Don’t you worry
too much about me,
being all pelvises
and elbows –
it’s contradicted
by the swell of my hips,
the tiger striped
woven pattern
of my thighs,
the layer of fat
sponging up and down
my midriff.
Sooner or later,
you will find
that the whitewashed
bones holding me up
stand impotent
in their promises
of jutting,
tucked safely away
from harm or passions
in an effigy
of woman.
If I break apart
the consecutive pieces
of a china figurine
I’ll save the segments
in this flesh-bed
of thimbles, rosaries
and watering blood
until time comes
for porcelain slices
to hunk back together
the glue-veined resolution
of the shepherdess’s elegy,
broken hard in the palm
that free-falling china
hasn’t breath for a whistle
whilst anyone is listening:
If, and only if, I break apart
the consecutive pieces
of a china figurine.
The sky collapsed.
How long did you expect it to hold,
Stretched tight as it was?
It pulled over this wing of houses,
Past the temple to the ear;
A rubber holed resistance band
Chafing gum against ankles,
Hauled up over wrists.
Disintegrating droplets
On a gauze-wadded forehead.
This drip-dried celestial sphere
Sweats the pressure
Of ropes and pulleys,
And stretches to the snap back
Of the black hole that gave it substance.
It is amazing
That a chocolate digestive
Lowered into tea,
After a long day
Of margarine scraped too thin
Over cheap white bread
Enacts catharsis.
This womb of water and milk
Calls me the biscuit,
To sink past the breast,
Swooning and sacrificial,
Through wet, hot darkness.
All day, dreaming hard into a pillow
Of hanging branches jerking leather hands
And the flailing limbs of the wind torn willow
By the pond in the park; how it stands
All the folk-prayers that the willow will weep
For another maiden, dead in a boat,
When grave and silent, it knows her asleep
And rested for the first time in years. She floats,
I know from dreaming, with a ring around
Her neck from the hands that encircled her
And blue lungs, turgid, from nearly drowning
Enough times in the storm colours of years
That stretch ahead like the rope of a noose
Always too tightly tied or knotted too loose.
I heard a bird sing.
It sounded like laughter;
Maybe it was a witch on a broomstick
(it was that kind of laugh).
Now,
Everything I’ve ever done
(and ever said) is
congealed around
your thighs,
Every book
I’d said I’d read
(but never read),
a problematic
foetus,
A blinkered world,
Unspoken of.
I bit into your back
so that the jewels of this night’s sleep
could flesh surreal this blackish thunder,
gathering moles under my teeth
to sell (this light) a tabloid paper
sprinkles on a paltry woodcut,
desire and all its buxom cronies
(soft and sensual) (hard and rutting),
solar systems, solar plexus energy
fissions mapped with canine charged precision,
sold, contorted (shaking, aching)
and carelessly rivalling, trivial and
spiralling, hardware conspiring
your black hole.
Suddenly, and –
November comes, leaves are tumbling;
There is ecstasy in the impatience of your marrow,
The rushing of your limbs, the screaming
Of your joints.
The seven scrolls come obsolete,
tumbling from this watery haven
of breaking seals, broken flashlights,
technicolour neon signs that coded,
gorge this quaint simplicity; strangling,
feint these crumbling hours.
