LEAVING    /    HOME
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Can’t believe / I’ll possibly get used to

Your aversion; / This treatment, or feeling

I’ve known all / Too well; of

Your negligence, & more, / Your delicacy,

With which I used to coexist —/ It is

Unimaginable, yet / Something more

Real / Than I’ve ever seen.

Your mealy curls are a nest of black ants squashed to death
In bed and drowning
By the hill of sweat between us

How do moist lips running across my own feel
Hegemonic and corroded as machinery

One cigarette to my name – a
Last crackling ray of sad brevity, inspired voraciously
Like a Hail Mary for an epilogue of warmth.
Embrasuring the atmosphere with its release;
She's the grace at the tail of a long day.

A diffident claim of the litre of liquid that singes my face.
Or an interjection, on the stiletto-edge of oppression,
Like the load of hands, flush against my iliac crests, like reins.
Not leading to any transaction
Through licking clean the wounds of a lifetime
That hurt with or without you.
(There’s a softer spot than the one you spoil for yourself.)

Her prized pink nose is fatty as an almond,
Yet it hardly hides the bone,
Allowing it to snap as giddily as a wafer.
As she races traffic, the waving flags turn the
Blinding white of a hot gun barrel.

What audacity's in that self-expression
But begging to be recalled beyond a crumpled chassis;
What power’s in the craft of self-destruction
Debased by something as soft as sympathy?
Her redemption and own enlightenment only
Lives through mockery. A natural disaster is her name

For impotence, a gripping horror;
Inexorably image-perverting, like
The ashes of the ******* ancient in Pompeii –
There are no do-overs for dumb *****.

“Don’t make fun of my night out.”

Be good for the all-knowing overhead light, the nascent
Hole in the sky – the aperture of a camera with a stuttering flash
For any cheek turned the wrong way. Must

Be good to be impervious to the shake of our big hands,
Like snakes caught in their own tail; to be
Impersonal as a hairpiece on the skull, flapping against the amygdala
With unimaginable force, like a door-knocker.

Answer in a ridiculous costume to insult the salesmen of sobriety,
Scuttling like roaches, whispering jokes to break one’s heart.
They sting like thumbtacks from below the knee.

I have witnessed unsolicited exposures
And revisited old faults without closure –
This painted ceiling, slowly stripping off its finishing
To bare its defects, begets nostalgia over

How your name is still a byword for frustration,
Shelved within my innermost synapses;
Like a dog-eared page in an Asian
**** magazine, sound & stiff as an equation.