Please can I have a man

Please can I have a man who wears corduroy.
Please can I have a man
who knows the names of 100 different roses;
who doesn’t mind my absent-minded rabbits
wandering in and out
as if they own the place,
who makes me creamy curries from fresh lemongrass,

who walks like Belmondo in A Bout de Souffle;
who sticks all my carefully-selected postcards –
sent from exotic cities
he doesn’t expect to come with me to,
but would if I asked, which I will do –
with nobody else’s, up his bedroom wall,
starting with Ivy, the Famous Diving Pig,

whose picture, in action, I bought ten copies of;
who talks like Belmondo too, with lips as smooth
and tightly-packed as chocolate-coated
(melting chocolate) peony buds;
who knows that piling himself drunkenly on top of me
like a duvet stuffed with library books and shopping bags
is very easy: please can I have a man

who is not prepared to do that.
Who is not prepared to say I’m pretty either.
Who, when I come trotting in from the bathroom
like a squealing freshly-scrubbed piglet
that likes nothing better than a binge
of being affectionate and undisciplined and uncomplicated,
opens his arms like a trough for me to dive into.