Courtship

A risky proposition,
earlier today

I went to a launch event for Deadly, Delicate by Kate Garrett, who I'd never met before but who is just as interesting in person as she'd seemed via the internet (this is not true of everybody...)

This is a pamphlet of poems centred around the theme of female pirates (with a degree of historical accuracy plus a dollop of poetic imagination; there's a LGBT angle too.)  It's a great pamphlet, and I recommend it.

(If you wanted something more solid, I also recommend Kate's previous book The Density of Salt; I reviewed it in Antiphon and it was one I really enjoyed...)

Anyway...  there was an open-mic aspect to the book launch and I read Girl, Unaccompanied — which I shall post in a week or so — and also The Man who Ate the World which was in retrospect a mistake, because it's quite a complex poem and the pub (poets in a pub, who'd credit it) was quite noisy by then.

I should have read the following.  Hopefully it will mislead you until the very last line.

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Courtship

I need you -- she is blushing, closer now;
this is in the limo, en route to the hotel --
to take me in a hostile way.  Tell me how
you'll own me.  Talk dirty.  Say you'll sell
subsidiaries and drive your staff
to penetrate my org chart, stripping
assets and rationalise the hell from chaff
in the top brass.  Her breath is hot.  She nips
his ear.  Expose me in the press
where my practices aren't up to scratch
then tie me with injunctions.  I confess
that being in legal knots makes my breath catch.
Slap me in jail...  He's eager for the deal.  It's hard
to think.  She has already cloned his credit cards.

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Originally also published in Antiphon