I love poems
but can’t remember them
like some people do
to quote, on cue
not that you have to
to get a laugh
with a line from Billy Collins or Sylvia Plath
I love to take a dreamy stroll
through Patricia Lockwood or Sharon Olds
John Cooper Clarke, Carol Ann Duffy
brilliant artists, nothing too stuffy

despite all that
I’m just no good at reciting them back

but to be fair
if you stood me on a chair
and said look you just stand there
until you give us some lines
of whatever kind
and if you don’t we’ll FINE you
for all the crimes you’ve
committed against poetry
you say you read it but you don’t actually don’t know any
so – no hurry

then incredibly
you’d see me
close my eyes dreamily
and speak with proficiency
these beautiful lines from Samson Agonistes:

O loss of sight, of thee I most complain!
Blind among enemies, O worse than chains,
Dungeon, or beggery, or decrepit age!
Light the prime work of God to me is extinct,
And all her various objects of delight
Annull’d, which might in part my grief have eas’d,
Inferior to the vilest now become
Of man or worm; the vilest here excel me,
They creep, yet see, I dark in light expos’d
To daily fraud, contempt, abuse and wrong

Mrs Cox taught me that in ’72’;
fifty years later I’m reciting it for you