September 2022 – Robert Garnham

I can feel a draught in here

Can I feel a draught in here?

All I said was,
Why is it so draughty in here?
And you gave me one of those looks
Like the tosser that you are, 
Sprawled akimbo half on the sofa,
Half on the pouffe,
You sports vest attired shag bunny
You king of pungency masked in Lynx Africa
You gymnasium dumbbell botherer whose limbs
Look like the spare parts left over when
Mother Nature has tried to make its first gibbon,
You text speak Netflix modern day lothario 
Looks more like Onslow
Whose only cultural refinement is the ability to
Belch the theme tune to Countdown
You harbinger of sloppy sex whose bedroom technique
Feels more like conducting an oil change on a Ford Transit van,
Said,
I can't feel a draught.

And I was apt to point at the curtains
The net curtains the fine lace net curtains 
Which were lifting ever so gently away
From the window frame gently swaying net curtains
And I said
What's causing this, what's causing this, eh?
Is it the ghost of Liberace trying to make a grand entrance?
And you didn't get my cultural reference
And thinking back
I didn't know what it meant either.

And furthermore I insisted persisted that
Should I stand there with feather next to the
Obviously ill fitting window frames
A feather whether the feather should
Demonstrate by means of its bristles undulating
Sensuously
Like a naked James Bond opening titles dancer
See them undulating these bristles
Like a naked James Bond opening titles dancer
Who ironically
Would almost certainly feel a draught.

And did I not impinge the possibility
That the curtains should billow so
Undulating billowing curtains ballooning curtains
Swishing whistling billowing curtains
Right in front of the TV screen
That we might
Billowing curtains billowing curtains
Fluttering across the TV screen
Lose sight of the bigger picture?

And thence did I not utter a silent prayer
A private invocation a spell a trance
Hands clasped flat palm on palm
Eyes screwed tight shut palm on palm
Prayer pious prayer eyes shut prayer
While you
Scooped up and consumed
Honey roasted nuts?

And did I not expostulate 
And did you not lie there
Half slouched with your bronzed muscles
That put me in mind of the cheap handbags in Primark
With your shorty shorty shorty shorty denim shorts
Which when you take them off just kind of
Maintain the same shale put a book across the top
Use them as a makeshift coffee table
With your bleached blond blond blond blondie blond
Sandy beach bleached hair short spiked
Like the stubbly pasture grass around the steaming cowpat
Of your bald patch
With your face that looks like the top half was incredibly surprised
That the bottom half had grown a beard
And now it was off to go and join
A much more successful face
With your tattoo of Marilyn Monroe that had got so wrinkled
She now looked like Sid James
Did you not lie slumped there and suggest
I sit at the other side of the room
Sit at the other side of the room?
No I replied,
I ain't no draught dodger.

(That poem was just a draft).

An Ode to Simon Reeve

Poem

I stepped into a tropical bar.
Simon Reeve was there in a slow dance,
And I lost myself to his floppy fringe
Whose sweat-soaked flappy fronds would
Tickle my blushing cheeks,
Whose stubble scraped at the twilit skies
Like a cat’s claws on anaglypta,
Whose come-to-bed eyes betrayed none
Of the entitlement of his classical features
But a yearning for a sweetness so virile
That he could have been a treacle tart
And I ached, how I ached,
To be the custard.

Backpack merely decorative,
Naive tone a faux Theroux,
Poor man’s Palin,
Cargo-trousered doyen of sand dunes
And jungle trains,
No armchair droner he,
Riven with Reevisms, river crossings,
Barrier reef rovings,
Now gyrating for my pleasure in the aptly named
Club Flamingo.

Simon Reeve whose dimpled smile
Hauls in the night like a Titicatan net-lobber,
Whose unblemished skin betrays the
Goodness of various restorative unguents,
Whose manly chin is jutted like the
Bulbous bow of a speeding Shinkansen 
And probably twice as purposeful,
Whose sensitive eyebrows are seldom parabolic,
Yet neither do they quiver intense for
Reevsie is an empathic soul,
Whose backpack is admittedly superfluous,
Whose torso is Michaelangeloian in its
Sculpted accommodation of his lean yet
Muscular frame on whose bounty I would
Willingly consume a quadruple-decker cheeseburger
Dipping a chip in a reservoir of mayonnaise
Stored for convenience sake in his belly button.

Action man for aunties.
Secret poet banging sand out his boots.
Earnest and eager though neither over with either.
Mortal enemy of Professor Brian Cox.
No world-weary Whicker he, but a clamorous compassion
And the kind of face
That would make even Vladimir Putin
Contemplate a five minute fumble
In the broom cupboard.

Simon Reeve, whose tousled locks hold
Within their definitely un-dyed verdantness 
A vitality that would put Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson to shame,
Whose rich deep Colombian coffee coloured eyes 
Might penetrate x-ray-like beneath layers so effectively
As to pass right through the earth’s core every time
He bends down to pat a puppy.
Whose nostrils hardly flare.
Whose afterthought goatee clings on like
A countryside hilltop copse stunted
By the choking emissions from a nearby pig farm
Yet in whose branches barn owls berate the night
With their haunted warbling,
Whose luscious lips have tempted many a plastic surgeon
To bemoan the artifice of their own creations
And now before is delicate tongue-moistened plumpness,
Whose sturdy shoulders in their perfect powerful paralleogramatic 
Precision
Would easily raise a live rhinoceros clear out
Of the Serengeti mud hole
Into which it had stumbled probably distracted
By the beauty of Simon Reeve’s face in the first place.

And I,
Simon Reeve,
I am that rhinoceros
And this ain’t no mud hole,
It’s the Club Flamingo
And our song has now ended
And our dance has now ended
And you’ve picked up your backpack
Which definitely doesn’t contain
Just a couple of pillows to make it look full for the cameras,
And off you go.