Love’s got teeth:
Like good shoes got grip,
Like good coffee’s got kick,
Like good bread’s got grit.

Love’s got guts:
Like good dogs got bite,
Like good drums got tight;
Like good minds got fight.

Love can argue and it can lose;
It doesn’t sulk and whine and bruise:
True love bickers and laughs it off:
It plays rough, stands steady, speaks soft.

To love is not to mince and sigh:
Love’s got teeth and a sharpened eye.
Love’s got boots to tramp sissies beneath.
Love’s got guts and love’s got teeth.

Without you, I’m only just a trickle;
In your company I become a flood.
I dry up and dither, pointless,
Until you come back and clear the mud.

Then I rush and cheer and splash,
Foam and leap over the rocks in the way.
You are the rain that breaks the drought,
You rush me from fountainhead to bay.

The urge to buy the towering type yet lingered –
those twinkling tottering teetering heels
at last a serious option after a childhood
of trying on mum’s finest tippytoe shoes;
after years of such shoes being too old
too dainty, too delicate, too sexually sure,
too choreographed and too mature;
at last: the tippiest, tallest,
daintiest, tiltiest, needle-heeliest
that a very first paycheck could buy.

Then, after years of true loyal service
swaggering angled provocatively
as I lilt toewards, to tip and back,
rocking my adult legs, my thighs,
after years of footwear fidelis felicitous:
a bespectacled order: tiptoes no more.

Weeping and shameful, I sent them away,
bundled into the annual charity bags.
Swapped my slender skyscraper slips
for sturdy and flat, reassuring robust,
arch supporting, humble and logical shoes.
I let out my hems to cover my failure:
I lowered my belt to hide them from eyes:
I ignored the relief and the ease in my back,
I defied the new painless state of my thighs.

Until I saw sexy slimline stilettos,
smirking at me from glassy store windows,
and felt nothing: no urge and no yearning;
so discovered a bliss in my off-roadable shoes,
gentle and kind on my feet and my knees,
letting me walk without being displayed.
I surrendered the last scrap of foolish seduction
to the promises of joy from the high heeled brigade.

She sighed with disgust and lit a cigarette,
took artificial drags and stared outside;
a sham rebellion, she never inhaled,
but sucked and puffed with self-conscious pride.

She looked over at me, dared disapproval,
Hoped to provoke a fight she could win:
I undid my shoelaces and sipped on my tea,
and waited for her impatience to finally give in.

Once she had sucked the cigarette hollow,
without actually having inhaled the smoke,
she began her predictable, petulant tirade:
how her uni is useless, our culture a joke.

How injustice is rife and cruelty free;
and nobody cares enough to set it to right:
How her unpopular perspective gets so often discarded,
and how she and her boyfriend had a mean, ugly fight.

Now she had got to it, I gave her a hug:
there was the splinter; there was the thorn,
She pouted and said she should be above the huffs:
it was too like the people she would usually scorn.

But hurt she still was, and regretful as well,
so I soothed her sore feelings and coaxed her to laugh;
By the time my friend left, she was embarrassed but hopeful,
and our culture, she decided, was just lovably daft.

With a serpentine slither
her skirt snaked sideways,
the silk slid along her thighs.

She hissed a sigh, her
throat exposed
and opened wide her unblinking eyes.

He was halted, hypnotised;
She sprang and caught him in his surprise.