Minor Comedy

from ‘Wonder’ (Salt, 2025)

Everything a poet is supposed to want, said out loud. I wrote it partly against myself. If you have ever queued on the Southbank for somebody’s reading, you will know the queue I mean.

Minor Comedy

I want to make it to the air-free cold denuded top
like major poets do.
The ones who never seem to stop.
The ones we wait for in a smelly Southbank queue.
The ones with rakish friends that sing false perpetual praises
and meet at gigs in castles in unpronounceable Middle-European places.

I want the jam, the cake, the cream,
I want the whole slim volume dream.
I want the prizes and the money.
I want the campus-rooted, lecture-touring,
student-clustered, whole American foundation scoring
land of odes and honey.

I want a ‘Time to Write’ grant from the mandarins at ACE.
I want to be the first poet in space.
I want to stare back from pinkish clouds Olympian
over drunken decades of small magazine oblivion
that led here to my godhead, freshly featured in Time Out.
The Laureate’s Laureate, the kid with clout.

And I want better rhymes than these,
or no rhymes at all, for academics in long essays to ecstatically tease
hot meanings into rapture. And I want, with all our golden multitudes, to please.
In major television interviews to gaze and nod and lap up wild applause.

I want to cause a change in several wicked international laws.
I want a thin grey spouse who plays Satie well in a swanky tower block in Espoo.
I want a bristling dramaturge for an affair in Timbuktu.
I want to hear my words falling like manna, heaven sent,
on the black-robed lemon-sucking North London establishment.

Yet I never want to write [successfully] in semi-comic verse
that which may reveal the whiffy bilge tank of pique,
or worse
an inconsistent compositional technique.

Naturally, I’ll heartily propose I want the very same for you
in every farmhouse masterclass I run in Devon-scented glory.
Late at night, with slippers propped and a tinkling whisky sour,
in my dark electric hour alone, I’ll watch the star shelf pour
nightmares through my hopeless story.