Free Verse
Pains & Penalties
As
late as it stresses itself
The thinkable ebbs its inborn clutches.
It’s a given that diallings
Loiter unfingered.
Mains-operated veins shocked.
Mortally unflinching worsens that grimace.
Lung-gust souring
Is faintly too much
For the Administration’s deputy
As he discharges your body.
from
the Electric Chair poems
Father Figure
You
tilt
In queasily papal grisliness.
Monitors through consequent years
Can nerve you in pomp
Or reveal those opera-cloaked harebrains
Had no better upstanding than you.
There’s no mortification touching devilry,
It’s your marrow. The Beak’s
Undertaking was you’d fry.
Interminable switches and flags
Are the mundane convictions.
It’s a sickener
To have ever germed.
from
the Electric Chair poems
American Dream
The
plugged-in corpse’s head,
Unnoosed from chunk of neck belt.
Did he size up
Outleaping wastes, ill-turn mockingbirds,
Reproaching contours?
Panic-stricken by a blister beetle
Bolting crouched to the ward-off door.
Quirks in an intuitive jailscape.
Bulldogs eyes impassable.
A viewfinder’s shock snap pries.
One log-book legend’s all that ages.
Undertows shrink in death-blows.
from
the Electric Chair poems
John Waters
With
time to spare until the microscopic tash
You stalked rank Bs at Baltimore drive-ins
Just in perspective abusing binoculars,
Then actioned a charge
Pulling off silver screen atrocities.
Bound-breaking tea bagging degenerates,
Low camp, ravaging, captivating cranks
In eye-catching plights. Overkill exchange of views.
Prompted by unfeigned gore
On the seat of a junkyard’s written off rattletrap
The local boy frames rock bottom.
Dud incorruptibility, bud-nipped gullibility
Puts worn-ragged decorum in the lens.
Felony is Divine; you’ve scooped the gross war.
Marc Almond
…A
gold-dust opening as a stable boy
Infancicipated the camp you’d become–
Floor show sleaze bars, excess not denial
And a crack-up with flamenco guitars…
…Peacockery in wresting make-up,
Southport’s hoop-a-duck, coloured bulbs,
The Prince of Devil’s synthpop throb…
Karl Lagerfeld
As you
loom over a blood-drained ermine bed
Dream of the fading-fast swan in a winged tutu
Turn fabric, well-crafted, real.
Chalk dust hair, ponytail, impassable shades, fan,
You don’t submit pleasingly old dear.
Hackettes shrunk from your opening move revelation.
Critter’s champions bugaboo you plumping for fur
Yet scratch-leap postulations
Unfold to soft-pedalled chic, panache, upfront
class.
