There is romance found in ingratiation – chaste doilies suffering implicitly beneath the burden of unclean bowls. Here’s one, illuminated as a pinball machine when you rattle that dung-brown stain about its shrivelled axis. Above its shaky pupil, a cataract of steam squirms about in unalarming routine.

So many nights I adulterated merely for lack of better days were given credence by the gimpy sun, turned away with its blouse undone, and ****** back to the chalkboard. Somewhere along the past few days I must have become bedridden, indentured to prickly sponge baths by that ****** tongue.

How I’d like to stay sedated now – another day of inoculation becoming an alibi for the adhesion of this numbness inducted to the soft-boiled meat of my temples, combing out my shoulder blades, running down my legs.

Stupidly I almost feel a sense of superiority in not learning any faces among the indiscrete convoys of whitish heads popping in now and then, with the subordinate arousal of stiff knuckles, or other things compressed inward by their own come-hither fervor.

“You talk too much, you worry me to death…”

Before her, I was
Tipped over in the doorway,
South-facing as a loose tooth
Plucked from sore gums.

There is a affinity shared with her
In this gloomy dark hair, like graphite
Fingerprints wiped on my featureless cranium; and how

Before me, she was
Broken as the noon's fever. Her boyish
Hips fanning out, abdicating space
For my tiny anemone palms to measure their wingspan.

There is a flood of adrenaline
Simmering the film in paragoric dampness; and
Suspending us in a jellylike expectancy.

It’s time to go when the miasma of guilt hanging in the corner
Stinks of apologies like a bed-wetting toddler.
Here’s an excuse, with the urgency of that pink slip
Inside your blind, seeking mouth,

Deluged with liquor to put out
The horrid taste of my own. I always overstayed my welcome before,
Polishing my picket fence teeth with the grease on your shoe;
Talking of future pets and bigger yards
Of weeds hiked up the knee like a chevron skirt
To warm the stake driven through my core.

Precocious baby, tempered to a china-blue hue, you
Had not been ripe as a morning glory
Before riots mongered in the plasma of your shapeless head.

Haunting as an omen, you
Had drank from the cord of my cold-blooded artery.
Turned my insides out like a shimmering dime bag
As we fell to the earth.

Bruises on the bulbs of his hairy lymph nodes,
Lucid and bothersome as soiled clothes –
What could a Spanish fly have to share
With that grovelling man over there?
Both are shaken and stirred tonight,
Smouldering in narcotic amber light.

Order, order; his pulp reflection wants
****** thrown at his better half –
Drain the abscess, help it depress
In a savoury bubble bath.

An acned pixie nicks kitty-licks
From her 6-inch flute of wine,
Amidst drags of palo santo
For the sober mind.

Shivering like a slinky, both bygone toys.
Walking down stairs,
Alone or in pairs,
Tons of fun for girls and boys.

Everyone’s a caricature rendered queerly
To anyone under the influence; clearly,
I could be a peddler of all things here –
Waiting on my ultimate compassion, hear:

W.Y.B.M.A.D.I.I.T.Y?

Switzerland in February is a lamb being sheared
So the path to K Kiosk may wear a fleece coat.

Breakfast comes in a box of Lucky Charms
Small as my palm, and
A sleeve of Fox’s party rings to share in silence;
Not out of a desire to eat, but in an analogue of
Unspoken recluse within our rental car.

You look nearly half-born in your ashen flesh,
As if unprepared for the journey,
Having left something behind.

Sitting adjacent to me, your legs are folded bilaterally.
A lawn chair for my handbag.
They jolt as the car growls to life.

Between us, even a stale coffee
Begins to froth with angst, spitting
Faint flecks of cocoa all over the seats.
Reaching over to sedate it, I gently imprint with coral lipstick
A heart upon its gill.
The driver mutters like an exasperated babysitter.

Picture specks of menthol green, clouded by frost, like a mood ring.
If you’d looked out the window just then, you’d have caught
A lone bird pawing offhandedly at the
Blistered surface of Lake Zurich.  

At 10,000 kilometres away from home, I am unmoored,
Yet not away long enough to send
Rambling, sentimental postcards back.

The cleave of your thigh is perfumed by something I am allergic to.
A large hit to my solar plexus for going down on you!

Custard-blonde tendrils dangle before me
Like a field of yaks, grazing tentatively upon your ****** back.
Lately they have been tumbling out spectacularly in clumps of fibre,
Forming barley or shellac-colored runes in the shower.

While cleaning the drain, mistakenly I
Touched a pale Daddy-long-legs that was crushed into a polka dot,
And let out a deafening scream
For you to stomp on its itsy-bitsy corpse till your footsoles wore brick red fishnets.
Then, left with only seven legs to lift its ***, it’d gone down like a ******.

After gazing into one’s lashless mung bean eyes,
I think I am going mad as the house flies
Who pivot into glass to pass their time,
Self-contained and distended as ostrich eggs