visiting Charleston

a rage swells for

dead painters

there is nothing here

that has anything to do with the likes of me

Duncan Grant

this was your funk hole

while my great grandfather

was at Ypres

riding dispatch

his wife at home already long suffering

they say she’d married below her

a master cabinet maker certainly but he preferred a betting slip

and a glass of milk stout with his idle friends

at the races

to the chisels and sawdust of his workshop

and you can see it in her face

and there at the bottom of the shoebox

there she is in sepia twenty years before

with a slip of a girl too bright to be related to

any family member living or dead

dressed too fashionably for these parts

the photograph seems out of place

placed by mistake

I want to warn you before it is too late

your little sister Sarah will marry well

see the world

die in Bexhill at a ripe old age leaving a small fortune

whilst you will stay put and not have two pennies to rub together

for your whole married life

fetching and carrying and doing for

your good for nothing husband with his private horde of pickled

walnuts under lock and key in the dresser draw

your eldest girl will crack living under his roof

the daily unthankled skivvying

and her suicide by drowning

will become a cautionary tale repeated

the wages of bad marriages to selfish men

reverse Virginia Woolf

without the poetry

Isaac Blackwell you old bastard how much of you do I have in me

or am I more the stones in the pocket kind