MY GOD
you have no idea
of the distances i would travel
just to disappoint you
i will even wear a fashionable shoe
my god
just watch me
and another? i ask
go ahead you say
and another?
no that’s too many shoes
we shout
we throw bits of the forest at the forest
we walk
the so-called trees and the sky
a so-called kite and a cloud
my god
the so-called sky but first the trees
if you hold my hand
hold my hand
it could even rain
a walk in the wet leaves
my so-called shoe comes off in the mud
my god these yellow socks
i love them
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CRISPIN BEST lives in London and at www.crispinbest.com.
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Read more by Crispin Best:
Two poems at The Quietus
Two poems in Hilda
One poem in Poems in Which
I asked a man I was in love with once /
if he was in love with me. No, he said.
Get used to it, kid, everybody wants something from you. /
And they’ll swear they’re giving you a gift.
Prague is falling behind the windows /
like an autumn curtain falls on summer /
like a fish falls after a whale
I’d listen to her work her way through its drama: the //
little girl’s errors hitched to curiosity, her wandering hands, the /
way the wolf and the girl had much more in common than not
say it /
briefly //
like /
a finch’s whistle
My sisters, deep in our cells, are still feeding me. /
But I know I will be their last queen.
A different me is silhouetted in the lit windows of every house I drive //
past – me: reading a book, me: making dinner, me: alone staring back.
I am waiting for you. Part of my wall /
will need to go to get you in. It will /
never heal. This is how they’ll find me, /
small, perfunctory, unfit for a king, but /
I’ll hold it all
Women love to dance with him, my mother said. /
He’s so easy to follow. But those women /
never had to clench against his slaps and rages.
God unlike the stories, never casting out /
a child, unloosing the sky
