Today i viewed multicoloured eggs
And tangled my eyes in a giant grid .
Got angry at the scorpions 
For getting in the photons of my stolen glitter.
I contemplated train  prices and cursed the wiry cellulose
In sugarsnap peas that catches in my throat. 
On a bright pink carpet 
With tiny rectangles we talked 
About words with words.
Then, later on, i thought about whether 
Not saving =
Killing
And wondered why we aren't doing any more. And then 
I closed my eyes 
Because that is what 
Everybody Does.

The arboretum watched her grow:
each day the wood-chipped path
would creep in through lace holes
and scrawl its earthen signature
upon her socks.
When she could walk on her own
the rustling blows tugged
the secrets of the leaves through the hair
she refused to fasten;
so it danced, rebelliously
on her shouldered landscape.
The labelled trees, landmarks to tourists
on the nottinghamshire tree-trail
linked outstretched arms in solidarity
around her when she froze on the bench
to skip the dining hall.
And the birds of paradise
who chirped in minor a lament
of their chicken-wire palace,
understood, when no one else could.

When they drained the lake to search
for a body,
and the parched park cried leaf-crisps
in red and orange, they were warned
from walking alone
and the grass stretches ached for
musing students to sprawl
chatter on its back.

When the time-dust sprinkled a veil
on the rumours and caution,
She appeared
taller, and hand in hand
with a boy.
They tried to decipher
the war memorial and it's message
in foreign symbols
for something to talk about.

The Arboretum has not seen her for
years,
but its crafted script
Is carved like wax in
her mind's journal.

Each day the wood-chipped path
would creep in through lace holes
and scrawl its earthen signature
upon her socks.

Collared wind blew
the secrets of the leaves through a tangle
of whistling hair

The labelled trees, landmarks to tourists
on the nottinghamshire tree-trail
reached to her
when she froze on the bench
to miss the dining hall.

birds of paradise
chirping in a minor lament
of their chicken-wire palace
understood,
only.

when they drained the lake to search
for a body,
and the parched park cried leaf-crisps
in red and orange, they were warned
from walking alone
and the grass stretches ached for
musing students to sprawl
chatter on its back.

then, as seasons cast a veil
on the rumours and caution,
she was
taller, and handed
to a boy.
they deciphered
the war memorial's
foreign symbols
for something to talk about.

When his eyes first fell upon her
She was choosing avocados
In the fruit and vegetable aisle.
And he watched how her thumbs lingered
On the base of the alligator pear
And pressed, maternally.
He feigned interest in the cabbages
Whilst sensing her delicate architecture
Through his peripheral gaze.
He thought that somewhere,
In real or imaginary life,
They would soon bathe together.
And when they did,
They soaked for years in secrets,
Details suffusing through their lips and arms,
Water-hole satisfaction and moonlit deserts
To make them feel they might have transcended cabbages
And be pervading a rhapsodic realm
They forgot their friends watching in greenery,
Subsumed by each-other,
They felt no need
To live in a world of relativity and apples.
Their love-traced sphere tightened around them,
Until it ****** at the edges of their skin
And wailed when they parted.
Tighter it grew, elastic dug into their humid thighs
Contorting their once harmonic bodies
That used to fit like crosswords.
And they each became ugly to the other
As the seconds ingested their perfection
And they bickered like flailing urchins
In a deep sea soiled darkness.
Decisions were made and paroxysms detonated
And they were taken back by their
Fungal friends with tissue offerings
And ethanol.
Time passed, and memories were binned
Periodically on tuesdays
Until neither knew the other
And they would pass in the supermarket
With no more than a quickened gait
And a silent thud in each ribcage.

But neither could buy avocados.

In September, we missed the bus
And walked for miles
In the Cornish rain.

We laughed as it licked every
Square on our bodies
And squelched into our shoes

Turning our socks to flannels.

The asphalt had become beautiful
- it had drunk the sky
And rehearsed the whispers
Of the sea.

We were the only humans in Cornwall
As the sun went down
And you put on your head torch

We climbed through mirrors
Of trees and bends.

When we got back to the cottage
We did a funny dance
To peel free of our clothes.
Then we toasted our bodies
And watched television.

She made a cake
beat with memories, sickly
sweet buttery kisses
and stuffed it into his half
open lips. he stayed frozen,
a plastic figurine
allowed her to smear
coconut icing into his eyes
and pipe a clown smile
into his waxen cheeks.

she covered
the moulded walls in
their stale photographs
recurring  coal eyes
hiding the red
that flashed inside like
a beacon on an emergency
                                 vehicle
his clones all stared at him
willed him to do something
but he sat, numb to her
numb to himself
and decided to go mad.

