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, 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 rear, 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.

A pack of pipe cleaners expertly twist into
Some itching bouquet of flowers
How can you blush just at the view
Of rosy strangers that eschew you

Being far away as a vacation destination
Locked in a fridge magnet, where for weeks
Summer heat like aftosa
Spread over your butter-yellow cheeks

Drops of pool-blue in a filthy ravine
Poorly polished toes bristle
Abjectly against a palette of olive-skinned
Limbs closing in like shingles on a roof

Plucking pestilent hairs from your nostril
Can make you feel important for years
The hearing aid wolf-whistles once
As you explode into tears

LEAVING    /    HOME
----------------------------------
Can’t believe / I’ll possibly get used to

Your aversion; / This treatment, or feeling

I’ve known all / Too well; of

Your negligence, & more, / Your delicacy,

With which I used to coexist —/ It is

Unimaginable, yet / Something more

Real / Than I’ve ever seen.

Your mealy curls are a nest of black ants squashed to death
In bed and drowning
By the hill of sweat between us

How do moist lips running across my own feel
Hegemonic and corroded as machinery

One cigarette to my name –
The last crackling ray of sad brevity I inspire voraciously,
Like a Hail Mary for an epilogue of warmth.
Embrasuring the atmosphere with its release;
She's the grace at the tail of a long day.

A diffident claim of the litre
Of liquid that singes my face. Or
An interjection, on the stiletto-edge of oppression.

The load of your hands flush against
My iliac crests, like reins,
Leads us to no transaction.

There’s a softer spot than the one you spoil through
Licking clean a lifetime's wounds
That hurt with or without you.