By Peter Robinson.
Left here, outside a fitting room,
I’m suddenly aware
the women swarming round me
I’m suddenly aware
the women swarming round me
are some in surplus camouflage,
some fetish underwear
and don’t know where to put myself.
It’s like there’s no such thing as kitsch,
or veterans’ missing limbs, or cabaret
of fashion and remark —
remark! Which gets me thinking how
my schoolboy stamp collection
had entre deux guerres issues,
the Marks blacked out like censoring
with yet more zeros overprinted
as their money went to Hell
taking peopled avenues,
un-peopled, dying, with them.
Still, those mutton-dressed-as-lambs’
made-up faces, cracked façades
would put a smudged smile on the fear
of age, decay, that decade’s times
and they’re like panicked symptoms.
I’m symptomatic too, when, come back, you allow
my advice, agree it doesn’t suit you;
but this was shopping now.
some fetish underwear
and don’t know where to put myself.
It’s like there’s no such thing as kitsch,
or veterans’ missing limbs, or cabaret
of fashion and remark —
remark! Which gets me thinking how
my schoolboy stamp collection
had entre deux guerres issues,
the Marks blacked out like censoring
with yet more zeros overprinted
as their money went to Hell
taking peopled avenues,
un-peopled, dying, with them.
Still, those mutton-dressed-as-lambs’
made-up faces, cracked façades
would put a smudged smile on the fear
of age, decay, that decade’s times
and they’re like panicked symptoms.
I’m symptomatic too, when, come back, you allow
my advice, agree it doesn’t suit you;
but this was shopping now.
♦
Peter Robinson‘s most recent collection of poems is The Returning Sky (Shearsman Books), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation in 2012. In 2013 he published Foreigners, Drunks and Babies: Eleven Stories
Portfolio: This is one of six new poems published in June 2013 in the Fortnightly Review.
