George Kendrick: The Sex-life of the Deep-sea Fishing Frog

Here is the royal son in a dark wood
Pleading blind Fate to lead him to his princess.
Lone lights pass him in the night like liners.
He came out of the egg, searching.

She, meanwhile, scried the dark for that gift of fortune,
The ideal lover, to blunder into her orbit —
One who would seize like a mole wrench,
Grafting his face into her face or belly.

As all good stories end, this lover found her,
Bit deep and held: faithful for ever, he’s fused
With her vein — and timed, and tuned
To blitz a continent of blind roe:

Clinging ambiguously, vampire and booby,
Drunken with what she drinks, triggered utterly
By the love, the chemistry of his true lady:
They are one, they are truly one — and she is ready.


Published 1975. Deliberately gruesome whimsy. Kendrick was a Yorkshire poet - associated with the "Hull Group" - who disappeared off the map in 1986 when, unpoetically, he converted to Scientology.