I Wanna Be Yours


"I Wanna Be Yours" is a spoken word poem by British poet John Cooper Clarke, on his 1982 album Zip Style Method. The poem was brought to wider audience via an adaptation by Arctic Monkeys on their 2013 album, AM.

Original lyrics

The poetic spoken lyrics recount the love of one person for another, using metaphors around various domestic equipment:

I wanna be your vacuum cleaner

Breathing in your dust

I wanna be your Ford Cortina

I will never rust.

The poem was included in a GCSE English anthology. Clarke re-used the title of the poem for his autobiography published in 2020. In March 2023, The Guardian noted that "if it was previously Britain's favourite wedding poem, it's now quantifiably the world's favourite British poem, full stop".

Arctic Monkeys adaptation

The English rock band Arctic Monkeys brought the poem to a wider audience via an adaptation which appears as the closing track on their 2013 album, AM. The adaptation, produced by James Ford and Ross Orton, contains novel lyrics written by lead singer Alex Turner. It was not released as a single, but the song still gained popularity as part of AM, in May 2025, the recitation reached 3 billion streams on Spotify.

Weekly charts

Chart Peak
position
Greece International 9
India International 2
Ireland 78
Israel 62
Lithuania 20
Malaysia 21
Norway 37
Poland 51
Slovakia 44
Sweden 66

Year-end charts

Chart Position
Brazil Streaming 199
Global 200 56
Poland 47
UK Singles 86

Chart Position
Global 200 49
Portugal 77

Chart Position
Global 200 71