It is nothing,
a mordant of the soul,

an elixir, a panacea, a placebo
for my lesions, there in the thistle, grows
our drastic garden of red posies and hyacinths,

such little things, on the verge,
lilting as the decorum begins to bobble
and slump sideways, and murmur,

on Mondays I can swallow the octave
of your absence, tendrils and all,
red quince limbs parting from the deluge

and in its wake, the wreckage
of black pumpkins and purple corn, hanging
pendulum at our door,

the Autumn lights summon a lavish song to harvest,
thirty seven colours in the brocade you gift me,
tangled and heavy the years upon my bones

begin to spur and flower
into cunning disruptions,
and stratify upon my body like rinds of ricepaper,

vellum for another wish
in the complacent burial of mango flesh,
listen,

as my song liquefies,
drowns you, inundates
each alveoli, and our love

in the swallowing gush, perched,
begins to shudder,
devoured by its symmetry,

stem cells all akimbo
in the shallow pitch of days
bound in a nostrum of wine and liquorice

it is nothing, really,
a mordant for the soul, a tulle filament
twitching in a raincoat of lightning....