Don't make a mess-
we were always warned
at the sticky climax of our play.

At St Pat's we pricked
sand-frosted birthday cards
outlining white bunnies in meadows,
grey pussycats with pink tongues,
stinging our damp fingers early on
with the self-poison of control.

When we were bigger
we were allowed other busyness:
divide your page with six lines
meandering tamely from edge to edge;
now fill in each void with muted paint.
When every scrap was covered
we rubbed with a paraffin nub,
smeared with floor wax,
buffed with an old singlet
until each page was as moral and glossy
as our mothers' lino floors.

Always, we were taught to confine:
long-divisions between the red margins;
chain-stitches down the middle
of a smutched linen sample;
Maltese boys' silkworms in a shoe-bax;
yellow pollen of an iris between glass slides;
a tight-spirited God in the Tabernacle of a long grey church,
like a genie unreleased from its lamp.

In autumn we were allowed a Natue Hunt-
one brown bag to each child,
we combed the palings and the asphalt for windblown cocoons,
the stringy old gums for bristling spitfires,
secretly stripping the nectar from honeysuckle
that hung from the Presbytery fence.

We sat cross-legged in a draughty hall
in front of a big televison with doors
and learnt about bees...
watched them jiggling like Christians
chanting psalms in hot oil,
jostling piously over the vats.
And the Queen Bee...
how each of her wriggling grubs
had her special smells and sometimes
a worker bee divulged a grub
and somehow gave it a fake Queen smell,
and if it was found out, it was killed, just like that.

Too many Imposters threaten the social structure of the hive,
the voice on the television droned,
while we watched as a loyal worker spasmed
and disgorged a live larva.

When I was thirteen
I said I would like to be
a famous writer or an artist;
Dad said why not Whitmont Shirt Factory?
You could see it from the train-
a grey zigzag roof and a billboard head
with a black patch over one eye.
That year I had my first bee sting,
on the back of the neck, beside the privet hedge,
and discovered how much their venom stunk.

One of the busybody nuns kept me late after school-
To do your homework, instead of thrumming that guitar...
like a skep in a paddock of clover, waxing fat.
That thin Dobell woman in the library brooded
until one afternoon in the middle of the Function of x
I tore a jagged corner and wrote a poem.
The paper was pale blue like a toxic moon,
with varicose lines.
I still have it in a box under the stairs,
covered in grit, layered between silverfish
with flat milky eyes.

These days I paint outside the lines:
fat ladies with violet belly-hollows like dewy chalices;
knead dimpled dough with my fingers glued;
boil amber jam, licking some from a saucer for readiness,
dribbling more for the ants;
and dye my underwear the colour of puce,
like the deep forbidden nectary of plums.

Sometimes when I'm carried away by the frenzied swarm
I still feel foolish, even shameful,
after the event,
having guzzled too greedily
on some pollen-crusted cup.
And still the drudging worker bees,
the sybaritic drones,
sniff and snuffle...
See, only the Queen is allowed to lay
her soft white voiceless grubs.