All your ex-girlfriends as Soviet statue park (poem, w.i.p.)

All your ex-girlfriends as Soviet statue park

The first has been decapitated. Her severe eyes, colour gone,
could stare out seas or deserts, but instead gaze over a sliproad
to the retail park. This one's legs, which your current squeeze
poses inbetween for a digital photo, not a polaroid,
are still shapely despite the mould. That one's almost still whole,
I think she holds a discus, or is it chips? She's too far away. That one,
the short one, her pointing wrist now buried in the ground holds up
just her head and torso, like a paraplegic breakdancer. The one with a bob
hefts a thick book, and longingly surveys a flat on the run-down blocks.
Drizzle hunts your eye from some far-up granite rill.
The martial one looks up and out for planes, will never meet your gaze,
and the one you always overlook is just an unsmiling bust. It's ironic,
what you now have to pay to see what was once immanent.
Your current's in the gift shop so your artistic eye can't size her up.
Suns set. Atoms swap. Whichever hands hewed these megaliths
from the porphyry, pumice, basalt, held too much memory of lust.



Slightly based on George Szirtes' Busby Berkely in the Soviet Union, and not actually based on any specific ex-grrrrrlfiends at all, no, not one bit so don't go looking. Feedback welcome, comrades.