Love-Bubble Poem by Sheena Blackhall

Love’s a bubble, a burp in the hookah-pipe of life
Ephemeral as cuckoo spit on a thistle.

Inside this nebulous sphere, would you Adam and Eve it,
Lust is flowering.

Young flesh
So ripe
So sweet
Swelling with juice.

Cherry mouth, apple cheek, eyes like sloes
Everyone else is a gooseberry
An extraneous prickle
Especially the large black rat
Who’ll slip in when nobody’s looking
By the back entrance
Bring the bills, the infidelities, the disillusion
The hundred little barbs to pop the dream.