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Mermaids
Friday, July 31, 2009



My lovely and very talented friend Jill Harbottle has made a beautiful wedding dress from found materials, with the help of a team of elderly people in a day centre. Go and look at it - it's amazing.
Strangely I am also in a mermaid phase only less beautifully - wrote this poem while at the London Poetry School summer course with Jane Draycott.
Still dog rough but here it goes:

Cry me a river

She was working as a mermaid
in a topless bar, down Deptford way.
I watched her buoyant breasts break surface
through the white stream of her hair.
She slipped out of her fish tail
a pearl abandoning an oyster
a sailor’s wet dream.

I took her home, suppressed the urge
to run the bath. Felt her real legs
wrap around me like weeds
believed she would stay,
moored to my delusions.

Today, I’m on the river, taking sounds
plumbing the depths
cold as a fish on a slab.
12:37 PM   0 comments