If we do not mass produce products, we vie with one another
in the difficult, exquisite and useless art of dressing fleas
Octavio Paz

Mr and Mrs Flea are dressed up
and ready for the celebrations.
He sports a neatly tailored waistcoat,
she silver-bordered asymmetric skirts.

They are the talk and toast of the party.

Sad to say, however,
a budding fashionista in the audience
catches sight of their duds,
and next year on the catwalks of Milan and London
the look is brazenly passed off
as the signature of the couture line
at the brand new House of Insect,
which in due course signs a cracking deal
with a high street shop.

I don’t need to say the Fleas never see a penny,
and neither does their tailor,
who, five months out of the punishing year,
wrecks his eyes
and racks sleep-heavy brains
in the decking out of his favourite customers.

Though for him it was never about the money –
the fleas, dearest, could hardly pay,
and the tailor is in any case not a tailor
but a farmer from the provinces
going about satisfaction in his own, yes,
his own unfathomable way
where the sun drops, faithless, to the littoral,
dead dark balling its fists against the light.

See him there, readied at the chipboard table.
He takes a swig of liquor.
See, dearest, how the inconsistent stars glitter and claw.

Published on the website of Poetry International (Rotterdam) and in Pirate Music (Bloodaxe Books, 2014)

From the big screen, and larger than life for a week or two,
which is all a tangent universe can stand,
we take them home and introduce them to our modest living quarters.

Their baby blues stare out at us at all hours of the day and night,
prompting every manner of ridiculous thought, such as:
‘The world is small’; or ‘What if Elvis could have taken to my mother?’;

‘I will ride across the desert on a purple roan, or some such,
for anything is possible’; and even that old chestnut,
‘There is only one for everyone alive.’ The cat mewls

at its perpetually empty bowl, the work piles up on the desk,
but we simply say, with a new-found recklessness:
‘This is not the most important thing in my life right now’;

‘you’re a predator, catch your own’. We exist
in the bubble of our making, our souls glistening like celluloid,
by turns rock bottom and on fire. What causes it to disappear?

Who can know, but one day we double-take to find ourselves
filing them away in the rack of lost hopes
with the show-jumping videos and ‘twelve easy tunes for classical guitar’,

the cat purring as it settles on the easy chair, as if to say
‘What then, what then’, the sky sucking back its thunder-claps
and storm winds, saving only one small cloud, which loiters there,

putty grey, shedding rain like tiny lead balloons
on the pristine terraces. And somewhere else a universe explodes.

First published in The Squirrels are Dead (Bloodaxe Books, 2010)