england

Where fingerprints lie underneath a bruise
is often a lesser ghost, deified, sacrificed.
The small town impoldes with a single crude
gesture and England had won.
                                              A young boy
with a broken jaw had told me so.

You were there and strangely absent
where your looks held broken fingers.
A girl who looked like England did
                                                before the war.

Not England then at all in the pure Anglo/Saxon.
Scratching their bollocks. No work to go to Monday.
You watched them go at it.

Another country removed from a five mile
square radius. On the border between France
and Italy, learning to talk in an old dispensation.

A primitive form of space travel, based
on a story by Jules Verne. The moisture on
your upper lip, dark hair hung
                                               damp with curls.

A girl who looked like England did
between the acts, when darkness falls.
On the edge of town eating oranges
watching the band play blessed Edgar.

You face had no politics. When we
had to lock the doors and everything
else might as well have been made
of glass. Only a country I had never
seen, this enemy I swore in blood.

Recalling every detail, fist to mouth
my feelings for you. So simple in a way
that words are never simle. Only a name
that always sounds so far away
to hear you say it.

I bought you a vodka instead of a rose.