Standing in the shade of a lion statue or ode to the temporary
Schoolchildren desultorily leaf through emails and posts
Lunchtime on their collective mind presumably as it is mine
When a person is a faun they’re expected to be highly sexed
They hide their animal parts in order to avoid being harassed
Grammar falls like leaves from a tree shaken by its pages
Textbooks are teachers but can’t get kids’ attention or speak
Unless accompanied by a human in a kind of kilt or tunic

Mosquitoes drive the desperate outside in their underwear
Looking for respite repellent earplugs or a cat to distract
Light is kind at that time of the night be it electric or cosmic
Driving through emu towns looking for a benevolent fix
Lovers of art or the bleeding heart sandwich some quiet into
Ordinarily frenetic piecemeal lives as they hop from traffic
Into a swimming pool or an office or onto a basketball court
Where everyone hides their inner parts all squishy and blue

From coffee and from the sachets they shake onto their food
Seven years or seconds later watering the forbearing plants
Words that should not be joined together include pumpkin
And breath yet it is something I can’t get out of my head
Genesis if you notice invented both weeds and gatekeeping
Very early on and disposed of immortality in an aside taking
For granted the desire to stay permanently in divine company
We shouldn’t assume any colonial poet to have been happy

Nor that they would have voted for today’s thumbs up greed
Every Reaganite or Thatcherite particle floating in the air
Ends up in a water course somewhere and if raided by Coke
Might eventually be bottled in plastic for your local mayor
Looking to lionise climate change or their idea of species
Hiding in this eucalypt like a crow I am rather mistletoe
Observing bunches of stuff align including love and kindness
Not the most monstrous combination the language speaks of

Read the rest of Poetry in Lockdown, edited by Toby Fitch and Melody Paloma

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