My Summer of Love
while everyone was looking at threads, I posted this ragged poem…
My summer of love
is sweet-wrapped in polythene,
under slab-grey skies,
amidst a coronation
of umbrellas,
observing pageantry
from a distance.
My summer of love
is the elusive sprig
of samphire — the sunken
treasure at the bottom
of a salad bag,
or walking for miles
along sun-baked asphalt
seeking pools of leafy shade,
or gently prising apart the
pale chambers
of an iceberg’s heart.
My summer of love
was once a carefree idyll
cast through the prism
of a peacock’s eye
soft and feather-fringed,
quivering with promise,
just waiting to be discovered.
My summer of love
went ra-ra for a while,
every breath accompanied
by a bass guitar part,
it’s fixed focus lens
always blurring the edges
on the rare days
when I let the sun kiss
my bare arms
and a washed-out
charcoal vest
with twisted straps
dipped over my breasts
above a vintage skirt
in watercolours,
provoking a reaction
that was so long ago,
I can’t remember his name.
My summer of love
once clung to a hillside,
under a Giotto-blue sky,
spending the night
on marble platforms,
before being turfed out pronto
by the polizia municipale,
always dining alfresco
on bread sticks and gelato,
notably lacking a local ragazzo
to dally with — instead
filling a small sketchbook
with copies of lesser masters,
studiously avoiding
pervy shopkeepers lurking
in the doorways of their glass
emporiums — eager to flog
a millefiori paperweight,
wandering into the austere hush
of a velvet-dark duomo,
sensing all the gold
on the vast cupola above her.
My summer of love
has been wound up abruptly
under false pretences,
by boring ground-strokers
via a punnet of strawberries
that cost a fiver,
and the pock-pock of a Wimbledon
that has barely started.
**
