november 2020

                               (i)

...and so begins the rise and fall

of all true-born bastards

fatherless, motherless

a wild, feral species

its genes left out in zero gravity

a place where no-one has a name

where everyone

is heir to those psyches

still embedded in the uterus

an asteroid, a moon

a veil of stones

nets of thinning blood

and this clinging imagination

this clinging affiliation to minds

left out in zero gravity

toying with bling and memes

and that one hope

that one, furious smell of sex

that one ancestor

who made bastards of us all...

                   (ii)

...within the ocean's insane magnitude

there is an uneasy, aching secret

a nerve, a mask

an intensity to exist

it is the salt-mother

the emerald mother

the one who constantly and deliberately

squeezes these ovarian moons

out onto the sea-bed

such vast, white globes of conscience

they slowly rise and rise

until they burst at the mind's surface

these raw, disturbing colours

this aching magnitude

of secrets squeezed for their blood

as though somehow the heart's pulse

always belongs somewhere else

mixing and pouring libations

over the earth's emerald soul

over these unclean, uneasy hands...

                    (iii)

...as each egg, each word cracks open

unfailingly I reel backwards

away from the exposed chasm

away from these utterances

flowing down over my hands

widening the stain

clearly they are things that began life

as unintelligible verses

clusters of sound fused together

like some cosmic radius

cutting with its knife deep into the larynx

staining reality

with this immense, dark dementia

perched on my shoulders

that is, even now as I write

dropping its egg-shells into my hair

it too once crawled from the chasm

its many mouths full of malign abandon

of words staining words

the sounds of an everlasting mirage...

                          (iv)

...this space, this inconsolable space

can’t you see it

can’t you feel

the earth’s frozen tears

the glaciers sliding over your skin

can’t you feel

these mountains falling into your mouth

filling your words with stones

do they not speak for you

do they not reveal the dancing mirrors

the cosmic temptations

that truly drive your blood

and this eerie prescience

this inconsolable damnation

are such things even possible

for they seem able to open

and to close the sky at will

but do they really and truly speak for you

these colossal tongues of basalt

these temptations driving your words...