Larval and azure
larval and azure, the tracheal glister
conquers the breastbone in boreal daylight
grey as the cinnamon-traders’ horses
whose hooves spark milk from the flinty paths
Doppelgänger
I awoke in the night beside your doppelgänger.
His hands were a conspiracy of insects.
His heart was a murmuring speculum.
The bed was full of non-sequiturs.
I kissed him as if you were me.
His breath was wetter than muslin.
In the morning my bath water was streaming with your angels.
The Reality Binge Trick
The reality binge trick:
In the red Madam attic, the belted child looks like
contamination.
A labyrinthodon stalks the male wetside.
Now repeat your lesson:
snybbkäst, a word for a new type of hooligan.
Bee radiation
Birdsong and aspartame run like packs through arterial
vineyards.
With their mynah birds strung out like torch lights the
henchmen are breaking every sumptuary law.
I could milk my fingers like udders. Ladybirds creep through
your moustache.
Your gorgeous Y-incision would pucker beneath me.
We would succumb to bee radiation and fall thickly back into
ashes.
Our hearts would form an archipelago. This planet has two
suns.
The Polymath of Perversity
Trickier than Odysseus with a greasy thumb
Never leaves the house without: keys, mobile, mammal
capsule, broken hand, two spare glass eyes, glandular hinge,
tinderbox
Tracked by tinnitus or hearing aids
Gets down and dirty with the lord of the flies
Non-stop fingering of a gardening attitude
Doubled up and saturnine, face smeared with chlorophyll,
every pore a war zone for trickster gods
At this latitude the morphologies slip their constellations
Onanists look like ships on fire, hermits look like ambulances,
duellists look like phosphenes, and superheroes look like
prehensile scientists
Occipital crick-crack, the mammalian gamble
Shouts gangway, gangway for the stump of your human
Serves a term as supplicant to your armed proboscis
This declaration of love has been tampered with
Handbag
Your swollen octopus is in my handbag.
It’s too big to bite and it’s too wet to suck.
When I stroke its head it cries like a dog.
When I push my fist into its mouth it chokes like a baby.
Walpurgis
Where were you while I was tonguing the aphids
down by the place of fear where agate sparked on the slipway
and cannibals asked for parley from between my syncopated
thighs.
In the house of wax I grooved on rill-bones,
gorged on crow-meat and blindsided the houyhnhnms.
Hounded by airborne alphabets I steered for the land of the
dead.
Sleep tight, necromancer, in this eyeless orbit.
Your rose-petalled lungs make colophonic war games.
Snuggled down in larval splendour, your synapse bone will tell
you your desires.
The teething coral
Ribbonned babies keelhauled under the fleets of Actium
from copper to scree over a molten breastbone
over frozen wine
helpless as milk.
Sugared almonds dissolve just like mummy’s warhorse
blades are untongued, and everyone’s last breath is stolen.
Decoder
polypentacular starflies are pupating between the exhibits
fireworking the orderlies with a golden chrysalis digging stick
rhythmic wasps taste the dark moon under glass on a map of
the coastline
the opening is a ripped tin cobra
its hot syrupy drips
are still undreamt
Daydream addict
What’s it for, all this machinery?
The candied glass ridges blistered my tongue
while I chartered my last unbroken finger.
To perform keyhole surgery at that hour of the morning
I would have needed a popsicle, or one of your earrings.
Batcave or funhouse? Your breath clouds the engine.
Thoughts of you in an iron lung turn me wet and bristly,
like snowdrifts on the balcony, or nitrogen burns on the floor.
Tarzan
I think I left something behind:
a skein of silverfish, a living key to the ignition
of a scarlet-thighed wasp that smells of petrol in the hall.
Sirius flew down nightly to lick marzipan from our fingers
and for several hours afterwards we could understand the
language of corvids,
while the Evening Star exerted its superpowers
and exploded into a fall of morning snow.
