The Long Slide

"When I see a couple of kids/And guess he’s fucking her...” Philip Larkin

In the American season of paradise,
I hear through the plywood wall
my roommate fucking his girl at 3 a.m.
They mouth the same script every time,
he going aargh, Aargh! she yelping,

to encourage him, perhaps. In my poetry
workshop, the girls fuck their dads, their mums,
their best friends’ pets, and the poems
never sound happy. They always blame
their dads, their mums, the pets, themselves

or they complain a good fuck doesn’t last.
I start a poem about a good fuck
but it slumps into a complaint in the end.
It refuses to be happy, as if sadness,
or badness, is the only mirror for the soul

and the only way to end a fucking poem.
Rather than words comes the thought of a slide,
long, but not straight long, curling long
round and down, and the slider sliding down
so fast he keeps catching sight of himself.