Don’t want to boast
but I’m not quite as low as
the most-things-toast
brigade of cooks. This one does

more: you-can-have-curry-
if-you’re-not-in-too-much-hurry,
or pasta-
if-you-must-have-something-faster;

and the reason for this relative
expertise is what I’d call creative
tendencies: adding ‘How does it look?’ yet
to, ‘Hat es gut geschmeckt?’

Palate and palette fascinate
And colours, sometimes,
More than taste, dictate
Whatever you get on your plate.

Is it of arab princes that she dreams
while punching up the grocery bills,
or Lawrentian lovers, miner’s sons,
beating in time to he electronic drums?
Something must help her overcome
The dull madness of her hungry till.
Something must help her do her sums.

We saw each other through a film of prices –
her cheap perfume, my secret vices –
but a screen love, harassed and fantastic,
came between us and the yards of plastic.
The tear-off check-list rolled and interthreaded
A mutual madness much to our quick credit
– only for censors, or for me, to edit.

Down from my Daily Mirror foot-hills
to a plain of Guardian-reading mums,
I drag my phantom dark satanic mills –
penance for using the wrong medium.
Up to my eyes in trendiness I bring
my younger son home from school, double quick,
listening to how he couldn’t eat a thing
at lunch because of a bad stomach-ache.
A fib of course. He had nibbled a bit
from his plastic lunch-box – not the plastic,
just the junk. Crisps today. His favourite.
I feel the shame of letting him eat rough.
But worse than that, I too, am a fibber.
I munch the Guardian AND the Mirror.