SALT CIRCLES

How a plant holds tight its circle of original soil

Rifting the new

I can’t separate the roots

As hard as I try to shoot away

There are things buried

In the cold-toed earth beneath me

These ghosts feed me

in ways sunshine couldn’t

The way night-walks and the sight of mushrooms

And men crying does

Bald and unsightly

I buried so many little girls

In my back-garden

Beside cat skeletons

Under a tree where plums swelled and dropped soggy rotten

A part of me doesn’t know how dead-

Who the culprit

Whether I buried them alive

But she did die

She died

Over and over

And she is my cold roots

So many tiny toes

Rows and rows

There are so many new parts of me

So many circles drawn in salt

To exorcise the ghosts of mourning

It’s the old organs that feel wrong in my body

Like my flesh is trying to push my history from me

You can’t kill your own shadow

She scratches with my cat at the back door

She’s waiting at the window

She’s a wolf-child

You hear me?

She’s got such sharp little teeth

Dragon-hands

I love you like my little brother

Tree climber

Dog licker

Nettle-lipped with blackberry kisses

Let’s touch toes

Mine bigger and colder always breaking

I forget that you’re tangible still

The vastest organ

Skin, apple muscles

Extra-fingered collar-bones

Child of myself

Spirit and whole and live and dead

My baby ghost

BEACHED

Bare chested to the sun

I realise my bodies as spheres

In orbit of sensations

Held together by tendons

As snippable as gravitational pulls

 

I’m trying to driftwood each bit of me stripped

Clean by disbelief of morning

Bleach their bones

Their afterlife can still hold warmth

 

The flies are coming for me already

Suckle this satisfaction from my capillaries

I can’t drip-feed happiness but I’m content

To share in my morsels

Like the crumbs the birds dainty picked

from around our sandy toes

Tiny shells

Beaches full of sunbathing ghosts

Blanched by sun and sea

They’re claiming my paleness

Driftwood, shingle

Hallucinations shared

 

What tiny possession have these flies injected me with

What pocket of their own shadow

Itching like larva sacks beneath my skin

This is why I don’t have the strength

To let more than a few at my flesh

I’m more than a blood bag

I’ve my own infestation of shadows

Itching for lemons on the grass

And crescent moon scabs

And rust on stones

FROGSPAWN EULOGY

Sheffield, is this my lump sum?

A pond frogspawn clogged

A water’s surface that had once been live

With squat squirming intentions

Fat arms tight-ballooned with clinging

Bubble-squeezed

An orgy of multiplying

Fleshy lifeboats inflated with

The resolve of toddler fists and gums.

 

What eats frogspawn?

What parasite cataracts its

Foetal pupils?

 

Gelatin shells to squeeze free from.

 

How do I crawl out of a place?

Like this?

All these benches my-body-sized

With strangers’ names

I just want to make like a snowdrop

And lose my head to the earth.

 

I left the window above my sleeping head open

For my night terrors

To escape into your fenced perimeters

and settle at the fountain’s stone base

Under all that dropped copper.

 

Or to wash up like tree-stumps,

Mock-shipwrecks overrun

by many-gilled fungus

Soft-skulled barnacles.

 

They still skulk as darkness

Under the hedges

Where the mice can grip the pips

of nightmare’s tangibility

Between their tiny paws and

Nibble them into

Digestible morsels

 

I will not cry

Over watchful cats

Swallowing flurries of tiny pink paws

With expanded pupils

 

Over lost spawn

Like bubbles popped

Sacks of pupa wriggled from

DRAGGED FROM SKIES

Aright my aerolite fright

Backsplice this with

Parasitic tightness

Wheelright my satellite might

This appetite

For foresight, politeness,

Triteness-  uptight, uprightness

Floodlight my oversight, its incites-

bombsite, alright, dogfight, alright, sick sights-

ALRIGHT! just

Write tonight white

Miss- Over write this, unite us

With a bite.

Such height, lights, might-

Granite and tight.

Respite overflight

BELUGA WOMAN

Behave

Be set and sotted

Be bearable.

Be little, be holden

Be got, be trothed and token

Be ware-

Beacon upon beachhead, berth

Besieged and benevolent

Beast of Burden.

Bent beneath belligerent

Bears with beards, beefcakes.

Belted beyond berserk.

Bestowed upon,

Bereaved, Belaboured

In beehives of bedsheets

By bevved up bedbugs.

Bedevilled, bewitched.

Bellow, bent below.

Be low.

Lower.

Below her

Be wails,

Beggarly wails

Betray her

Beg her

With benedictions

Be light and

Be tide

Beget your belated-

Be bedlam

Bewildering as berries

Befelled as be beetles,

Be loved, be belchy

Behemoth and bellifull-

Bellow your heights.

DRAG

These are crystallised visions

Dancing too close.

Instruments of the deep blue;

Fish hook kisses,

Raging rip-tide tongues.

These lights are an alien sky

Faces fish-eyed,

Scoop music or

Struggling spirits –

Slipping, yolky through florescent fingers –

Into steel-basin chests.

Phosphorous, unbound waves take us

Swaying in its swell of salt.

If we vomit tonight,

It’ll be jellyfish

Blubbery and full of washed up wishes.

Hips swing in rings of infinity

The Steady, instinctual pattern of bees

“Honey” They mouth;

Choked women’s voices

All those messages bottle-necked,

Annexed in Adams apples.

Tribal painted we chant

A song unknown to us

Possessed by the drums and

Something sacrificial,

Something ungendered and primal-

Angels with

Sequined wings exposed

To hungry hands.