A poem about a petting zoo

…and the end of a relationship. The title is from the song “Take me in your arms and love me.”

Take all of this love of mine

As a child I was taught “The Fairytale Theory” which states that in situations of mortal peril human characters should always heed the advice of the helpful animals.

Helpful animals include rabbits, turtles and miniature horses.

So when, later in life, I found myself punctured and bent double with a broken heart, I went straight to the local petting zoo, suggested donation £3.

Initial feedback was disappointing. The llamas had nothing but barely intelligible platitudes and the pity radiating from the parakeets was crushing to say the least.

But then the amphibian keeper took me aside and said, “Listen son, you only get one shot at love, are you going to let her go without a fight? What if she’s gone from you, gone, gone completely and you’ll never wrap her back up under a duvet, or cook that yellow meal just how she likes it, or have someone tap to find where you are hollow and dark?” He gestured towards the heavily populated bull frog tank. “Take Herbert here. Do you think he got where he is today by giving up at the first sight of rejection? Go and tell her how you feel.”

When we walked home and you put your arm around my waist and buried your head in my chest and told me that you dreamt we woke up together in an Italian villa, 100 steps above the sea, in a village where the shop had only bread and salt and there were stalls selling giant lemons by the roadside, your hair smelt of lime flowers and your forehead pressed against muscles I never knew I had.

The ground grew sticky underfoot, but I had love on my side and hope in my heart, so I strode on, ignoring the owls and foxes stationed along my path. Out of the faraway corner of my eye I could see their mouths moving and their tongues waving like red flags.

A poem about being bored at work

Here is a poem about working as this lady, who lives at the Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall:

Red Vespa

I’m normally the first to arrive, and in the pale blue light I arrange myself on the moss with a fair amount of enthusiasm. But as the visitors start to drift past on their way to view the giant rhubarb, a feeling of despondency comes over me, along with a searing pain in my right calf. Cramp is an occupational hazard, so I keep a stash of salt in my muddy pocket. By 10.30am I’ve usually emptied the contents of at least three sachets under my tongue.

I get 45 minutes for lunch and spend them in the local shops browsing through home made fudge and tapestry kits of small brown birds.

In a moment of self destruction I once suggested to my manager that it would be economically prudent to dispense with my services and replace me with a great hulking piece of granite rock. He replied that the curve in my fleshy waist was known as the most comfortable seat in Cornwall, and that publicity like that was like gold dust.

I hit a slump at around 3pm. Suspecting a drop in my blood glucose levels, I take a ten minute stroll through the walled flower garden and pull up a sugar cane to chew on. After that, my daydreams become temporarily more vivid and rewarding, often involving rare green herons emerging from the banana plantation and wading through my grassy hair.

What I didn’t put on my CV is that for two thousand years I worked as the interior wall of a pyramid, before being carried lovingly all the way to just off the A303 and placed bolt upright in the sun.

At 5.15pm every day my boyfriend of four years picks me up on his red Vespa and we hurtle along the country roads even faster than the time I took a summer job as a meteorite, and fell to Earth so quickly even the sauropods, with their heads in the stars, didn’t see me coming.