God Save Poets

No mother better try to board this bus
with her baby buggy, for I’m standing
in the designated space with my face
pressed in the armpits of overcoated
strangers; blood-warm stink of damp gaberdine

as we hang ripe as xmas turkeys on hooks
in a butcher’s window. I feel the burn
of RSI from wrist to shoulder with
each stop and start; watch my pain reflected
by a winter-dark grimace in breath-steamed

glass, round-cheeked as the Munch-scream moon, whose pull
I sense in tides of post-viral fluid
on my lungs. I know the moon is up there,
stone-faced and constant as Keaton’s slapstick
routines on the rooftops’ edge, while I sway

and stumble down here, from one pool of light
and warmth to the next. We both trace orbits
in unerring and unending circles,
with the same visage forever frozen
in a futile, facile, blank expression.

Let me off. I’ll walk the rest in the worst
gales since ’86, glasses smeared with festive
lights and horizontal rain, eyes made
kaleidoscopic: an acid flashback
in this age of reflux. And there’s the moon

herself: the pucker of her bleached arsehole
a pale promise of cheap comparisons
I might make if both weather and humour
were not already shit. God save poets
and devil take each dull and unsung day.