Let a fanfare of trumpets call your name
And fireworks right your name in the sky.
A nation chants your name in a joyous chorus
Your achievement, you stole my heart my mind
my being, no hesitation or doubt to share
You have everything I have got to give
and everything I needed to exist.
Just speak my name upon those lips
and hold me in your heart, so dear.
Then close the door and do not cry.
As she left the building and looked back once
And the door sign read DIGNITAS
WOMEN CAN’T BE COMPASSIONATE
Women can’t be compassionate, or their reputation’s dead
Can’t comfort the lost tourist, he’s the surrogate lover
As he sits on the theatre steps, wearing loud red
Checks and braces, bewildered when the play is over.
Women must be professional and never huddle
In doorways after rain, like an angel in a stupor
With life’s rejects, looking for a cuddle
Sad casualities of money, or of having worn Lee Cooper*.
Women can’t be friends with male novelists, or film-makers
Or poets, who want to define mistresses, and wives,
Leaving creativity to the movers and the shakers,
Taking dignitas and money out of women’s lives.
This narrows the field to the tycoon, or the bore –
Feminists – choose death first! Webster’s honest whore.
*Apologies to Lee Cooper – I couldn’t resist the rhyme, in fact their jeans are as good as anyone else’s – at one time they were very cool indeed.
from IN MEMORY OF HER, 2004, 2008