You are reeling in
an unformed cord
gently tugging yourself into existence
through my longing

Like a grain of sand
in a soil bed
we cannot know
if you'll see a day of light

if you'll bloom
into a million thousand cells
like petals opening up
to a star filled sky

like a universe
which may or may not exist
in light years of time,
will it be, or matter?

there, the air is thicker
it hangs full, like the ladies

all the sadness lived in the
capsules of trapped air in
woollen jumpers left behind

men with their toothless
smiles and shining skin
coax laughter from a steel drum

the market boasts a rainbow
of sarongs, papayas, star fruits
offered in jangling song

it was a medicine.
the coral blooms in the reef
are teeth in a dog's mouth,
guarding.

There’s a pigeon in our chimney
His cooes are like an unreliable
Cuckoo clock-
Your face lights up when he calls,
In recognition - something you can place
In this brand new world
You are still discovering
His voice echoes down the chimney
And lands in our dining room
Whilst you are eating tomatoes
The vibrations are playing tricks on us, as
Though he might just be a metre away
BIRD
you call, and I nod, yes, a pigeon
Which sounds like it might be
A contradiction
So I smile to reassure you
Every time I see your delight
In the everyday
It’s as though I am remembering
Or perhaps discovering?
Just a little each time
What it means to be alive

one year, we will scramble the seasons
so a summer yolk bleeds gold
into our white winter pages

leaving our islands on a plane
we will watch the clouds pull a mottled curtain
between ourselves and our mothers

in a campervan, we will etch lines
into the pale stretch marks of America's belly,
litter mountains with conversation

we will build our own climate with our lover's arms
wind a thread through an atlas cross-stitched
with icicles and sandstorms

we will enter the new year with sepia forearms
a thousand rivers gushing through our heads
stomachs rounded, full of sun

that year, we scrambled the seasons

so a summer yolk bled gold

into our white winter pages



leaving our islands on a plane

we watched the clouds pull a mottled curtain

between ourselves and our mothers 



in a camper van, we etched lines

into the pale stretch marks of America's belly,

littered mountains with conversation 



we built our own climate with our lover's arms

wound a thread through an atlas
cross-stitched 
with icicles and sandstorms



we entered the new year with sepia forearms

a thousand rivers gushing through our heads

stomachs rounded, full of sun

She explained, as she passed him the coffee,
“I just keep dreaming that I am a couch”
His eyebrows lifted,
a smirk played on his lips.
Asked her if it was the couch they were sat on now,
Crushed green velvet and
endearingly hideous.
She glowered, said
She wished he’d take her seriously.
“But your body writhes in curious convulsions,
You fill the cottage with ear piercing screams-
Can it be that bad, being a couch?”

She declared that he would not understand,
Could not see what was worse
than his dreams of combat;
gunshot night terrors
she’d never hear.


He insisted, “explain”. So she told
of the aching void beyond her couch-body.
How paralysed, she would flail vainly
Cushions muffling her hungry screams
of longing for oceanic adventures.
He watched the sun through the sway of the trees,
form a moving lattice upon her shoulders,
Mused of his cravings for their living room
from his bunk at sea.

She watched him, watching her,
and knew,
He’d never understand her couch-dreams.
They sat in silence, holding their coffee,
And accepted their anharmonic lives.

Is it not magical, fantastical, terrible
the way my body expands and contracts
like a peach balloon
the more or less I digest.

If I wind mental stitches through
my oesophagus - my bones call
to the skin,
reel it in. ten million krill
trapped in the suction
of the line of a fisherman.

In gluttony, the same line
spills, the tide swells
and multiplies cells
Lipids blossom and my waistband
leaves a discrete red line of rubble
on the shore.

There are no curtains
At our windows-
Our room opens into the sky street
Of black -
An asphalt continuum
Broken with a glaring street light
That fizzles like a cloud
Into the edges of the sky

One day soon,
We will clothe our windows
And envelope our home in a
Blanket of cosiness
But for now, I enjoy
The nakedness, the vulnerability
Of an open chasm, as though
We are still camping, perhaps,
Under the rockies or in the atachama
Like we used to, can I say when we
Were young?
When inside, I still feel so young as the night
falls,
Or does everybody?

This time, a single breath unbalances  
the silky parachutes
and they float into the hedgerow.

A watch reads seven,
but it stood for the year that
slithered through a broken sand timer.

leaning uncomfortably backwards
on the dentist chair
mouth gaping, strange
thick latex fingers
poke borrower weapons inside
and contort my lips into shapes

would it be easier
if we could excavate all the 
decay in a body
with a drill and replace it
with a shining pearl-cap?

