Once I knew a spider
wore Doc Martens on his feet,
eight holes on eight hairy legs
he wasn't too discrete.

He rode a lengthy shadow
while he stomped around the floor
this micro “muy macho”
unabashedly cocksure

I trapped him in a glass one night
And told him at the door
“My wife she doesn't like you
don’t you come around no more”

But spiders rarely listen
and ignoring my request
next evening he returned once more
our octo-booted guest

each schoolboy used to know the saw
laid deep in tracts of Danish lore

Forkbeards pious son and heir
Cnut the great, konungr,

his throne set to the boiling awe
somewhere along a Hampshire shore

but was it somewhat further north
he faced down scorned Ægir’s bore

his person kissed by Trisantona
upon her banks at Gainsborough

I dreamed of Frida Kahlo
"yo era ella amante"
pure, paupered prince to her primal queen
yet still I hollowed a carnal niche into the midst
of one perdurable, lurid " noche de los muertos"
and fingered the lachrymose from her lacerations
counting prurient  time in a piercing nine of
perennial persecution before I wore her pelt
to lay me down in her sanguinary glow

at 3AM the taste makes sense
your flavour gently
formless, yet;
clap inwards, roam safely now

for, two weeks gone, August died
once the sky mill's lights came crashing down
a sunless ****** ably refined by the opulent gunshot
whence your neck, once slim as a bottle's kiln poured plume,
yielded crackling splinters and a bully ragged tie

how quickly the lips of entrapment ****** your memory
the venerable address of a cruel decay, corked
and crucified over willow wrought applause

the unsecured dregs of my dreams drag themselves,
desecrated, yet still breathing, into
a barren sensibility of service
to so sadistic a cheer

you identify yourself as a counterpoint to heat
burning tissues and tighter crosses,
laid across your stretched stomach
while the flirt aperture fades to a crumbed splice

I agreed to outlive my extinction
so long as you willed a heaven fish wriggle free
from the pressed seawater and shrink my temptation

and that beast, like every other, had a treasonous heart
once it knew the single human truth, the martyrs glee for murderous poetry,
where biology cascades dominion
into the thrice strangled terror of life

punctuality suckles a speedy affiliation
with wakeful limbs, christened of an inferior exception
some days I might touch upon a suitably plain persistence
through a righteous soliloquy,
an instance, steeped in harmonic fear,
where music can no longer buy sleep but ****** gestures imagine a time
when oxygen will not consent but leave my lungs,
scabbed,
torn
then will come the difficult hello
for whisky rarely clears the mind
of smoky memories in slowed down time
more so while you still live in the hole
I drank into the side of my jaw
eternity
it seems so vague,
spacious yet thimble sized
whilst nature frowns,
cured,
withered and ferrous
noting the unobserved,
even as the militant dynamic
of every unendurable star fingers forever

doppio espresso
and 100mg of ℞ potassium
bring the equilibrium
I have been advised
against
long enough
for the insect hum to become
coherent and show me
a pathway to the moon
but in its miserly light
I can’t tell
if it’s half empty or full

remember those  nights
we   placed hooks  in  our  eyes?

waiting in our  sleep
to catch  the  white tailed lies
that  swam inside our bed

do  you  remember those nights?

we   should, instead,  have  walked
the  chrome stacked  streets
that  rolled like silver  eels
amongst stub ends
sailing on tarry  keels

in that  vanishing space between
the  night -clubs gaudy  hush
and  a  needful capital morning rush

before the  coffee,
before the  bread,
before the  morning headlines
but  we   chose  hooks

do  you  remember?