Below are two poems from Divided Tongues, the new collection from Patrick Davidson Roberts, published this month by Broken Sleep Books.
Patrick will be part of Broken Sleep’s forthcoming online launch reading event on 2nd January. Details here.
Aphrodite
I am comforted by couples composed of people younger than me
who seem to be on an early date in a bookshop in the morning.
While I’m shuffling my headache round the Stationery section
they’re going after laughter between Essays and Graphic Novels.
As much as it must be a neutral space, the place also offers options.
All the conversation they are likely to have is already in this building,
it’s just a matter of one of them getting there before the other
reads which book said it first, and ceases to smile.
In the spirit of giving a handful of them a few more seconds’ grace,
I move books to other shelves, where they’re less likely to give it away;
though worry, as I do so, that I am upsetting some vast neural program
carefully laid out in a deal between the Fates and several publishers.
There they go, out the door, as I remove the dictionary from Erotica
and hope that this sets us all straight.
The Hell and High
It isn’t the case that the taste of white wine
and the drop of Bud Light are the same.
What is different is what I feel
in that place in front of my heart.
After years of passing the Rubicon,
I’m finally over here. With the fucking them
and the wearing of rings,
hands half a foot out from the hips.
We don’t really talk. I’m not here to talk.
The savings? They count for little,
but as with the difference in drink so with this:
I’ve tuned my tongue
to economy.