Jack Underwood

Softball

The score didn’t matter.
No one gave a shit. Too busy
with the mystery of strappy bras,
of hair in new places.

In a vagueness of uniform and kit
cross-legged, or lying down,
our stomach cramps, erections,
dirty words, untidy signs and looks.

And then there was the grass, the sun,
and our teenage bodies,
new exercise books.

Toad

Toad, I have told you already,
this is not your house. Why do you insist
on staying there under the sink?
You cannot eat the soap like that,
it makes your insides sick.

I remember toad, the shed we used to sit in.
How, in the fizzing light of a twenty watt bulb
you were moved to unbutton love, to turn
your pockets out and inspect the lint and sand
in the oil palm of your toad hand.
You were friendly in the sawdust then,
your toad face wide as the brim of your hat.

You cannot eat the soap like that.
Toad, it makes my insides sick.

Disturbances

It’s why the neighbours smoke at four AM,
why the pigeons coo their incessant bed prayer
through the walls of our room.

It’s why you found the torso of a mannequin
in the front room when you first moved in,
why we shouldn’t have given him a name.

It’s why the rent here is so cheap.
And why you push somebody else’s voice
through the fabric of sleep.

Wakefield waiting

As always he is early,
shifting peanuts about the bar.
Nibbling at his drink,
he avoids conversation,
noses through a local paper,

or among the cool echoes of the Gents,
presses his head hard against the tiled wall
and aims grimly at the pale blue urinal-cake,

asks himself, Wakefield, do you wait
for your life to end? Or expect it
to stop turning up?

Qualifier

Police cross-talk distorts out of radios.
There is glass, paramedic salt.
The landlady sits rigid on the patio wall
with a trembling fag on the go.
I ask two boys the final score.
Neither know.

Weasel

So Weasel, it has come to this;
to your thighs like tall glasses of milk,
your biscuit hair,
eyes that are like any kind of deep water.
It has come to those coiled, snaking guts
we had when we were younger still –
those balled-up sock guts of an afternoon
stolen back from college.
It has come to the spastic, ticking urges
rising through skin at the simplest
repositioning of your weasel hips,
or the one in twenty-seven kisses
I might land about your mouth,
of the right temperature and diction.

Was I even hungry once for eating?
Were you ever not the end to all fasts?

* * * * *

Biography

Jack Underwood was born in 1984 and grew up in Norfolk. In 2005, he graduated from Norwich School of Art and Design. He is a student representative for Wells-Next-the-Sea poetry festival and has edited and appeared in a successful pamphlet 'Stop sharpening your knives so I can think for a second' which he co-founded in 2004.