Jack Underwood

I Promise When I Lift Your Egg

from the water with my special spoon,
carry it to a cup as if it were a bald man
whistling steam to a tune he had just made up;
when I take my green handled egg-knife
to whip off the top and inside it is more
than yellow, like a laugh about to happen,
or butter pushed back into light; when you dunk
gorgeously in, softly exploding the yolk
like a new idea finding one coloured term
for its articulation; when the little promise
of the egg, contained inside from the moment
it was laid, is broken by your tongue, then,
like love, it is remade, I promise.

The Eye

Wherever you were you could see it –
you couldn't not see the eye
and when it blinked
an aeroplane shocked its course
to a new evasive angle, streamed
downwards, like a slow cross-tear.

The huge pupil dilated
like we were all stood peering down
into a full oil drum only
we were all stood peering up into one.

It made us feel sick and some of us
were sick, our stomachs brimming
over with a wide kind of shame.

And then it started looking
and we ran before we thought of running;
cold-sweating through our clothes,
we knew to be pinned beneath
was a dead-naked wrenching from yourself
and the eye, beady and horrible,
jerking hungrily, tried to fix and focus.
As we cowered in the caves of our houses
the windows were like frames,
our voices became clipped,
hateful, burnt sounding.

And we almost gave up,
arguing in the dark,
leaning at the TV screen for news,
or sweeter blame,
blame like hot soup.
And when the stations collapsed
we started forcing lines
between whoever and the eye,
shouting out to it "Look at him!"
"She is here!" "I did nothing!"

But the eye calmly shut on us.
A heavier dread emptied down
as the slow omen dawned
that behind the eye
a thought had been made.

My other girlfriends

                                           are all beautiful.
They say things like that's wonderful
darling, tell me something else
and my repertoire is endless.
Eating figs with one of them or another
on holiday, it's as if the sky settles in,
the ground leans to stretch me out
and the sweet breeze dizzy with bugs
conspires for me to lift their skirts
a little, so as to hold my interest.

And when we step out in various towns,
my other lovely girlfriends and I,
for an evening stroll before the dancing,
juke boxes singing from bars, a lager-top
fizzing, brightly earning condensation,
my other girlfriends multiply,
endlessly, beyond the grid of the city
into swarms of swarms of girlfriends,
so that nothing in the world is not love
or how it tips our lives up
and I want to see the freckles,
that are the enemy of dying,
on the shoulder of my girlfriend,
and only for her to be true.

Professor Enchilada's Summary

My assistant will now pass round
a small triangle of bread.
Disregard its shape which is
happenstantial and instead begin eat.

Amylase, the enzyme in spit
begins, as you chew, to break
down starch into glucose and so
the bread turns sweet.

Now consider that the body
grew the mind for itself and instead
of defining us, imagination is
simply its inverted flower head;

we gift ourselves into being,
and the ersatz brain-king
on a feudal pile of muscle and bone,
was long dreamt out of flesh.

Meanwhile beyond our humble sky,
planets swing about their wider business
and this miracle of thought is just
a bus route in a city they don't visit.

Or is it? Perhaps terror, or love,
the coloured nights we dream,
belong to some higher, Gaia scheme,
and as with these chance shapes of bread,

our delicate thoughts, sprung
from blood, make new the taste
on the tongues of stars that speak to us,
incomprehensibly, from the brink of space.