It Would Be A Boy This Time

Beginning as a bubble,
gas perhaps, or
a niggle waiting
to be squeezed out
by practised massage,
along with a cry
and a happy thrash.

Hiking
from hotel to hotel,
riding different shapes
and sizes in the quest
for some kind
of frontier less comfortable
than that found
in wedding-gift sheets.

More talk, typed
hurriedly onto a screen
without subtlety, intonation
or guarantee that this
was indeed a genuine photo.

So many names - slut, stud, slave. You
were just initials.

Shouts from below.
"I'll be right there, dear."
Click the corner cross
and wipe the brow.
Come down for dinner.

I love you but I can't.

A week, supposedly
a business trip, spread

(make your excuses, Montana)

and eaten alive, digested
sweetly, nerve endings
blown like fragile fuses,
drained of stored-up cream.
Some Hellfire club!

No phone call, just
a weary return to the known, complaining
of spreadsheets and deadlines.

Then you. Months
encased in Java applets,
fighting requests to meet
until you said you'd leave
and your script would never
tap up again
in flashing boxes.
Goodbye.

MONTANA: Wait

A conference, I said,
packed and left them
at home and I fell
part into you, part me,
whatever I am these days.

You translated from type
to life as a painting
by an expert forger.
I have never
before been oh
never

My name is Adrienne.
You asked Montana to stay,
to leave everything. You loved
her that was me and she promised.
You waited at the station
the next day. Waited.

Adrienne is home, swelling
with a cuckoo her husband
is ecstatic to think
is his, a sibling for the little girl
bathed nightly, oblivious.

It's different this time.
I have flown into a wall,
been corked. Don't ask me again.
It's his now
and a boy. I know.

>MONTANA has left the room