Wine at Teatime
‘Another pot’ you order,
for the tea’s gone cold, old, perhaps.
You buy my wine,
a bottle’s worth in glasses that flood my mouth
like water.
I start you wonder if you’ve noticed
when the waiter marches over and you take
sugar in your tea and I sip wine
while we dine on the last halves of scones
that crumb between our fingers.
You yawn once the waiter’s gone to check the lady on
table twenty-four.
My knife is warm and ready to slice the slabs
of butter beside slabs of phone,
face-down to stop a drone scroll,
rolling photo-faces down until our heads loll,
hushed to a blue light-fried hum.
Better not let our brains rot like the others.
You itch your leg and
I imagine my head nestled there while you stroke my hair
and bear the weight of it all,
and sink into a gingham blanket
I brought for you before.
I make a feeble smile from cheek to cheek
that stretches thin like weeks in winter, and
look up, sly, into your eyes. You smile
And buy me another glass;
I know the other girls you see do not
drink so much wine as me.
You blow on your cup, a little ripple
off the porcelain shore that I imagine in my ear,
tea-steam hot, and I almost forget how
you make me cry sometimes.
You take your tea, I’ll sip my wine and bide us time--
‘There will be time”
When is this time? Where is the line
I’ll cross one day that greys my hair and cricks my spine?
Another cake?
I’ll have lemon, you have lime,
they’ll both pair well with our tea and wine.
I wish you would not make me cry like a
lamb alone left high and dry, that lays between
cold sets of sheets that I made fresh for you and I
You put your fingers on top of mine,
whilst I decide if after all you might
prefer a kind of girl who drinks her tea
with rose petals and rather dislikes wine.
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