She is eight or nine and she sits
in the playground
on the bench
with the teacher standing a
happy distance
Away and her lunch on her lap
She watches all of the people running
and crawling through legged bridges
to set each other free
and inverting their bodies
so their legs dangle,
confused at their new-found
flight
And she thinks about how
it seems there is a screen
where the
paved slabs meet the grass of fun
and that if she should
press
her face against the divide it should
crackle
the same as the one
At home
and if someone was to sit on the remote
The children would mould into black and white jumping rectangles that shuffle and bump shoulders and hiss.

But there's something inescapable
About this deoxyribose stuff.

As though its winding skelter might secretly
Hold all of fate
In its innocent-looking strands.

when the doll's hair
became so tangled a
wild toothed comb could
not soothe it,
I took the big scissors
in wild frustration
from the drawer in the kitchen
and hacked away at
Lucy's hair like a drunken
maniac.
her duck-speckled
printed eyes
closed their mechanical
lids each jolted snip
and a soft tick ticked
as coarse lashes hit
**** plastic
the more
that fell in chalk white chunks
from one side the more
I extracted from the other
like a wonky scale
until the spilt strands
covering the floor
tumbled tears down my  
fleshed pink cheeks
and I ran away to hide
under the duvet.

You had sand in your hair,
freckles under your eyes
where the sun kissed your face
as I would have liked
I watched your hands as you drove
watched them turn the wheel
not knowing how in seven years
those hands would make me feel.
That they'd be bound by gold
and a solemn vow
to love, to hold, through any how
and that, by then,
our plans would be
entwined together, endlessly.
That we'd have seen the sun
from each hemisphere
balanced on the equator
lived out of a backpack for a year -
that you'd become my home
with your arms as the doors
your eyes as the windows
your feet as the floors.
That we'd bloom together
throughout those years
explore with each-other
our deepest fears.
That one day we'd stand
with our dearest of friends
and make a promise to
make-do and mend -
to patch up our souls
even when we find winter
might creep in and freeze up
and love might seem splintered,
that we'll wait for the spring
and that when the frost thaws
our stream will flow free again
fresher than before.
For now your heart lives within me
I'm keeping it safe
I'll cover it with feathers
of love and of grace.
Those hands that once turned
the wheel of that car
will now hold me through life
on this road that is ours.

we talk to autumn
about his delayed decay;
the truculent end and
tousled beginnings of hibernation.

how did you term the coming
of the razored howls.
will you calm the smothered
pebbles in
chalked glass
or leave them.

what do you say
of the canopies’
demise. fallen
in a big mesh bag
to measure litterfall.

and when door-mice
bite into slumber
where can you hide
as your leafy raindrops
turn to stone.

A mothered voice
was a cloud-drop
in the quarry; she would keep running
with the patterned footsteps of a fool.
needles that glitter become
gold in this abyss.
one licked scar remained
of the two of you-
a day blackberry picking;
when you dried weeps
from the petals and pressed
them in a book.

I carved her face from a pumpkin,
spooned out the flesh to a red bowl
traced out the lines where I wanted
her eyes to be.

I retrieved her heart from a pip
unravelled from the lungs of a satsuma
it was sticky, oozed a milky wine
so I wrapped it in tin foil.

In her sockets I placed half-boiled eggs
sliced down the centre
the yolked irises dripped down
orange turgid cheekbones

When she woke up, the walls shuddered.

rocking the metal pan
side to side, agitate
the sand so swirling
  water
lets gravity push the
worthless sediment
over the edges into the
pool

gravel-dust gathers
momentum
swarming in a circular current
allowing the golden
nuggets to sink to the
base

fingers as feet through
quicksand
explore the grey salt-swamp
cold makes them slow and dumb
soft skin complains as grains
scratch skin a thousand times
toy fingernails clawing


catch a lump, hold it
between
thumb and finger, bulge with
fulfilment as your gobbet
glints beneath its caked mud
set the pan upon rocks
clasping tightly, pull the
stone through the pool,
freeing
it from the clinging dust
  
release it from the depths
of the crocodile water
and the ugly mound of
chalky mud submerged will
be caterpillar to
butterfly, a solid
gold nugget lying fat
on the face of your
soggy outstretched palm.

start with a bucket of dusted gravel
tip into a cold pan, a wriggling jungle of alphabet
gasps.

drown.
rock the pan of words in arms
agitating the line-breaks

the twisting plait of water
spurts the lightweight
sediment over the edge

to a scrap pool of dog-tailed idioms
the rest charges, a collage of schooled fish
the pulse in the rubble sinks

like a dictionary to the base.
ransack the salt-swamp of dazed stanzas
as a malnourished mole

catch a lump, grasp between digits
it twinkles under caked mud.
free it from parasite-adjectives

strain from the crocodile water
a chiseled torso of words in the rock
all along.

at last -
our routines collide;
a daily walk, kiss, sweat,
our letters turned post-its
phone-calls to real life sound waves
bounding home.
The strange comfort
of arguing - knowing you're in the next room
not the next stretch
of foam-etched ocean
away from a 'sorry'


and knowing
it still grows, away from the distance
the aching, the halflife,
it's growing,

maybe more than before.

