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Sam Smith

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With a snail trail of semen on his thigh he delights
in the ordinary – letterbox snick and shush of
envelopes, quiet voices through open windows. . .
Yet he says to her, “What strange creatures we
monogamists are, giving our lives to each other.”

So delicately is this, his world, kept
together, that it needs only the slightest
miscalculation for the whole of any
being to collapse. Puzzled, she thinks
herself hurt by his words. And now. . .
now there is a shouting family next door.

“My family,” he says, “didn’t talk of love. Not for
our parents, nor for our brothers and sisters. Only
of duties and resentments.” Getting up, radio on,
he goes from room to room, pursued by pop music, its
repetitions finding folds in his mind. “Sentimentality,”
he too needs to be shouting, “is fundamentally a lie.
Religion and poetry are there only to teach us how to die.”

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