"You will lose me because you are an utterly disobedient lover"
And what you think of as charm has the ring of noxious smut.
I said you were a fountain of fragrant vulgarities
Prompting a river of bare decreeing on the subject of my idiocy,
A charge of pig-headedness fierce enough to turn me porcine.

You will lose me because you drink wine from a bowl,
Because it is like living with the ghost of a failed comedian,
Because my heart only ever leaps with the stiffness
of a woman with two fractured kneecaps.

I declared your lust the cut-out-and-keep kind,
The type I laminate to ward off the itch
of hours in an office chair,
That if you leave I will certainly die a pauper,
Or some Mid-Atlantic panhandler of love song. —Keiran Goddard

PRAISE for Keiran Goddard...

"Keiran Goddard writes with an intensity and commitment matched only by his imagistic facility. The sincerity and lyric ambition of his work place it far from the surface effects and trickery of postmodernism, navigating a terrain darkened by history, literary and otherwise. His is an original new voice that demands our attention."

—Luke Kennard

Keiran Patrick Goddard, 28, was born and raised in Shard End, Birmingham, and educated in Oxford. He has worked as a journalist and editor, and now works in higher education. His poetry has appeared in various journals, most recently, Mercy, the Warwick Review and the Salzburg Review. A pamphlet, Strings, will be published this year by Antler press.