My boyfriend is converting me to free-range eggs

It is hard to know what’s real
when the world has got clever
at masking aspartame.

Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall
has one up on me (the bastard)
my man was too easily swayed
by emotive pleas and his own memories
of slipping into small dungarees
to cycle to the Clampitt’s farm
“I hung them from my handlebars
yet never broke a single one”.

We look at sallow photographs, collect vinyl,
eat cakes I baked with those expensive eggs
we do much together I hope is as real
as the taste of blood when I ran
in the morning to the school gates
old with rust scurf and never locked
or the day you stroked the backs of my arms
and asked if I could feel.