Justine Knowles
First Love
An unlikely object of desire:
A slight five-seven
Odd clothes smelling of charity
Jack Nicholson smile.
Your steed a flimsy racer
You battled vicious Southwark traffic
And somehow won.
Employing Northern vowels
Kryptonite charm
You talked your way
Past the suspicious landlord
Into my student room
Where you dismantled my defences
Brick by brick.
With you, a bus became a space-ship
A walk: street theatre,
A party: legendary.
You told tall tales
Of your tragi-comic history
Feathered your nest
With my middle-class guilt.
Skipping dull lectures
We sipped oily tea from Styrofoam
While your conquests circled like starlings
In the last days of summer.
How we laughed at them
And how I gripped my fleeing pride
In desperate fists
Determined not to love you
Like they did.
Page(s) 66
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