Chinese Slippers
Admitting to any weakness is a weakness.
I remove your Chinese slippers: they are lighter, almost
than the swathe of violet hair you release
and let fall over your shoulders to your scaly ankles.
Now you can lie back, my courtesan, making a pillow
of that cascade, and hand me your feet. I push my fingers
between your violet-painted toes,
gripping your very soles like wee bony sparrows.
But I will not ask you your age, nor to change the violet
colour of your eyes. From Taiwan to Tibet
the dangerous people are those with more money than taste.
You are my Cartesian, a body in love with the mind,
so no surprise your greatest fear is the same as mine,
and lighter almost than this slipper and slipper
your tiptoe along my spine, nape to sacrum,
confessing to a weakness for violent hair.
Page(s) 56
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The