I could stare at your back all day
Your shoulder blades slice
Like doves diving into rice milk
Am I being saccharine?
Only for you, my sweet rabbit

If I pry into your ribboned cage
Would I find a tanghulu heart
Or a hollow space where I’ve stolen it?
I hope it has found a home in my mouth
Despite the high chance of cavity

At least I have you to fill the empty hole between my lips.

Like twin moth wings
Perched atop a sinking pearl
Nectar dripping
A strawberry’s insides peeking
Let me lick those honeysuckle tears clean

A shock of platinum blonde
Sugarspun and flaxen
A braid travelling in axis
Like a swallow in flight
Trapped by a bow

You are pathology incarnate
The sweat on your brow trick of the light
You were the first female
But you are no woman

Just a beast in the shape of a girl
Plucked one year before ripeness
A major at everything
A minor one way

Your eyes betray your true nature
Sharp, louche and depravity reined
Soot-yellow and one dollar green
Some might call it hazel

I call it dirt against your aryan gold hair
If you offered me fruit
I’d force myself to take a bite
So my soul won’t witness my guts feasted in the gutter

Carnivorously carnival-carved cadaver
Stamped under your cigarette-stained heels
Cherry cola chipped out of chapped lips
Cos I didn’t dare take a chockfull

You’re the first girl who has ever touched me
But I’m just the fly on your fruit
Lilith Haefelin
The girl before Eve.

Your body
All angles and edges in place of curves
Your neck
Cinnamon, turmeric and salt
Your skin
Wheat-dark like pages of a well-worn book

Your atlas back
Arched like a cello’s waist
Your elegant fingers
Graze the ivory shell of my ear
Your hollow collarbone
Perched like a sycamore branch

Crawling its way up
My pelvis
My sternum
My throat
Until finally hanahaki springs forth
From my welcoming lips.

Meteors are made of three components
Iron, nickel and silicates
You are made of something simpler
Sea salt, angst and
Tenderness

Yet my fingers always fall short
Of reaching you
But if you did ever let me caress the space
Between us
Not just in our lips

You’d come crashing down
Bursting in a kaleidoscope of flames
Orange and silver sparks flying
And I would still hold on
Even if you take me with you.

7 pm like clockwork
A row of tiny, flat pearl soldiers
Gulped whole
So the dissolving of chalk suffocates the belly
Not tongue

A dozen little tablets
Now down to fraternal twins
Dark circles the colour of a bruise
Now fade away to sand
Washed away by time and sea

Angry red streaks hiss over my skin
On my thighs, my sides, my *******
Now yawn gossamer tiger marks
Proof of my excess
My will to heal

Curling fingers over my proof
Eyes black as charcoal
Glint like the night
When the looking glass
Proudly catches a hint of a smile.