All is quiet
in the city of snowflakes
Fakery covered by slumber
As the Humber flows
Rocking its bones
Passing the homes of the chip-fed
Landlord and Mistress alone.

“Do you love me?”
she strokes through the whiskers
of her once-a-week mister and whispers
his eyes are enraptured
post-coitally captured
arm on the arc of the bow of her back
which had slinked like a cat
and at long last relaxed in his arms
at one with her charms
and the danger of chance
and the duskiest glance
and the taste of her lips
and the shift of the hips
as she lovingly drips herself selfishly
cradled like wealth as she
sinks him contentedly
down in the well of her care
Never to share
for the world isn’t fair
and a vow is a lie
when a life gives it time and mind to be
why’s it a crime to be
rescued like jewels from the sky?

“Pour me a whisky”,
he says to her briskly,
her tights in a twist as she hoists them…
The end of the night then?
Did something afright him?
Happy one moment then suddenly
flickers of faraway fear in his eyes
Eager to rise
Shifting his mood
from relaxed into rude
and a hoarding of space
and a crag-chisel face
As he grumbles
Apology mumbled
He stands and he stumbles
Tying the johnny like knotting a promise he’s nothing but eager to break.
He leaves and she waits
With the moon and the chill in the room.

“Can’t you stand me?”
She shouts to the landing,
A plea for the key to a
shred of the least understanding
Twice in fortnight he’d left her forlorn like this;
Where was the romance they’d shared but a moment ago?
The man was a child.
But it wasn’t enough that she’d let him inside
for years he had lived in her mind.

The decades of signs and the tokens of care
That he’d left her the moment her man weren’t aware

and the guilt in her heart and the warring with dreams
of her publican prince laying down by a stream

and the strongest of hands and the deepest of eyes
and for one lonely winter, her deepest surprise

as he caught her alone as she lit up a fag
with her misapplied face and her faux-leather bag
and he told her he cared and he said she should stay
on the every odd Friday his wife was away.
And the weight of her want and the terror to plunge
And avoiding him constantly month-upon-month
But then calling him suddenly, buoyed by the booze
And the promise of loving a something to lose
As she tied up her coat and her sexiest shoes

“Why’re you mardy?”
he said to her calmly.
Him back in the room as he
takes her like gold by the waist
then he kisses her sweetly
toffee-like bending her back on the sheets,
she with brows of surprise presses nails to his nape
as she asks “why you leave me then, shitting-fuck’s sake?”
And he says “mind your language, I’m kissing that gob,
I’d just shitting remembered I’d left on the hob”.

All is quiet in the city of snowflakes
Fakery covered by slumber
As the Humber flows.