The Lowry Ladies

There you are.
The third time you’ve come to hear me speak:
Obsidian dress, ankle-length,
Like a late Victorian spinster.
Victorian-levels of posh-ness, too;
As convincing as a faux-nineteenth-century New Build,
But at least the architect’s attempted beauty.

Born three months early, you say.
Only child; the siblings kept self-aborting,
Struggled with depression like a preemie with PE,
Science degree, but local:
Nervous to leave home; to be alone?
You’ll date only Englishmen,
Older ones, like me.
From your bag, you reveal four candles
And they if don’t immediately
Get that joke, from The Two Ronnies,
They’re not English enough. Not acceptable,
Not worth your time. Not up to snuff.

I’m old enough to know better,
Yet the others, from the twenty-first century,
Bore me -- Born at term,
No affrays with the obsidian --
As much as my middle-aged life does.

Obsidian gleams before me,
While the granite girls smile past
To domestic work, as though in a Lowry painting
Of some lugubrious Lancashire town.
I’ll come alive through you.
You’ll send me insane as Salvador,
Then I’ll yearn for the Lowry ladies anew.