Is the washing machine a clock with an attitude problem?

Is the iron an anchor with acid indigestion?

Is the radio the ghost of my father?

Is the cat my past venom in a panther suit?

Is the rain a million reincarnated dragonflies or is it just the rain?

Is my life an excuse for not being dead?

 

The kitchen is a debating chamber

Dreamt to the scale of Europe

Today I shook hands with a mosquito

The washing machine turns its mechanic eye

 

I thought the kitchen was an operating system

Cool & functional as a Mac

One day it stops

And we shift to the next version

 

The gold cat from China is still waving at the sun

The fruit bowl gets heavier & no two plums ever taste the same

The last English mushrooms shrink back in the pan

Like the life cycle of a toad in reverse

What will this kitchen think of us while we’re away?

It will slow down like a thatched-over country lane

A homemade film from the ‘80s

A fly will orchestrate coordinates, jubilant in its moon landing

 

This might be our last nuclear winter

September raises its flag in the wings of butterflies

Long exposure in avenues of light

We leave the ghosts on the other side of the glass

Last night they helped themselves to everything

The egg timer, the spatula, the flour scales

They whipped up soul cakes

And ate them with a shot of Domestos

 

Three Goddesses come into my kitchen every night

The first is the Mother of Avant-Garage

The next is the Mother of Dreampop

And the third arrives with an obsidian wing

Across her eyes

She is the Mother of Shoegazing

Some people hear a Boeing wing in the fridge

But that is the Music of the Mothers

The drip of the tap

The filter in the fishtank

The mulch in the u-bend

The kitchen is Berlin in the seventies

London in the Poetry Wars

Liverpool in a beatnik permafrost

 

Kitchens are connected at night by air traffic control

They pass through time-zones as we sleep