Thursday 15th January

I wrote this (along with many others even worse) in the immediate aftermath of losing Alison.  It was a brief but passionate affair and she broke my heart by doing a Shirley Valentine on me on the Island of Crete.  Ancient History now, but it broke my heart at the time…

Never Trust An Artist

(Preamble….)

All the poems I’ve written, the necks I have bitten – didn’t make a winner of me

The cheekbones I’ve grazed, the names I’ve erased make these gun-lips unworthy of me

(The story so far…)

Did I dream you standing there, drift my fingers through your hair

Smell the dampness on your skin, discover what went on within

Or was it only make-believe, weaving only to deceive

A spinning gamblers card I played in the ego game of time-waylaid

I thought I was so clever too, to have won a pretty girl like you

I turned your head right from the start; I really thought I’d won your heart

I should have outgrown all of that, but older time begets not wise

Though I was sure I was where it’s at – you  really brought me down to size

And me the Hero, the Artist too, the Liberated Feminist Socialist who

Had read all the right books; who knew how to please, was wicked shin-kicked and brought to my knees

You stood there above me, sunlight in your hair; I could almost forgive you standing there

But you smiled as you twisted your high-heeled shoe in the space in my heart I’d opened for you

This pretty girl I thought I’d won, the face for all my stories spun

Had spun me through her fingers feel, and wound me round her spinning wheel

I who wove people into my life, and out again, quick as a knife

Got caught in the shuttle and before I knew,was part of the pattern I’d woven for you

 

(What can we say…)

Never trust an artist, with his magic box of oils

Never fence with a foxy lady, a fencer with                           unbuttoned foils

 

Never trust an artist, a weatherman of words

Never leave your heart in your lovers hands –                     she’ll feed it to the birds