Phone Phun with
the Bard of Your Choice


The odour of cabbages, since you ask. Coming not from 1984,
a novel I couldn't get out of my floating head till 1985,
but from brachia bruises on whipstalk that blotch my pale arms.
I avoid the sun. Apply myself: onomatopoeia and failed odes.

What I'm wearing? A lilac Guernsey. I finger computer-cut chunks,
designed to sort out corpses in a moonlit corpseworld,
bought last year at Aldeburgh, between sonnet and tired villanelle.

You were there? I walked the beach with a seller of rhymes and a cellar of salt.
I got sand in every crease, every fold of 'How To Write A Love Poem'.

What turns me on? Mostly the absence of rhyme. No, I don't think we met.


Philip Wilson

If you've any comment on this poem, Philip Wilson would be pleased to hear from you.