Tender me all your smiles.

Let us throw them a party,

- In some NW5 student bedsit,

Boasting two litres of vodka

And four two-for-five-pound wines -

There, I will consume them; send them up.

I will give you, then, my bile, and my bitterness,

And my cynicism. You give me your smiles, and

I will eat them, make them into something to throw a party about.

And then, with gathering momentum,

Send me your frowns, so

I can stamp them on my passport

En route to the States! The Biggest Apple Yet!

I will travel to New York, stake my claim,

Or Chicago, or wherever it is that all these

Sultry American poets and leather jackets and icons and geniuses go, and I’ll be

James Fucking Dean and go to the trendiest single branch of McDonalds like they do in scripts,

And later I’ll send you back your smiles,

With mine, and all the things about myself that I had to cross the Atlantic to learn,

So when I come back there will be waiting a better idea of how to caricature myself,

And a conviction that there are only two characters in any story,

And one of them is you, and the other one is everyone else, for better or worse

(See how long that perspective lasts you. Not more than 120 minutes I expect).

And probably the package will get lost in the post

Or lost in the mail, or you’ll pretend you never received it,

Or maybe I won’t even have sent it in the first place, from my room

In the Chelsea Hotel, which I’ll rent when I remember

That a smiling person I once knew threw a party about it,

So we’ll dissolve all our expressions in correspondence,

And I will see you

At the party.

When I saw you at the last one, I didn’t make you happy, but maybe my new hat,

And an alien vocabulary of tenderness, which I’ll find soaked into my 54th

Or Something Street mattress, and bottomless reserves of patience,

And snappy looking US dollars, and all the time I’ll save,

Making big bucks writing poetry and putting on fake eyelashes by candlelight,

And the money I’ll save by destroying myself with madness

(Which is easy and cheap to come by, if all the adverts are to be believed

Or was it something else?) and it’ll be 12:20 in New York with lens flare on celluloid,

And then I’ll come back dressed like a brain surgeon but not like a doctor,

And fix you. I’ll fix you into something else entirely.

Or preferably,

Keep your smiles to yourself, and your bile.

I’d rather you were just happy in London, removed from this transaction.

If only you’d take a little responsibility for yourself and let others do likewise

Rather than letting the invisible script dictate character, mood and scene,

Then, we could have done with it. And I’d save on plane fares.

It’s not my fault that they’re a consideration.