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Anastasia Webb Apr 2014
Slippery tentacles swirl,
overlapping each other
in eagerness,
engulfing,
embracing,
the others.

To be mindless
clay thoughts
clumping, and
separating
with the tide.

Slimy, as seaweed
but smoother, and yet
bumpier
as well.

Slipping, sliding,
simple thoughts of
embrace,
simple arms of the
octopus.
Anastasia Webb Apr 2014
I searched up the hashtag “winter”
and all I found was misery and cold.
Why?
There is a certain beauty in winter.

Like the cold-snap frozenness
and the way your skin shivers
but your blood is warm.
Like the feeling of being on the edge
of something very, very large,
and very, very old.
Like a mountain.

I hope you appreciate it.
There need not be misery
nor cold.
There’s a certain special beauty
in winter. Say it aloud.

There’s a certain special beauty in winter.
Anastasia Webb Apr 2014
Once there was a mad Arabian poet,
he said,
who wrote a Book of Death
and an Unsettling Couplet
and inspired him
in the way that a car-wreck
may inspire a tattooist’s
gruesome designs.

O, the frightening things
that ran through his mind!
So unsettled was he,
so disturbed.
O, the way that they leered
at his table they dined!
So confused were his colleagues,
so perturbed.

God, the things that came creeping
in the early hours of dawn
when the town was asleep
and the moon was forlorn.
How he tossed in his sleep –
Was it sleep? was it real?
There were Things he did see
there were Things he did feel.

Lovecraft, Lovecraft –
my quiet recluse –
why are you so pale?
Pray tell. What phantom-horror
did you see in the night?
Why are you so blue?
Why do you shake? Are you
ill, are you sad, are you
broken in the mind?

But all of the doctors,
the scientists, the friends,
THEY COULD NOT REALISE
the horror, the nightmares,
the Things in the dark.

Escape through your head
through the blood-and-ink stained alleyways
within. Retire to your room
with a pen and an electric light.
Try as you might
not all of your stories with
their horror that some find unspeakable,
others disturbing –
THEY CANNOT EXPRESS
that pure form of fear
your mind feels at the idea
of the mad Arab’s couplet.

*That is not dead which can eternal lie
And with strange aeons, even death may die.
Anastasia Webb Apr 2014
1.
Your specimen:
the cat.
He lies, a stretched out
blob of
whirring, whizzing particles:
You can’t see them –
he can.

2.
His fur is
dried old carpet
left out on a front lawn:
homeless,
floorless;
waiting to be claimed.

3.
His eyes are
blank marbles
flicked by sticky fingers
in a game.
You won them
by cheating,
and stole them but they
turned to mush
in your hands, they
fell through your fingers, and
stained them with purple:
it would not wash off.
It grew:
an omnipresent reminder
trickling down your arms,
pooling at your elbows.

4.
You raise the scalpel:
it is a crescent moon
speckling down to
illicit behaviour
below.

5.
The portraits on the walls
applaud
when you make the first
CUT.
and reveal the
gooey caramel
dripping, circulating, inside.
It sticks to
the blade, forming
clumps of purple
that harden to a
crystallised-honey form.

6.
Later you sleep
with the cat;
he lies on your bed
and purrs
(does he purr?)
and you label the jars:
“Dissection 15”.
Anastasia Webb Apr 2014
This is our love:
we hold it plainly
it is so creamy
it is so smooth.

How we will love
without complaining
like purple straws
and orange fruit.

How we would dream
while sleeping slowly.
How we would laugh
how we would cry.

We smile like moons
with dimples, holey
we are like oysters
we are so shy.

This is our love:
we hold it plainly
within little hands
within petal skies.
Anastasia Webb Apr 2014
Shimmering
Disillusion
in the darkness.

Dancing
Bright lights
Cast tiny speckles
of colour.

Rain drops
on glass panes
Are,
briefly,
Illuminated.

Dew-dropped night
stands
ever-hushed and empty.

Heavy clouds
weigh on sky, in
Anticipation.

Two thousand people sleep
And only one
Watches the lamplight.
Anastasia Webb Apr 2014
january's the year
where mottled greyness
mingles in with a spitting torrent
of teawater
and shyly showing
slowing

a shadowed gold wisp
of cloudy hushedness
settles past broken branches
and scratched identity
mossed-over

past purple stones
upon the leaves of day
and afternoon's
gleaming water shimmer
though fathomed reaches falls
into icy teacup thoughts
through unswept orange light

in shortened shadows
down from a scudded moon
of frog dimples
and imperfect rays
as fire-cold steam
rises to a rapid slip-stream
and crish-crash clouds
hush and sigh:
diminished lightening shock

— The End —