what do we do with all the blood we’ve lost?


and the shattered saucers

leave them

                  fallen

                 purpling, proud

in case you question me again

with the strawberry smarting from your lips



when will we speak of the unborns in your pocket?

and the bruises in my head



our sandals cradled evidence

your water raked away

I'm always intrigued by the chemical ingredients of interracial attraction. This extract from a novel I've been reading fervently was particularly interesting:

"I didn't realise it at first, but I also felt threatened by black women: this was jealousy. A sex-love existed  between white men and black women. This was an old love, as old as the hills around me. For centuries, white men had spread their seed as they pleased, had taken as many of their slave concubines to their beds as they could: blacks, mulattos, women with skin the colour of coffee, cinnamon, muscovado sugar; women the colour of mahogany, so black they were purple. This habit hadn't ceased. The white man still strutted, still behaved as father, oversser: the white man, I suspected, carried a deep carnal longing for the black woman. I saw it, smelled it, felt it, even understood it. But I couldn't compete. And what, just what did black women think of the white man's attentions? What did they say behind his back? I dreaded to think."

Monique Roffey, The White Woman on the Green Bicycle

Encopresis


from the Greek κοπρος [kopros, dung]), also known as paradoxical diarrhoea. this is involuntary fecal soiling in adults and children who have usually already been toilet trained. persons with encopresis often leak stool into their undergarments, sometimes as a result of the perceived pleasure of holding one’s stool in



The music room is emptying

I am beyond noses

in a maroon-banded tie

And busying Miss Something or other with novelty

Self-hypnosis

pallid unties cheek beetroot charms

giddy

keeping cover behind ginger brick

shaping a middle destiny

of an elfin shame



Then my daughter wrings her face for grip

and I erect teacherly

for our first words about its stains

as if all shitty things smell better in time

The Shakespeare



Silence and sips

and seldom swinging doors

the ritual of pint glasses

their pull and their pour



A silver dense carbon with frozen eyes

at its shore,

and lifers - flat or lifeless.

Three unsettling straws



Like fish finger fishing

‘tis morbid, ‘tis blunt

‘tis thoughts for the thoughtless

‘tis true Anne found a lump



The temple. The Vedas

crown of froth of a christ

a coiling of piss rivers

neuro-cells sacrificed



Sacrament dainty

is here, everyfink

bunches of coarse hands

little to drink

Afaf was one hundred and twenty days old when arrested

Damascene Ba’ath enamel extracted her soul stiff

to mine information from a mother and disabled father – rebel minds

fortnight tipped away

parents missing, presumed dead

Afaf’s corpse arrived at her uncle’s Homs house bearing dark torture marks

that smote the imagination to wail hard into the night

When it is the children that turn pavements molten with sacrifice

having chipped their foreheads at the presidential altar

soldiers pounded violet grapes into your silken back

using dogs they found in their hearts, berserk

raucous snarls bit,

inevitable pleas,

as they held you aloft and pitted,

bullet fingertips,

the bastards put in you everything they had

and if they live to witness their own daughters’ gullets hung from iron hooks

then the God of fire is good

God is infinitely beauteous

and we will pelt their bodies with daddy’s shell casings

and survive as jigsaws in this until the grief exhales

when the blowing of prayers is almost enough

and wind ships no pollen

and children have expunged crying at wounds, for us,

or semen is staunchly infanticidal

love the wetting of enemy skulls

and the welded black nipples

kissing men goodnight

from afar



with puckered eyelids

brave flower, you look like you’re sleeping again

Kept envelopes

it was your idea

- to write letters

you saw it somewhere

somewhere someone gave some other a pot of words

and unless you had it too it was unfair

we were fresh as a new page in an age of scared

I was Charlie Bucket

opening with a tear

that first message won me

like a posted pair of undies

smothered me dumb deep inside the unseen

with my tongue creased

and my mind drunk at the beach

or in a ring fumbling for my feet

between each round being sponged down by the priest

at sundown I would reach

into your breath where I’d eat

or take early to slumber

for those nurseries of opium

I tucked hope in them, woke in them

walked every week they came in the slope of them

and at the podium of my pen I pressed

stood undressed

waved at my mess

and declared that every four seconds I think of you…

every four seconds I think of you…

every four seconds I think of you…

each stint with you on the end of my stamp

emptied the bank

scooped the pennies off the floor of my heart

and ended with thanks

you left me just blanks

and I’m firing them at all that followed you out the door

who knows what I’m crouching here for

maybe the ground can shroud me from yours

and you can ask around for your round of applause

find someone as compelled, as astounded by law

to be housed in his core

but I was a coward

I had one last letter to write

but by then I had climbed to the crest of your light

and my confessions that I’d sketch you turned trite

while I rested a second shadow had crept into sight

so I left you that night…

you loved me through little lines that caged that whispered time

when I touched your hand and you gave me your ribs to climb

I’d never discovered a belly I needed more

Mi amor, I drew you pornographic pictures

and it was sweet

and I coloured in your feet

O Lauren, I cannot sleep

it was your idea

- to write letters

to bruise, to blind, to make your memory relentless

to lipstick stain, to stick, to construct an empress,

to bottle, to reign, to paralyse senses

to magnify, to terrify, to adjectivize endless

‘To Lori, I hope you’re smiling J’

Holidays

i can’t be on the phone long

you’ll see They twist every breath and every piano key

so just listen to the last of my voice, stranded

i sleep outside now

in this starry room.

the gunners with us swoon

at the wicked lemon of my thoratic bloom

which are embers of the Infinite

spelling soon

do not ingest what they tell you when they tell you about me

it was never hate

they were never civilians

and the smiles on our dead would have given you too over to the green birds