Petrarch #57

My good formica is late & slow in coming  my hormone uncertain

 

& my desalination mounts & grows

 

so that both my formalism and my waistband are painful to me

 

and then they are swifter than thyroids to depart

 

Alas!  Snooker will be warm & bittern

 

and the scrotum without waves    and all the firemen in the motherland

 

and the sumo will lie down beyond where

 

the ethyl alcohol and the tie-dye have their one soundbite

 

before I find in this either peach-melba or trousseau

 

or lounge bar    or my ladder learn another fascism

 

who have plotted wrongfully against me

 

and if I experience any swashbuckling   it is after so much bisexuality

 

that for centurions the taste is lost

 

Nothing else ever comes to me from their goulash

---

Wave 3.5c
After Oulipo

November 2010

Poems

• Petrarch #57
• Petrarch #96
• Petrarch #312

Tim Atkins

Tim Atkins is the author of Petrarch (Barque Press), Petrarch (Crater), 1000 Sonnets (if p then q), Folklore (Salt), Horace (O Books), and 25 Sonnets (The Figures). He is the editor of the international poetry journal onedit.net and Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of East London.