Contents

I Suspect - Lynn Peters

Verse for a Birthday Card - Wendy Cope

Office Friendships - Gavin Ewart

Toilet - Hugo Williams

Warming her Pearls - Carol Ann Duffy

Steam - Carol Ann Duffy

i like my body when it is with your - e. e. cummings

Life Story - Tennessee Williams

Storm - Alan Jenkins

LYNN PETERS

I Suspect

I suspect
There would be more poems
About sex
If it rhymed with more than
Pecks
Necks
Erects and ejects.

This begins to sound promising.
I may write one.

WENDY COPE

Verse for a Birthday Card

Many happy returns and good luck
When it comes to a present, I'm stuck.
     If you weren't far away
     On your own special day,
I could give you a really nice glass of lager.

GAVIN EWART

Office Friendships

Eve is madly in love with Hugh
And Hugh is keen on Jim.
Charles is in love with very few
And few are in love with him.

Myra sits typing notes of love
With romantic pianist's fingers.
Dick turns his eyes to the heavens above
Where Fran's divine perfume lingers.

Nicky is rolling eyes and tits
And flaunting her wiggly walk.
Everybody is thrilled to bits
By Clive's suggestive talk.

Sex suppressed will go berserk,
But it keeps us all alive.
It's a wonderful change from wives and work
And it ends at half past five.

HUGO WILLIAMS

Toilet

I wonder will I speak to the girl
sitting opposite me on this train.
I wonder will my mouth open and say,
'Are you going all the way
to Newcastle?' or 'Can I get you a coffee?'
Or will it simply go 'aaaaah'
as if it had a mind of its own?

Half closing eggshell blue eyes,
she runs her hand through her hair
so that it clings to the carriage cloth;
then slowly frees itself.
She finds a brush and her long fair hair
flies back and forth like an African fly-whisk,
making me feel dizzy.

Suddenly, without warning,
she packs it all away in a rubber band
because I have forgotten to look out
the window for a moment.
A coffee is granted permission
to pass between her lips
and does so eagerly, without fuss.

A tunnel finds us looking out the window
into one another's eyes. She leaves her seat,
but I know that she likes me
because the light saying 'TOILET'
has come on, a sign that she is lifting
her skirt, taking down her pants
and peeing all over my face.

CAROL ANN DUFFY

Warming Her Pearls

Next to my own skin, her pearls. My mistress
bids me wear them, warm them, until evening
when I'll brush her hair. At six, I place them
round her cool, white throat. All day I think of her,

resting in the Yellow Room, contemplating silk
or taffeta, which gown tonight? She fans herself
whilst I work willingly, my slow heat entering
each pearl. Slack on my neck, her rope.

She's beautiful. I dream about her
in my attic bed; picture her dancing
with tall men, puzzled by my faint, persistent scent
beneath her French perfume, her milky stones.

I dust her shoulders with a rabbit's foot,
watch the soft blush seep through her skin
like an indolent sigh. In her looking-glass
my red lips part as though I want to speak.

Full moon. Her carriage brings her home. I see
her every movement in my head. . . Undressing,
taking off her jewels, her slim hand reaching
for the case, slipping naked into bed, the way

she always does. . . And I lie here awake,
knowing the pearls are cooling even now
in the room where my mistress sleeps. All night
I feel their absence and I burn.

CAROL ANN DUFFY

Steam

Not long ago so far, a lover and I
in a room of steam -

a sly, thirsty silvery word - lay down,
opposite ends, and vanished.

Quite recently, if one of us sat up,
or stood, or stretched, naked,

a nude pose in soft pencil
behind tissue paper

appeared, rubbed itself out, slow,
with a smokey cloth.

Say a matter of months. This hand reaching
through the steam

to touch the real thing, shockingly there,
not a ghost at all.

E.E. CUMMINGS

i like my body when it is with your

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh. . . And eyes big love-crumbs,
and possibly i like the thrill
of under me you so quite new

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

Life Story

After you've been to bed together for the first time,
without the advantage or disadvantage of any prior
   acquaintance,
the other party very often says to you,
what's your story? And you think maybe they really and
   truly do

sincerely want to know your life story, and so you light up
a cigarette and begin to tell it to them, the two of you
lying together in completely relaxed positions
like a pair of rag dolls a bored child dropped on a bed.

You tell them your story, or as much of your story
as time or a fair degree of prudence allows, and they say,
   Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
each time a little more faintly, until the oh
is just an audible breath, and then of course

there's some interruption. Slow room service comes up
with a bowl of melting ice cubes, or one of you rises to pee
and gaze at himself with mild astonishment in the
   bathroom mirror.
And then, the first thing you know, before you've had time
to pick up where you left off with your enthralling life
   story,
they're telling you their life story, exactly as they'd
   intended to all along,
and you're saying, Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
each time a little more faintly, the vowel at last becoming
no more than an audible sigh,
as the elevator, halfway down the corridor and a turn to
   the left,
draws one last, long, deep breath of exhaustion
and stops breathing forever. Then?

Well, one of you falls asleep
and the other one does likewise with a lighted cigarette in
   his mouth,
and that's how people burn to death in hotel rooms.

ALAN JENKINS

Storm

At 2 a.m. she arrived out of the wild north wearing
her daffodil-yellow fisherman's coat - with warm
cheeks and a strange smell and swearing up a storm
at the minicab driver who'd tried to get a leg over
and ended by pulling a fast one. A half of Bells,
some fifteen B&H, and she was calm enough
to ferret through my albums with the white-denim furrow
of her tail in the air - at last we got off
on Louise, the girl with perfect skin and cheekbones like
geometry (at which point I brought in her own
perfect skin, and reached to stroke it), then someone else
who looked like Eve Marie-Saint and read Simone
de Beauvoir - as she does, or did; 'I'm not a dyke,
you know', she said suddenly as she burrowed
deeper into bed, and sleepy-drunk, I was all at sea. . .