Author: Izzy Gibson

Would I still love you if you were a worm?

Your focus fixed on mine with headlight eyes

I am Schrodinger’s roadkill until I reply.

“Yes”.

I imagine a half-mattress half-soil bed, covers never stolen,

And a cupboard safe from prying midnight fingers,

Half-price trains with my pocket stowaway,

And tobacco packets lasting twice as long.

I ignore double takes from restaurant staff who see us connected by a strand of spaghetti half your girth and triple your length,

Comments from concerned friends who join forces with labels from concerned psychiatrists,

Disapproving wriggles as you inform me that I have stepped on your now-late second-cousin,

And accusations of genocide as the dog’s weekly worming tablet wipes out your colleages.

You tell me I’m “not taking it seriously”.

I’d evidently failed to acknowledge the grave, impending potentiality that you might, before my very gaze, gain a newfound affinity with soil and shrink into a pinky tangle.

You say that you know I’m a poet,

that poets are serious,

they use rhyme and obscure words

to express their feelings … “seriously”

So I indulge you.

“Would I still love you if you were a worm?”

Your focus fixed on mine with headlight eyes

I am Schrodinger’s roadkill until I reply.

The beating risk of “yes” or “no” must lie

To punctuate the phrase, ‘your palm, my thigh’.

My moral needle promises to try

To spin to truth in questions polarised.

“Yes”.

The cliche speaks before me, “I love you for your soul”

And although its true, convention turns it old

And assumes that souls and bodies do not mould and fuse

Until the sinews of your soul flex in your shoes

And express its aura through your hands that choose

To steal my hoodie, as it’s raining on the news.

And even if one could perfectly transfuse

That effing ineffable being that is “you”

Out of my clothes, your vans, your twitchy snooze –

Into a worm, I’d still be left confused.

As worms do not have words I know to use.

So then begins a tangle of misdirection

As my tone, my tongue, my poetic inflection

Finds in pink tremors of backyard soil no true connection

But blinds both me and you with its reflection –

A sentiment unfelt contorts to rejection.

Left only with remembered laughter at my silicone erection.

I surrender to the hypothetical in a crooked bow

As neighbours peek through half-furrowed curtain brows

At my repeated soil screaming unanswered vows:

“I still love you Oli, I did then and I do now”

Unstrirred you labour on as a soil plough.

My muddy torment dampens as I know

That placing my 5 foot 7 6 feet below

May be the only means I have to show

The lengths to which my love for you will go.

As you digest my flesh from heart to toe

And use my dead undying love to grow.

I’d give myself to you in one foul blow.

I ask if you’d love me if I were a worm?

You respond:

“No”.