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,
all glue-veined ephemeral
and stand-alone lonely
in the slap-dash resignation
coating the shepherdess’s effigy,
broken hard in the palm
so that free-falling china
hasn’t breath for a whistle
or the capacity for shrieking
whilst anyone is listening:
If, and only if, I break apart
the consecutive pieces
of a china figurine.
Latest
If
Unnamed
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
Chafed 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.
Tea and a Biscuit
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.
Sonnet #1
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
I heard a bird sing.
It sounded like laughter;
Maybe it was a witch on a broomstick
(it was that kind of laugh).
Remembering Old News
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.
Your Black Hole
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.
Bike Ride
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.
On Reflection, 12:49 PM
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.
Missing Cat
The cat hasn’t come home
in seven days and seven nights.
I am concerned.
She took off in the heat wave,
left the tinkling of bells
at home for my ears.
I don’t sleep at night, feeling
fur amongst my toes, catching
her face at the window
with a quizzical expression.
She always looked embarrassed,
standing at the window.
She always wanted thumbs,
that cat, she always wanted thumbs.
My mother thinks that she
is locked in a shed and starving
to death.
She isn’t, but
she’s always wanted thumbs,
that cat, she’s always wanted thumbs.
