Replete

Next in my series of many month-old poems I never bothered to do anything with:

Replete with you, incapable of more

before the war which robbed all saws

of pressures past from mind whole-cloth,

the pressure on my back, the love, the wrath

of complete repletion, a maximum in effect –

flipping every defect, hedging every bet

with a rhyme or two about the cut of your hair,

its receding rhythms, the coloured underwear

from Next or Topman unintentionally collected

year on year, which somehow nicely fit

(yet are not fit to wear). Because scent,

like taste, I can almost soon forget

until I finger the aroma that lingers where we met

White you out

The names we award to the colour of one's collar,

mean less here in Oxford, where the collars will be white,

because daddy's collar is already quite white

(though to say "Daz-white" will seem awfully blue),

where even black skin indicates whiter collars,

or white mothers, who'll white you out,

scraping black from the canvas, leaving it white

and bare, and boring, a space to be filled in,

ignoring the proscriptions of a white collar,

demands of taste behind your pound or dollar,

seeing distinctions like 'high', forgoing the 'low',

consigning baser forms to the blue abyss below,

where I've missed the simple pleasures of

Yates on a Thursday, or sambucca before eleven,

where EastEnders is not just watched, but waited on,

but I'm dipping my collar in bleach, whiting myself out...

(with such a dingy-looking shirt, I'd best not go out).