Still Life

We tread in a duckling row. We tiptoe over sewer pits, and bend left at the samosa shops 
so as not to coat our feathers in oil. On the TV, you want to watch those 
Richard Linklater movies, our answer to sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll is tuition fees 
and plane tickets, paper fruits of four years’ labour 
So that we might become real kids someday.
I don’t know what I’m talking about but I’ll risk 
it for America, the only country in a separate orbit 
I know if we were there, you would have kissed me by now, and I 
would have stopped laughing at your teeth once you began to use them. 
Your thighs smiling behind cotton salwar 
Come to think of it, I don’t know anything about you either. Perhaps we 
will make exceptions of each other too.