It’s time to go when the miasma of guilt hanging in the corner
Stinks of apologies like a bed-wetting toddler.
Here’s an excuse, with the urgency of that pink slip
Inside your blind, seeking mouth,

Deluged with liquor to put out
The horrid taste of my own. I always overstayed my welcome before,
Polishing my picket fence teeth with the grease on your shoe;
Talking of future pets and bigger yards
Of weeds hiked up the knee like a chevron skirt
To warm the stake driven through my core.

Even stronger now. Another year of inoculation
Becomes an alibi for
Boils of syphilis, unalarming and virtuous as stigmata

To me. Might is
Ingrown as roots permeating soft meat. Will is
Yanked off as easily as a lariat of barbed wire
Tangled between unarmed thighs.
Even hardened knuckles bow to
The spongy clenched cache of a throat.

I don't take offense to the acrid smears that remain
Lingering within its four walls. I merely
Squirm like a ****** at the withdrawal of what is

Backward as Venus in retrograde.
There is romance found in ingratiation:
Chaste doilies suffering implicitly,
Beneath the burden of unclean bowls.

Precocious baby, tempered to a china-blue hue, you
Had not been ripe as a morning glory
Before riots mongered in the plasma of your shapeless head.

Haunting as an omen, you
Had drank from the cord of my cold-blooded artery.
Turned my insides out like a shimmering dime bag
As we fell to the earth.

Bruises on the bulbs of his hairy lymph nodes,
Lucid and bothersome as soiled clothes –
What could a Spanish fly have to share
With that grovelling man over there?
Both are shaken and stirred tonight,
Smouldering in narcotic amber light.

Order, order; his pulp reflection wants
****** thrown at his better half –
Drain the abscess, help it compress
In a savoury bubble bath.

An acned pixie nicks kitty-licks
From her 6-inch flute of wine,
Amidst drags of palo santo
For the sober mind.

Shivering like a slinky, both bygone toys.
Walking down stairs,
Alone or in pairs,
Tons of fun for girls and boys.

Everyone’s a caricature rendered queerly
To anyone under the influence; clearly,
I could be a peddler of all things here –
Waiting on my ultimate compassion, hear:

W.Y.B.M.A.D.I.I.T.Y?

Switzerland in February is a lamb being sheared
So the path to K Kiosk may wear a fleece coat.

Breakfast comes in a box of Lucky Charms
Small as my palm, and
A sleeve of Fox’s party rings to share in silence;
Not out of a desire to eat, but in an analogue of
Unspoken recluse within our rental car.

You look nearly half-born in your ashen flesh,
As if unprepared for the journey,
Having left something behind.

Sitting adjacent to me, your legs are folded bilaterally.
A lawn chair for my handbag.
They jolt as the car growls to life.

Between us, even a stale coffee
Begins to froth with angst, spitting
Faint flecks of cocoa all over the seats.
Reaching over to sedate it, I gently imprint with coral lipstick
A heart upon its gill.
The driver mutters like an exasperated babysitter.

Picture specks of menthol green, clouded by frost, like a mood ring.
If you’d looked out the window just then, you’d have caught
A lone bird pawing offhandedly at the
Blistered surface of Lake Zurich.  

At 10,000 kilometres away from home, I am unmoored,
Yet not away long enough to send
Rambling, sentimental postcards back.

The cleave of your thigh is perfumed by something I am allergic to.
A large hit to my solar plexus for going down on you!

Custard-blonde tendrils dangle before me
Like a field of yaks, grazing tentatively upon your ****** back.
Lately they have been tumbling out spectacularly in clumps of fibre,
Forming barley or shellac-colored runes in the shower.

While cleaning the drain, mistakenly I
Touched a pale Daddy-long-legs that was crushed into a polka dot,
And let out a deafening scream
For you to stomp on its itsy-bitsy corpse till your footsoles wore brick red fishnets.
Then, left with only seven legs to lift its ***, it’d gone down like a ******.

After gazing into one’s lashless mung bean eyes,
I think I am going mad as the house flies
Who pivot into glass to pass their time,
Self-contained and distended as ostrich eggs

A pack of pipe cleaners expertly twist into
Some itching bouquet of flowers
How can you blush just at the view
Of rosy strangers that eschew you

Being far away as a vacation destination
Locked in a fridge magnet, where for weeks
Summer heat like aftosa
Spread over your butter-yellow cheeks

Drops of pool-blue in a ***** ravine
Poorly polished toes bristle
Abjectly against a palette of olive-skinned
Limbs closing in like shingles on a roof

Plucking pestilent hairs from your nostril
Can make you feel important for years
The hearing aid wolf-whistles once
As you explode into tears