Free Verse
Stab
We loved—better
than handled birds,
Hatching our fool’s paradise,
A cardboard city circus.
A flesh and blood box office
Proportions us in clover.
My marimba heartbeat has dared
Foreskin piercings, bulimic audiences.
I’ve done it all
With knife-lobbing clowns like you.
Lightning-hooped I am a throw back,
Ghetto-centric mannequin.
I don’t want to kick velvet.
No more.
Staff Change At
Watching You Space Station
The mission harps on
shift after shift.
We squeezed and hooked bomb-proof satellites
up keeping the subverts in theatre.
Spinning in mid-stream electrons
we forestream a zoom to the autochef.
Yep, we snorkeled zero gravity.
I gasped,
unsteadying synthetic prop ribs.
The safety harness
was a snare of wadding cables.
In pixels
tortuous screw-worms, parallaxed galaxies.
The
Star-Spangled Spanner
We have fire-balled
the light,
sapped and mined the after age
(twinkle) The Cosmic Star Temple
has a paean
for the straightforwardness of blue
interned by the smouldering diamond.
Technicians has tasked statistical mechanics
to autopsy the Astro Son.
We peered into The White House last month.
Sterile
Surfaces
Away from the
lab-bench’s proving ground
the naked eye’s lame.
The moon’s heart
in an impulse swirls.
Triple-check—it’s
far off,
wide of the mark
of swabbed feelings.
If the love-gene’s spliced
there’ll be a syringe
in the throat,
a hitch to swallow
like fish-scaled GM apples
or the troublesome underbreath
of Dolly, the sheep.
Stunted
Off guard our hands
Dekinked to twiddle
Expose warmth, skin to fingers.
But you’re heart’s ectopic, fugitive
In an Action Man’s air-pocket
Of a body.
I’m self-referenced thunder,
A porcelain doll’s unsound mind.
Sultana
(summer) Narrowing
the gap to his birthday suit
He worships Ra,
Arms open to every radioactive wavelength
In the dusty sky.
(winter) Chilblain-bound his grey haired body stands aghast
Humbled by five vein-knits of wool
Alighted, stooled at the gas radiator.
See his paper-moon curtains,
His lone safe-hope’s a painted sun
Unwarming on the wall.
