Maria, Maria,
open up, Maria.

You can't leave me out here in the streets
hollering against the wind until my cheeks
cave in, and well meaning folk restrain me
("It will do you no good. Leave the woman be"). 
And after all that humiliation I will break down
the door and throw myself at your feet, crying
"I am changed".
                        Stinking of the gutter, sans
teeth, sans everything, I invade your fragrance
with frank decomposition. I mean the opposite -
changes, not in the body, but in my deeper spirit.
The change you see is my Quasimodo hump.

Vagrants, who live off pickings in the city dump,
wipe the garbage out of their eyes and fall apart
in empathic laughter at the howling of my heart.
They've watched vigils before for stale cheesecake
bring a man down. Some have made the same mistake. 
 

Rain blobs the sidewalk with its sobs. Sodden rats
slobber over drowned cats and dogs on the cobbles.
Look at me, my eyelids hanging with stalactites
begin to thaw, tears dripping from my eyes. Shutes
overflow in disbelief at the boots in which I hobble.

The deluge licks down on streetwalkers and such,
cleansing their souls. But spoils the fabric of the suits
of gentlemen about town, out exercising themselves
in carriages. Bursting at the seams, their armpits rip.
The remnants of their picnics nourish the soupy flood.

Maria,
the stuffed ears of these smoothychops
are deaf to poetry and my confidences.

A bird
sings for its supper
and gets it.

I am only a man,
a simpleton, Maria,
coughed up by consumptive
night on the dirty hand 
of a slum.

Is that what you want?
Let me in.
My fevered fingers latches
on to the door-knocker's
iron lung.

Maria!

Coach horses bolted
from the paddocks
in your street. Forget
the padlocks. Open up!

Lynch mobs
have a hold of my neck.
They've got me. Open up! 

Society ladies spike my eyes
with hat pins. Open up!
Don't leave me to them.
They plan my immortality,
They're loving me to death.

I'M IN. SHE'S LET ME IN.

Dear one, don't be alarmed.
Those mountainous women
with gross overheated bellies
squatting on my shoulders
are what I have to live with.
I drag behind me a harem
of swooning Fannies ("We
Love Big May"). Regiments
of platonic paramours, armies
of bints who want a piece of me.
It goes with the territory and
means nothing, honest. When
falling back into their clamouring
embraces, I'm performing a duty
to the needy. Squalid betrayals
are part of my job. The shop-soiled,
cleaned and pressed in my laundry,
are returned purified by the experience -
queens for a night on the slippery
slopes of the heart of a madman
released back into their safe cages.

Maria, don't recoil.
Sit close, hold my hand.

Stripped naked and hot,
or shivering with all your clothes on,
let me search out and find
where your blossoming lips
can be opened at bud-point
by mine. All in an April evening.
I have never got as far as May.
My seedy life is an eternal spring.
Impatience lasting a century!

Proper poets do their homework
and craft sonnets to interested ladies,
mostly married, giving them pet names
(Maud, Maudlin) to spare their reputations.

I wouldn't know where to begin.
I'm a flesh poet, simply a man,
ill-bred by moonlight, whose plan 
is to get you to bed. What's wrong
with wanting your body? Christians
lust for the body of Christ, give us
this day our daily bread. Hypocrites!
I don't want a half a loaf. I want you.

Maria,
give me my due.

     *******
I nail your name
to my brain
for permanence.
I'm afraid
of forgetting it
like the lost word
in a poet's dark
night of the soul.

Your body will be cherished
like the lonely,
loveless war veteran
finds solace in
         his
         last
         remaining
         leg.

What Maria! 
You just want to be friends?
You want to be friends. Ha!

Darkness falls once again
and numbly, dumbly, I drag
my tearstained heart 
in my coat to the doghouse
like a mongrel tending a
paw
mashed
by
   a 
     train.

Dripping blood,
it will leave a poppy trail
on the highway, glad rags
caking dust.
                   Johannes's
lopped head is the earth
around which Salome's sun
dances for a thousand years
or as long as I live.

The haemorrhaging path
leads to my father's house.
I'll arrive, derelict from
rough living, rough dying,
But not too dead to stoop
and bawl in his ear,

"Listen, mister god,
your eyes must stream 
from sticking hairy eyebrows
in the celestial blancmange
day after day. Why don't you
climb down and join me
in a dance around the May Pole
garlanded by good and evil?
You have the keys to cupboards
everywhere. Let's unlock the wine.
You'll find, even your gloomy apostles
and the virgin martyrs will want to
step out and dance a fandango.

We could set up a couple of little Eves.
And heaven would be heaven again.
Just say the word. A nod will do. Tonight
I'll trawl the boulevards for top totty.

Wouldn't you like that?

                        The only sign 

is wind stirring in your beard
from the bustle of wings behind.
Do you think the holy ghost
has all the answers? What 
does he know about love?
That great ghoul of a butterfly
living for the eternal moment.

Look here, you silly god,
I was an angel once
in my way. A sugar lump
offering myself to ponies
with wings. When that failed
I tried ornamental vases
with scenes of torture
to stampede the horses.
Never again. Mythology
is a dead loss. You made hands
to mould our heads. Why did you 
top them with a twist that torments
when two heads come together
to kiss and kiss and kiss?

You were the Big One, I thought.
No stooge supreme. What a let down
when you revealed your true size,
a dwindling little microbe of a god?
I stooped to find the knife in my boot.

Faker, cowering in the clouds,
flapping flightless wings, amplified
by a trick of the light, cock of the walk
now a feather duster, I won't give you
wing space. You can ruffle your feathers
to keep warm. Fly by night, god.
I cut through you, stinking of incense, 
and show your stomach's absence from
here to Alaska. A trail of cloud, fading out.

                     *******

Let me in!
I'll have the last word.
No stopping me. Right or
wrong.
           See how calm I am
although the stars are once
again the running scars
of severed trunks. They're taking 
off their heads to me. 

Salut!
I'm coming.

Dull thud. No response.
 

                 Vacant space's
                 ponderous paw
                 reposes around
                 an ear, swarming
                 with stars.