A baby is greeted like the second coming and little rituals of worship take place amongst the banal secular ritual of cooking and cleaning in the miserable 1960s. In big families child care is duty, no matter what aspirations and plans you may have. In your mini dress with the red ric rac trimming, your Twiggy haircut and makeup you’re reminded that family and a domestic life is king and while your mother goes to the shops please mind the kids
The tightly folded sheets
Compacted on dusty shelves,
Receptacles for mediocrity;
Love in an apron, tripe.
Factory clean and neat,
Woven in patterns to conform and blend.
Fashionable or traditional
all fit a type.
They must not clash or provoke discord in the night.
When making beds, technique is all,
Hospital corners and no rough stuff.
Do not let strangers in your bed,
Gratuitous self obsessors (wankers she means).
Only gentlemen, please, with one foot on the floor.
Let’s pretend it’s a draper shop,
the sheets sent billowing above our heads.
Dive, dive, duck, down.
Spin inside the windy cloth of candy stripes.
A multi colour haze of nausea,
dying without a sound.
Sometimes she steps in to stop the game,
sometimes she does not.
Lessons for good wives
Sheets are useful winding cloths,
they can bind sleep into death.
Marriage is the art of dying quietly
with little climaxes in between.
A little death and then a little sleep,
This is the advice my mother gave me,
repeatedly
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