Peter Johnson
Booze
Cocktails for two,
and absinthe
making the heart grow fonder.
Club armchairs,
elderly, arthritic hands
cupping crystal brandy glasses
whilst rheumy eyes search The Telegraph
for news from the Balkans.
Champagne bubbles rising to the occasion.
Old and mild - pints tipped past toothless gums
into the empty bellies of the workless
in countless, long-demolished snugs.
The upwardly mobile downing
Sunday lunch-time G and Ts
in fake-beamed country pubs.
Dean of the Faculty passing the port
clockwise, suffusing academic complexions
around the High Table.
Morse savouring one more lethal malt.
Delicate, long-stemmed hock glasses
caressed by long, delicately manicured fingers.
Suburban dry sherries,
the decanter circulating
amid conversation
of BMWs and loft conversions.
A hip flask
on a mufflered January afternoon
at Twickenham.
Bix killed by bathtub gin,
Brendan soused in his native Guinness,
Oscar wittily sipping crème de menthe.
Nectar.
Mother’s ruin,
a young girl’s undoing,
ambulance sirens and A & E.
Chilled Sauterne under a Southern sun,
cheap hooch under a Whitechapel arch.
Booze.
Page(s) 27-28
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