A
Drop.

Then it came
Pirouetting.
It came clattering
It came guttering
with furore and fight
with rhythm and rhyme
like many dancing feet.

On steel roofs
On downy pines
and baobabs
and old cracked earth
Pattering and shimmering
drawing dust from dirt
women and men from houses
enshrining the sky with their trembling hands.

I watched you unravel
You sat beside me
And slowly I listened
It with cadence ebbed
As you spat truth after truth
And in your moment of leaving
I loved you more
But was powerless
As you disappeared
Into the night.
And later
I assume,
His embrace.

we spill
out
into the dark
Sanguine moon
watching
your
guiding hands
and mine lead
so softly
to the lily-vellum of your thighs
then
a fuse-spark
a cataclysm of ruffled
skirt
hands on your apocalyptic hips
your lips are rhododendron honey
your lips are codeine
mellifluous and urgent
as the pressing heat of a black summer night.

She held in her hands
a bluebell sky
as it drizzled
out between her fingers
I clasped them
As if to stem the flow
and we carried
those summer days
wherever we went
until each
and
every
drop
      was spent

Coal dust
+
asbestos
+
Silicone
pull J U G U L A R  
straighten larynx
Plug my cord in.
Run:
digitized opalescent sky
Terminate process
heart exe. Cannot be found
reboot reboot reboot
sign up to facebook
sign up to dumb luck
sign up and sign off
C:/prey
C:/pray
C:/pray

that I don’t get swallowed
by this machine
that I don’t get swallowed
by this 01101101 01100001 01100011 01101000 01101001 01101110 01100101

Staggering you stagger out
a trickle tout lager lout
a beer abuser a loser
with morals looser
than the crude jokes you spit in bars
EDL violence
Daily mail intolerance
you dog beater
with talk cheaper
than forgotten junkyard cars
***** dog breath
bereft of what’s left
When you’ve rinsed your words away
alienating while fornicating
with bottle after bottle
day after day.

Were we to pass as strangers in the fray
As lost newspapers, or such fleeting things.
Were we adequate strangers today
Who in the wintered wind may drift.

And were you not of basalt built
A Pillar stacked in greying sea
Weather-worn still weathering
But eroded not to frailty

Were we but strangers today
I could chance upon a greater strength
As like stone you are worn away
By tempests which you fought at length.

While now we wait in whitened rooms
As morphine pump lets out a rasp
I wish I were a basalt being
For I had missed your final gasp.