The clumsy line of your jaw
is where my affection gathered.
It blew across in tentative skips
to hide amongst the angles of your limbs.

That satisfied surprise,
the smile drawn out through relief,
that shed its glib grace across your face –
it baited at the growing lump
I spirited across the threshold at just past 10,
come to entertain you at the bar.

A double act just for ourselves,
we closed that Friday night like most;
with a dance round innuendo,
toe bruised and left footed.

I’m sorry, really, if I stopped up conversation
each time you told me of your lust
for all these exotic women,
or referenced bluntly at the phone-sex you
shared with your girlfriend.
I was trying hard to delude myself,
but every straight gesture just pressed
and pressed and was harder to ignore.

But then, you shouldn’t have sighted
my eyes across your brow (with a smile!)
when my hand hung just to long
around your shoulder,
nor sidled in alongside me on empty seats.

Or
perhaps
I shouldn’t have read
the shallow musings of a  sex-bereft boy,
every utterance being prone to my scrutiny,
as the furtive flirtings of a man
discovering.

So I know you understand
why I cried in the station
on Sunday night,
after I painted your
tissue skin red with my confession;
it isn’t that you don’t love me –
every life’s a cabinet to display
loves unrequited, capsized or grown cold –

it’s that you never could.