You puff a miner's nose-warming clay pipe
stuffed with leavings of others' tobaccos:
big chapped hands cradle its warmth. Sulky lips,
licked by a cat's rough tongue, spit out bad words.

Along the muddy back lanes of London
you wander seeking whatever you lost
on boulevards whose cafe gaslight paled
that frowning face once brown with boyhood glooms.

I share the young criminal's body heat
moulding your moleskin thighs with promises
of rancid inspirations in midnight's
lusting loneliness, rich-rhymed feasts of love.

Your rough-mouthed kisses in the sweating dark
of cheap hotels — their towels never changed
stiff with the stinks of disgusted bodies —
till noon awakens us from sullen sleep.

We feel our anguish rise again — surging
new poems from your knotted loins of words.
Unsmiling, our mouths bathe us both in breath
of new-baked bread for our bodies' hungers.


 © James Kirkup, 2008