How scrubbed-up clean Poem by Mark Waldron

are our spirits, these loquacious silver gods who glide at
some safe distance above their rank and proletarian bodies.

Foul though fascinating landscapes they are that they
traverse, besmirched with armpits and fruity genitalia

and belching gobs and those impulsive blurting sphincters
in whose hot updrafts they might ascend and soar.

O, but our spirits are so lustrous, so hairless, so advanced
in their glass-bottomed flying machines which run on

just about nothing! What quick and icy notions they have
that slot into one another like the tightest clocks, and how

they lick their lips as they gaze down in anticipatory glee,
for though they would not themselves wish to rough it,

they certainly will peep through their bedroom
windows, each a jiggling voyeur of its own ardent body

when that body has chanced upon another, and the pair
of them have knuckled down to their immersive work.