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 compress
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

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 ***** 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 – a
Last crackling ray of sad brevity, inspired 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,
Like the load of hands, flush against my iliac crests, like reins.
Not leading to any transaction
Through licking clean the wounds of a lifetime
That hurt with or without you.
(There’s a softer spot than the one you spoil for yourself.)

Her prized pink nose is fatty as an almond,
Yet it hardly hides the bone,
Allowing it to snap as giddily as a wafer.
As she races traffic, the waving flags turn the
Blinding white of a hot gun barrel.

What audacity's in that self-expression
But begging to be recalled beyond a crumpled chassis;
What power’s in the craft of self-destruction
Debased by something as soft as sympathy?
Her redemption and own enlightenment only
Lives through mockery. A natural disaster is her name

For impotence, a gripping horror;
Inexorably image-perverting, like
The ashes of the ******* ancient in Pompeii –
There are no do-overs for dumb *****.

“Don’t make fun of my night out.”

Be good for the all-knowing overhead light, the nascent
Hole in the sky – the aperture of a camera with a stuttering flash
For any cheek turned the wrong way. Must

Be good to be impervious to the shake of our big hands,
Like snakes caught in their own tail; to be
Impersonal as a hairpiece on the skull, flapping against the amygdala
With unimaginable force, like a door-knocker.

Answer in a ridiculous costume to insult the salesmen of sobriety,
Scuttling like roaches, whispering jokes to break one’s heart.
They sting like thumbtacks from below the knee.

I have witnessed unsolicited exposures
And revisited old faults without closure –
This painted ceiling, slowly stripping off its finishing
To bare its defects, begets nostalgia over

How your name is still a byword for frustration,
Shelved within my innermost synapses;
Like a dog-eared page in an Asian
**** magazine, sound & stiff as an equation.

Pin ***** beneath your valley of ribs.
Your mousy heart beats
Endlessly and namelessly as static. What
Used to be swollen with purpose, constipated
With pride, greasy and blistered as a cocktail sausage,
Is now an old wound; it needs a poultice,
A placeholder of semantics
For the palms praying to the peerless sky,
A paperweight for that
Headless neck. You used to be pedantic.
Now ease is the strangest feeling;  born of the dailiness of splitting hairs
Between us, over and
Over.

Numb under mine, your crossed arms
Frame my grave in a way that seems sacramental,
To be left barren too of hope for you. Not fair to
Create it out of nothing, like some ****** pregnancy.
If God won’t come to hold me down, I’ll go to him and start
Over

While you stay curled up by the window like a vegetable.
Time makes cautionary tales of lucent billboards that brand the street
Infected by moths numerous as ****.
Subdued and flickering out, they don’t concern me anymore; now I
Contemplate cleft-lipped fractures in the concrete
Cracking seedy smiles at me, and grow quietly dim as understanding takes
Over.

You are well-acquainted with the sight of
Columns of apartments like pillboxes,
Naked as ****** once they’ve been
Emptied out with a heavy hand.
Your touch brings with it separation-
A million cells deriding me between our skin.

My resentment is misdirected as the traffic tonight, and
The world made my helpless victim for
Allowing me love, even letting me leave
Too many red-stained kisses on your
Clean headboard, turned jaundiced by the evening.
Your scent rises like a note in the sanctity
Of my ***** laundry.

Flesh pulls my soul from its core
With every fall of the sun’s breast.
I am a thief of its radiance,
Breathlessly clamoring for an insipid warmth-
I like roses, even though they smell like the bitter dirt.

I partake in the shedding of skin like a diaphanous veil
For all to witness my soft underbelly.
The first acceptance is sycophantic-
Fathers’ lust and mothers’ panic
Are wed in the same vein. This is my resignation to
A marriage as ancient as

The first rejection-
Desire, a hunger that abandons
My parasite of a resolve. My mind’s affection
Warped my size beyond its threshold, too dormant to digest
Love.

Isn’t feeling chagrin cruel?
I’ve learnt it from a life’s refusal
To crawl out of my glass house.
I like roses, even though they smell like the bitter dirt.

You correspond to the night.
Like an angel with gray wings, effacing
The stage of my prayers in tongue- a perjury of
Mine lesser than yours.
Which is a forgiveness, swaddled in linen sheets
Offering no warmth.

Mascara delineates 100 filaments
To exalt your image in my eye.
The copy left a shallow impression
And an afterthought of indelible darkness.
These tears that stain are a borrowed black;
100 claws that catch my skin in your shadow. Faith ends with me

On my knees, conjuring you
Through dreams which evaporate when
Distilled by light. Is it weightless?
The sun injures me with attention.
Day breaks like glass;
Coming over me at great altitude,
You correspond to the morning.