Keith Chandler
Peeping Tom
Long distance cameraman I crouch, I wait.
Perhaps tonight. Pack-ice will shift perhaps
from cold blue moon-irradiated glass
to let me in - a lens-dilating shot …
pillows, soft light. Writhing off her dress
she lifts pale arms. I blink. A shutter snaps.
I need the dark, a child-high place to hide
among the privet. Look! With rolled-up flowers
Pullover knocks. They fuss, purse lips. Removes
her Marilyn pinny. They TV, eat. For hours
all-seeing, yea, all-suffering as a god
I kneel behind this sitcom of their lives.
A half-inch crack’ll do. Or step by step
as if in some pause-button game of chase,
a slowcoach snowman, statue on the creep,
I inch toward the lights, the warmth, the buzz
of a french window. Or, underthing left out
pegged to a spider web, freeze to the spot
star-gazing, Greco-eyed, a religious
observant, faith fed by imagination,
up at the peep-show of a bedroom shrine.
Or, pupil baffled by the rippled glass
of a bathroom, reconstruct the text
of tenderness from bits of crippled sex.
Don’t pull the blind. Don’t switch off in disgust
your Long Lost Love. Click on another slide
of You and Me. Just Us. Our Secret Life.
That time you let the bath-robe slaver off
by ‘accident’... or, parted by a cloud
of condensation, we almost, almost
Page(s) 20
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