Adam Panichi
Take a look at a Michelangelo,
the one with God in a bath,
God letting the water out, or
putting the plug back in,
God in a bathhouse with hot bathmates.
We shared a room once.
Five years ago, when I slept
in your bed with your husband,
kissed him first,
I didn’t mean to stay, I promise
as if it would change anything.
All of life is tricking the head cop.
In the centre of the Atlantic,
news reports say men
are boarding lifeboats
before the women and children,
others are taking the propeller’s
way out. It has nothing to do
with a starving idea
everything to do with plucking
a single red grape from a bunch
in a supermarket aisle. Language,
to Nietzsche, is a gaoler.
The poet is always pacing a cell.
In the film, she’s doing the mambo
on a log, the lead holding her,
her pretending to fall, hips swaying
as she stumbles, he’s weeping.
If you dropped both words
on the moon, they’d land together.
God the iceberg, God pacing
his moon-cell, God in a bathhouse lifted
from water.
Adam Panichi is a British poet living in Italy. Runner-up in the Ledbury Poetry Prize, he is published in I’ll Show You Mine, VAINE, Dust, berlin lit, Atrium, Strix and Magma. Adam’s pamphlet Cupid, Grown was shortlisted in the Broken Spine, Paper Swans and Poetry London pamphlet prizes.
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