"Eating hares is an adaptation;
it provides convenient nourishment
and pleasant sensations:
why should I not consume you?"

You have only to look, he said,
into my wide-eyed, whiskered face
to see the adaptation
that would make you human.

I can tell she's been drinking by the discarded lemon skins dripping on the counter.
I clock them at quarter to three, or nine fifteen
and the clock reads ten past twelve, or zero zero one zero on the digital.
There's a dead energy, like watching a spider stand statuesque,
giving you the anticipation of feeling your skin crawl
when its threadbare limbs stroke the polished surface of your wooden floor
and the simultaneous begrudgement that it isn't instead rotting in a bed of decomposing soil.
The windows are unrelenting slabs of black
and the only light is a twisted regurgitation of the scene behind me,
a mocking parallel universe that blocks me from the outside of this hollow house.
I hear laughter lightly bouncing off the back walls
and I see, through God's black humour as it feels a miracle,
a light through the window, bobbing up and down through the movement of some silhouetted poltergeist -
the consumed, burning end of a cigarette.
And the light transfixes me, in all its seductive intoxication
as its products curl gently against the absorbent tissue of my mother's throat,
because it penetrates the darkness outside;
because black silence encloses me as it is pulled backwards
and is then broken when it is rocked forwards and laughter once again stains her nicotine-kissed lips;
because that bobbing light in our shadowed, rotting garden holds more power in that moment than either of us.

"Do you wonder which paths are
severed each time you
make a decision;
do you change the world's vision?"

I am more absorbed, he said,
in how others' paths
intercept me.

but I have to say that the poets here, unknown behind computer screens, inspire me more than the "famous" poets ever have, no matter how many Pulitzer Prizes they've won or books they've sold. They may have guided me to the road of loving poetry but the awesome people here are the fuel that keeps me speeding along it.
So yeah, thanks.

I see you
beneath the robust
rubies that draw
drooling blood to keep
alight, in your skin,
I see you,
peering through lace
lashes across your face
of silk damask,
on the inside the
colours reversed and
I see it, that, every stitch
(every missing thread),
I see you.

Your lips are wet,
****** clean by your tongue
darting insolently,
giving the game away.
Your lips burn red
in angry anticipation
and agitated by the
hot
raw
sting
of your racing breath.
Your eyes are ink,
you spilled it with trembling hands
over your coffee liqueur
irises but
I drank them anyway.

Moth-eaten lace veil -
it unfurls like swan wings
beating back to a better time;
holes pocket sunlight
and age-old folds
mimic the curve of your mouth,
light and dark play
as the lace dances
between my fingers -
inhale
exhale

I am painting birds
in dripping watercolours,
their feathers plush against the page
and lines a vague whisper
lost under those soft, diluted hues.
I am looking, gazing
blank, the white of the paper
tones down the expression of running brush
and my heart fails to miss a single beat.

I glare at the clear and unbroken sky,
its blue a hue that made young girls weep
as they gazed into some unattainable stranger's eye;
I am grass greener than sin
chewed by cattle older than time
and as I sway to any trickling wind
I point accusingly at that clear and unbroken sky
because it shunned away the clouds
with their heavy weeping cargo of life
with their voluptuous bodies that would cushion the chariot
as it stops at ninety degrees from my weeping skin;
I am a bird lost on the canvas
as the backdrop is wiped clean when the chariot thunders past
and, blinking, I gaze helplessly -
for I am as young as this moment -
into the clear and unbroken sky.