Untitled

Behold the Sirens,
Those faceless throats,
Singing with iron spite!

I will grasp my yearning eyelids,
Hold the truth to my tender ears,
Lest my senses be blacked out by glorious lust,

For then would I forever be close to the dust,
Forever embracing the tide with nothing left to dress me.

But see how their skin becomes a haze
In the brutal shine of their distorted nails!

I beg you, Sirens, retreat with your bones
Or I'll fall down blind.

You'll swarm upon me
And all at once
I'll implode.

You and Your Dog

I don't know if it ever occurred to you
that your dog was keeping you alive.

I'm not talking
about your heart or your arteries
or your legs or your lungs.

There was a hill of slate
where you said we could find fossils
so we went scrambling through the stones,
scavenging in crevices for ammonites,
sliding in the sludge and the rain
and came back with nothing.

(Except a muddy dog.)

There was a half-buried Victorian dump
where your dog would help us to dig.
We collected dirty fragments of porcelain,
pieced together the Blue Willow.
You pretended to smoke from cracked clay pipes;
I drank air from broken bottles with glass marble stoppers.
We found a spoutless teapot,
took it home, filled it with dried flowers,
put it on a shelf.

But one day

You threw away the teapot
because it clashed with your Wedgewood.
The old bottles with their stoppers
were no good for your Moet and Chandon.
You gave up the clay pipes
for Montecristo cigars.

And what's the use in searching for fossils
when you find yourself amongst rich dinosaurs?

Now the past is overgrown
and our paths have grown apart.

You have grown far too tall
to notice that your new Berluti shoes
have trampled over broken old teapots

broken old us

and that part of you

that died with your dog.

The Order of the Directors of State Boundaries

Society becomes rather special,
And the air quite threatening,
When 8-year-olds become master astronauts
Who devise secret science letters between themselves
While socializing in Vegas amongst old guitarists
And cultural pillars of anonymous white people
In some room in Hotel Rio.
Then joint nations and oak leaf empires
Give out missiles as badges
And drop pendulous burning fish on our hamlets.
They strike the deep purple sea like spears
And buds of lightning weave through the cracks
While socialists fight in fissures over blood and debt.

The Apocalypse Will Come in Time

Father was sleeping with an angel.
He was nurturing her bruises, inhaling the hope from her hair.
He said that she looked beautiful beneath her halo.
He soothed the spaces with lies
While she staged desire and wished for the floor.
She left her tongue at the door;
Louder voices have come from ashes.

And now the angel closes the wires on her dress.
She leaves without her polluted dreams,
Without the corruption of a second kiss.
That rising fever may be a star buried in her veins,
A denial of her wasted glow.
But Father can't embrace the light, endlessly long gone.
He has nothing, save the things he battered and displaced.

His flock heard him say a pure requiem yesterday.
Now his colourful display of prayers boils in their closed eyes.
Now they bargain for reheated grace in a frail velvet closet.
Now we shall bring the mirror to blind them,
Blind them with this pale and lonesome truth:
That they have come closer to chaos and decay,
The ones who sheepishly looked away.

Graveyard Planet

"To die one's own death has always been a freedom subject to loss by accident, but in Planet Auschwitz . . . the loss of [this freedom] was made essential, and its survival accidental."
- Emil Fackenheim, "The Holocaust and Philosophy."
The Journal of Philosophy, Volume 82, Issue 10, Eighty-Second Annual Meeting American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division (Oct. 1985), p511

in an unframed nightmare painting
i witnessed the chimneys in motion
lonely sweet-burning castles
making scarce the dear blue sky

where mindless walkers swayed
under rusting pendulums

on this graveyard planet

where countless hordes of spindled limbs
danced at the end of a tightrope

beneath the hissing and barking guards
i heard an orchestra of ghouls
playing their dead chords
in an endless nightmare concerto

Paperweight!

'Fuck' cross stitch (for a coaster)...

...but look how pretty it is!

Playing around with tattoo flash art...

My sewing kit...

The unfinished cross stitch project at the back says 'oh...shit'. It's going to be a coaster someday, if I ever finish it...

(That's my cat, Macy.)