The weather made words loose and combinatoric and repetitive.

Hottest May ever, may be the hottest, tube strike maybe, to be heatstroke,

May is only spring.

The avenue from Queen’s Road was sexual with ferns and bees.

I was fevered to distraction in the library so words repeated themselves:

Never forget that in 1579 E.K. had referred to Edmund Spenser

As a poet who was ‘uncouth, unkiss’d,’

Which were the same words that Chaucer had used,

And that Milton would go on to use. Poetic forefathers, artistic lineages,

I scribbled, trite English degree truisms, but unkiss’d made me think

Sunkissed, and how could the heat not make you think of sex and genealogy?

Overheard redhead in Sainsbury’s chalked her sunburn up to Irish lineage.

Her freckles normally repeat themselves across her face from cheek to cheek

But now have loosened and combined.