'Beloved sweet bastard'

Recently I saw TV programme about creating your ideal wedding cake. A woman on the show was obsessed with Havisham and wanted her wedding cake to relate to Havisham's tale...

A tale about a woman that was stood up at the alter and has since spent her days in her wedding dress, bitter and alone.

Not quite what you would want for a wedding cake...

Anyway, I wanted to share Carol Ann Duffy's poem Havisham as I recently came across it again and it is just brilliant:

Beloved sweetheart bastard. Not a day since then
I haven't wished him dead. Prayed for it
so hard I've got dark green pebbles for eyes,
ropes on the back of my hands I could strangle with.

Spinster. I stink and remember. Whole days
in bed cawing Noooooo at the wall; the dress
yellowing, trembling if I open the wardrobe:
the slewed mirror, full-length, her, myself, who did this

to me? Puce curses that are sounds not words.
Some nights better, the lost body over me,
my fluent tongue in its mouth in its ear
then down till I suddenly bite awake. Love's

hate behind a white veil; a red balloon bursting
in my face. Bang. I stabbed at a wedding-cake.
Give me a male-corpse for a long slow honeymoon.
Don't think it's only the heart that b-b-b-breaks.