On feeling a bit lack-lustre, and overly tired, and too tired to read that book on female body-builders I'm supposed to be reading for the essay...

Standing on a rock screaming at the sea;
or the sound of a fish flapping
on the sand:

I fell in love today
at a quarter-past three
by half-past eleven she’d
left me, and I had to ride
home on the bus
all alone

There’s a seagull after my chips

mum, there’s a seagull after my chips
‘It’s a Larus ridibundus, she corrects me
‘and please don’t eat with your feet!’

- I am a twenty-three year old with a fear of sea
birds and an aversion to fried foodstuffs -

according to the RSPB web-site
the Larus ridibundus is not really
a seagull at all, more a chocolately brown
in fact, and has a white head and is near-sighted
and is found commonly almost anywhere inland.

so I look to my chips for some answers
I am an eight-year old child with delusions of ketchup,
think I should have taken the hamburger option

Epilogue:

Joyce would have written something profound, no doubt
and his mum would have looked across the table
and said ‘why don’t you go outside and play with
the other boys,’ and Joyce would have carried on reading


Truth no. 114

is sex merely helpless fun, or is it pure egoism
at the expense of someone else’s self-image?
I honestly don’t know
just wish I was having more of it these days


would like to meet

would like to meet an interesting
woman age important who likes similar
things to me and does stuff I could appreciate,
and looks good naked and who will read me
poetry in bed and post the bills that
need posting but I keep forgetting to take
with me when I leave the house in the morning,

and who likes the look of me, and savours my
awful cooking and stupid, unmanageable
hair, and likes men in glasses and more importantly
likes this man in glasses, and likes wandering
around aimlessly, and who doesn’t mind
me waffling on about this and that
without ever seeming to look like I know

what it is I’m talking about, like some
meandering idiot who walks leaning
forwards as if people are continually
pushing him out of the door and never
has the time of day, regardless of how
many watches he has bought over the
Internet thinking that they might be

a worthy investment, but are in fact
worthless, and I’d like it if she had the
long, dark hair and eyes and eyes and eyes
and a good reading voice - reading is important,
I think I’ve mentioned it twice already;
it’s important that this gal can read, and likes
lying in bed reading, and other things too rude

to mention here but worth hinting at anyway,
and likes watching foreign films
is critical of babies, and I’m not going to settle
for anything less than what I think I deserve, since in the right
company some might say I’m quite agreeable

Narcissus

started going to the gym recently
can’t do as many press-ups as I thought
I could, but I didn’t want to be overly-pumped,
would just look silly, and besides,
It just doesn’t work on your willy