A Good Day's Work?
by Phil Davey
Last night as you curled up naked
perplexed you asked me
What’s so wrong
with a good day's work?
And so this morning
sponging up your crumbs
from a hasty breakfast
I clear myself space
which as you labour
provides me surface
to savour your words
in lingering bitterness
What's so wrong
with a good day's work?
Too lumbered then with plum-stuffed chub
with deep-dug chunks of Parma cheese
with bubbling jugs of Lombard red
too drawn to hips in bedded crispness
I dared not answer but teasingly kissed
soft fair down around your rims of lips
Then brimming a glass with dark amaro
improvised rhymes to beggar the question
There was a young lass from Milan
who travelled to town in a tram
All day in a bank
she slaved till she sank
in the arms of her lazy young man
Like spring-beached seals
we shrieked and snorted
rolled and contorted
flexed and cavorted
until
(half-crawling)
half-keening
half-dreaming
we lowered the blinds
on a murky midnight
moiling like moles
towards a loamy peace
Phil Davey has dual British and New Zealand citizenship. His poems have been shortlisted in the Montreal and Bridport Poetry Competitions and published in Oxford Poetry Now, Poetry London/Apple Magazine and Illuminations. He has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of New Brunswick and in Film Studies from the University of Exeter. After years in Chester, Oxford, Cambridge, Trieste, London, Bedford, Milan and Varese, he now lives with his wife Chiara in Brussels.