More Sweet To Me Than Song

Entrails take the business of taking themselves out of the body, warm and squish, and into the welcoming mush of, say, the collected squash of bits of fruit: mango, peach, nectarine, plum, apple, pear, banana. You recall, of course, the Carmen Miranda touch? She too, without entrails, bent at the middle slightly, stooped somewhat like you, like the way you stoop. But at least she had fame, fortune and, it was said, a certain degree of happiness. Not to mention the film star good looks. What do you have but your stoop, your mushiness?

The neighbours are fully aware of your seedless ambitions. The groves that line your yard have not gone unnoticed. The bushes, the trees, the low-flying aircraft spraying insecticide – all spied upon and noted by that loose affiliation of neighbours, now a form of gang. If they do nothing else this year, they’ll at least ensure they get you.

When stood against the barrow though you plenty of bag of joy, your fruitiness is, like, way past the threshold and into the realm of unutterable beauty. Your shimmering form and your skin of hair, or perhaps of smooth. Your odour of faint stabs of death and the way you bruise on contact are all the endearing things I look for in a potential girlfriend. And it is just as true to say that I love your inner form as well as your outer gorgeousness, whether seedless or full of the rum rattle of stones and seeds and perhaps – and let’s not give too much away here – the empty skeletons of long-deceased worms. You could crush me like a grape, as we used to say. And the spray from Spitalfields, all that old past and the ghosts of grocers haunting the gulleyways and barrydowns on the exact spots where you now can’t move for four-eyed twerps carrying coloured plates and wooden things wobbling.

Your settled grace, however, balancing the fake grass slope that flies terrifyingly down to the pavement below is just some of the proof I need. Your bruised response to the gentle pressure of fingers and thumbs, the way that, despite your all-encompassing desirability, you somehow save yourself from the terror of brown paper bag. What worm holes do you hide there missy, what poisonous side do you show to your suitors?

Plucked, left to ripen on the window sill, you are a visible spot from the tread of the ground and the fall from the air. Clouds rise above you, the sun beats its path to your door. Unripened at first, your silver hardness is soon worked down into the sponge of mush. Your pungency, your sweetness, enough to turn the heads (and stomachs) of the beautiful young men walking everywhere. The swell from your harp the finishing touch.