Maiden Flight

Your room has been locked for days, 
of course I have tried the door,
and one evening last week I kicked it
so hard in the bottom corner
the old sapless wood splintered
leaving a gap big enough for a cat,
but not of course for me.

I am well-fed, and tend towards the big boned
I do not have a pianist’s hands, and I know you
have always secretly loved their promise
of violence, not to you of course, but to anyone
who’d dare fuck with you.
I protect your secrets,
like a gaoler.

It’s not as though you’re quiet,
I hear the occasional oath, the rattle of lids,
your theatrical dialogue muffled by
the running of water,
you always watched too much TV, and you
got that one from a spy film we sat up late to
watch, once when we were new,

We’d decided to crack open a Pol Roger
and have it with Pizza.
Oh fuck, I’m in a terrible state,
here on the landing, pacing,
and pacing, fingering the leaves
of an old spider plant which seems to survive
though no one round here ever gives it water.

It looks a bit like Warhol’s wig, from a distance.
I take that distance now, April evening
colder than it looks, blowing the smell of moss
in through a stiff window, opened for the first time
since fuck knows when, it’s a long time at least
since September when you shut it in a huff
to stop the last of the barbecues from smoking you out.

You’ve been in there a while, that’s certain.
And I miss you like submarine crews on desperate
missions to the Bering sea must miss fresh fruit,
and girls of course. Like they must miss them.
Your noises are becoming more regular, and if I’m not
mistaken there is a beating of wings,
it could be the leathery flap of a daemon,

But I like to think it’s
the feathered halleluiah of an angel, 

so I take my seat, near a neglected rack 
of National Geographics, 
opposite that adamantine door
and I wait, suddenly flushed with Love, 
for you to take the air.