Thursday 26 July 2012
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
Friday 29 June 2012
"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
Sunday 17 June 2012
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
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
having chipped their foreheads at the presidential altar
as they held you aloft and pitted,
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
Wednesday 2 November 2011
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’
Wednesday 18 May 2011
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