I’m just an ordinary dryad
not like fancy Eurydice   with her sun god father
keep things simple   I say   I don’t have her dilemmas

The poem of the mask disguises meaning.
The poem of the diet lost seven words.

The poem of the snowman melted.
The poem of the invisible man.

Let us now praise hi-vis men
who gather together
round a pothole, filling the gap
with their sticky black remedy.

I lie back, arch my throat,
pretend to relax.  Contemplate

ceiling tiles . . .

This is not you, but someone soaked in fake Brut
coming at me in a gesture of fake generosity.

Your face was on a bus pass,
your hair falling around your face like a curly straw,
pressed in a puddle between the Queen’s old face
and an Aldi receipt for slippers and chicken.

I owned a g-string like this,
the back connected by a rhinestone butterfly.

Starved myself at school to save
my dinner money, bought it from Poundland.

The ash that screams into the night,
the lake that dries, the child amongst the rubble,
the heat, the fire, the lack of books,