Friday 3 March 2017

Green Light

What a clever trick it is to buy
a pretty thing.
Hear her pennies
Rattle in the tin.
Look at those round
wet eyes. That silver voice.
Hand her your change: your copper
your gold. Hear her
ring with it. Like
change in a till.
Stuff her full.
And when she's nice and round
smash her wide open.
Spend what you find.

Hungry

Spread cold meats on the table.
Keep the warm flesh to yourself.
Salt everything.
Nothing bites harder
than an empty stomach.
Keep yours overfull and aching.

Sleep in wheat fields and grain silos
and water troughs and rice paddies
and kitchen cupboards and rubbish dumps.
Sleep in warm, cosy ovens
or locked back-alley refrigerators.

Sleep when the animals come home
or you'll see what happens to them.

Or lie awake and listen to your belly -
gurgling and churning.
Shrieking like a wild thing.


Or else like the fattest,
softest,
fullest little sheep there ever was.

Drill

Prop gun under one arm,
hard against the skin,
each breath harsh and humid,
out on drill in light rain,
feeling good about some things, feeling earthed –
wet mud sucking like a puppy at a teat.
Blind, hazy satisfaction in it.

Sky like a scrawled kiss on a love note,
already halfway a mistake. Distant,
but fond.

What’s needed is a cage you can wrap yourself in
like a gift. Like a mind.
Tumble into one, out of another.
Rifle humming like a current;
boots buried in soft sand.
This moment.

Then this. 

Snow Queen

Aren’t you a shivery soul?

Sliver in the glass.

Slip of a thing.

What a balloon you are!

Puffed up on hot air,

Beloved of children,

And where you go

You pack that snare of a smile.

And me the perfect pin,

My hot hands pressing you to water


Letting air in.

Triptan

Feeling eyes feeling
hands on your skin
your eyes closed your
breath is like a clock
that over-winds inside
you, those seconds stored
like apple seeds in your gut.
Your mouth is like a tunnel.
Your mouth is where the skin
is thin enough to split. Nothing
fits in your mouth. Your teeth
are an ill-made cage that
your tongue pushes through.
Your feet ache. Your feet are cold
and they ache. Don’t you have nightmares?
Don’t you have cold hands?
Your mouth is mostly blisters.
A ceiling on the world like a doll house

With giant hands piercing through.

Cumulonimbus

This is the electric rain
that stings the skin.
That startles laughter.

Rivers gripping the pavement.
Great black clouds
and her own small mouth opens to catch water –
burning her tongue.
Clothes plastered to skin.

Nimbostratus

The next time she opened her eyes
it was raining
straight and light
from cloud to grey paving;
leaving tiny black circles.

Her skull felt tight:
a fuzzy kind of ache
where the rain came in.

She ran her tongue across her front teeth
and felt that little gap
where the two incisors didn’t quite meet.

She breathed deeply.
The air rushed in
tasting of iron and dead leaves;

it clogged her throat.