Wheeeee

Watching Filey funfair’s Mega G-Force –
the one which straps kids into firing lines
to swish them up and down for three full minutes –
 
and other gewgaws to remind them they’re alive –
inverters, chair-o-planes and the Black Hole,
where you’re on some kind of switchback
but only your innards tell you what –
 
I think of the buried dead – each strapped
in their own black hole, backs to the turning earth,
white-knuckled, too cool to whimper – facing space
for the longest ride of their lives.

Julia Deakin

published in The Rialto, 66 (Spring 2009),
ISBN 977-0-2685980-0-7

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Attitude

Made in England, for my sins I bear this image of you: this marriage
of words and geography which is more than green hills, greyness or London tat,
more than the union flag, tea, or that outdated sense of some great place in the world;
this print of you, England – which is not even you but you and your neighbours,
limpers bound in a tetchy three-legged race – branded like MADE IN TAIWAN
on the back of my mind, a bit of residual DNA I’m not sure how to use:
 
this scar of you as a backward E or battered pound sign, which is an L and Latin
so part of you as well, and therefore me; this body image which is, oddly, mine too,
of a flailing, ectomorphic, many-limbed old goat: your back to Scandinavia,
rump mooning at the Lowlands, sitting on France, Kent protruding like a cushion
from one surprisingly fat flank as you drool over Ireland, crumbs tumbling
from your beard, making a clumsy pass while looking incorrigibly past
 
at what you hope’s your main chance. In geography, history; in history, your future
as ageing hack, satyr at a typewriter, aiming some tired apologia at your tireder muse.
Conceding what? Your neediness? How without Scotland you’d be headless,
armless without Wales, spineless without the north? Or how in the right light
you can look heraldic: caprus, sejant erect. Your heart a Mersey beat, your capital
a pelvic ache, how well the map catches you. Catches us, in fact.

Julia Deakin

published in Poetry London, 64 (Autumn 2009),
ISBN 977-1-4792590-2-2

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Valentine

It was you, wasn’t it?
Sent me a box of genitalia?
Not two but twenty-four ripe ovaries
with six enormous stamens each engorged with pollen
thrusting purple-veined through curvy lips and downy inner folds
around a fleshy pistil glistening with a film of moisture round the swollen tip
all bursting from a flushed, moist, hirsute declivity and smelling…
as if freshly showered?
 
Thank you for the flowers.
I won’t read too much into it.

Julia Deakin

published in pamphlet collection, The Half-Mile-High Club, 2008,
Smith Doorstop, ISBN 978-1-9066130-0-6

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Nice work

In here I’m trying to write a poem
while out there a man has come
to clean the hall and landing carpet.
Paul Armitage’s Home Cleaning Service,
van in drive, is feeding two diameters of hose
in through the windows, one sucks
while the other blows apparently
and is it OK if I run the hot tap?
 
In here I’m trying to write a poem
going back in time two thousand years.
Out there he no I’m fine love, no,
no problem starts up the compressor.
In here I’m hewing granite, out there
he squirts detergent on each stair in here
I’m hauling monoliths uphill on logs
out there he may have to move the piano
slightly
 
In here I’m chanting pagan funeral rites
out there I notice two different tones of suck
then intermittent thuds, clicks and bumps
advancing on the door which I get up and close,
properly, wondering how long
the quarrying took. Out there he’s going
to have to try the bathroom window
in here I – oh, sod it.

Julia Deakin

published in collection Without a Dog, 2008,
Graft Poetry, ISBN 978-0-9558400-0-5

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