from PETRARCH

PETRARCH 49

Here in South London

The I-Speak-Your-Weight machine talks like

This-is-the-world’s-biggest-crime

& if it all comes back to the body

As a space with total sonority laurels & robes

You cannot teach bad monkeys to be mothers

These days it’s all about defending your own personal regime

Left under a cloud & the books you cannot teach

Bad monkeys to be mothers

BECAUSE THEY ARE BAD MONKEYS

Cigars speak louder than words

Question: If you were invisible what would you do?

Answer 1) I am

Answer 2) You

PETRARCH 176B

Dante: You have no values. Your whole life: it’s nihilism, it’s cynicism, it’s
sarcasm, and orgasm.
Petrarch: You know, in France, I shall run on that slogan and win.

My method is thus

Recordings of birds on vinyl the starling and the black one

With a white throat on a pink bed it was impossible to make love

To a man with a hungry look the kind you get from not eating for a while

Dressed in the style of a birdcatcher & beaten thus

In the legs & the hind

In supermarkets or on commons I confess

My love is as lame as a duck not the metaphorical lame duck either but a

Real duck that was actually lame

Maybe from stepping on a land mine or something

Like two hummingbirds who had also never met

Falling from a branch

I hit the pavement like a Costcutter bag filled with vegetable soup

As shots are wont to do                                        Shots rang out

—

TIM ATKINS is the author of To Repel Ghosts (Like Books), Sonnets (The Figures), Horace (O Books) and Folklore (Salt). He is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University Of East London, a practicing Buddhist, the father of Koto Daisy and husband of Chiaki. He edits and runs the online poetry zine onedit and can be contacted there.

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