A glimpse- and rushing
Your fingers rough
But warm as they find the skin  
beneath my hair-
grasp the back of my neck and
we’re embracing through heavy coats:
a sturdy crush to reach our organs,
placate the crave for your trace.

It’s always elation, first.
A squealing burst I stifle-
My brain is jelly in the station.
It’s a stinging cold but I won’t wear gloves
as we walk home and
our united skin blends as our fingertips
grow numb.

I’ll say, “I’ve missed you”
and mean more- only because the words are missing
and it’s easier – less syllables
to say than to explain
how you’re the colour to my scenery;
and without you, my kaleidoscope gives
only grey triangles.

Dip your toes
into receptacle of embellishments

whilst
hoisting your trouser-legs
above your shining ankles thus
preventing traces of
immodesty.

conjure an entire
genus of rhombi
to  think
                                                                              outside of

at interview:
bubble
and dress
in clothes, preferably.

try not to fold your arms or look bored
and always remember
to be someone you are not.

conversing in loops,
you seem content.
they burnt
down your home, I kept a bag
of the special things next to
the door for a time.
Now you live under a centipede's
back, an exoskeleton of notched
houses, with the wrinklies.
your nails
are crinkled like a soil bed ready
for seeds, they lived in water like
soggy tissues, when you were a nurse.
you keep falling now
but they can't pick you up,
like you used to, them.

Kashtanka had lost him on the street
Instinct had stung her mongrel brain
tiny legs had span out of control.
And when she looked back
a grey desert hid her friend,
And had she been human
Tears would have pooled in her
Gummed ducts.
She padded through pavements for dog days as
Umbilical hunger for a scratch behind
Ears pulsed through her vital organs.

Simultaneously, it was ethanol that pulsed
Through Luka's.
And had she known how little
He was thinking of her,
Her tiny canine heart might
Have faltered.

They had played for too long.
The stretching shadows sang in minor
whilst tackling gusts
scratched the colour from his hands
and tugged wire through her clutches.

Their fettered aircrafts swooped
in plunging shifts:
seconds of clouded rhapsody
and cotton screams-
equalled in deflection
and discord.

Their colourful counterparts
climbed higher, twisting
in solar breezes.
They gaped upwards with
tense suggestions
neither knowing
how to sever
their tangled kite-strings.

Knotted Cord

Rebekah- Hebrew, meaning - Captivating; knotted cord. Wife of Isaac in the Old Testament.

I am a knotted cord,
Of chattering reactions,
and alphabetical perceptions
straining to elude me.
A tangle of cerebrum crammed to my cranium
snarled loops that hear light in code,
or see voices through pulsating synapses.

I am a knotted cord,
A grey rope of countless nucleotides;
fashioning my own skintight survival manual
from my own regenerating song.
Rough edged coils of yesses and noes,
Spiraling into collected silence.

I am a knotted cord,
A scrambled array of ambition,
Stitched with the lethargy
of an unraveled thread.

These are the days when
nothing feels like a poem,

when biscuit crumbs
form a cloud in the bottom
of a teacup and you know
what the week will hold,

when april showers
mutate into bath time,
and the trees drip fat drops
that find their way to chill your skin.

When you hear bad news
from no news, and each second
leeches all your hope, one
vertebrae at a time

until at the base of your spine,
you submerge.

you didn't know
the moon leaned drunk in another hemisphere
or that the street-steeped colours would dye your soul

that you'd forget how bread melts
instead of noodles that slide down your throat
after three months
of breakfast.

that beaches would cling
and that children playing football in the dust
would be painted yellow in the echo of a memory

how the crumble of a chocolate cookie
is what you remember about that mirrored sunrise
and pips from a lemon speak  
as you let a crashing waterfall envelope your pale limbs.

didn’t you know you are brave enough
to ride the back of a motorcycle
on seven hundred and sixty two turns
to a jungled hot spring and a wailing band

but on the tip of a domed decision
you’ll crumble into the altitude
with four songs spiralling in your mind.

you didn't know it would finish
and rain speckles of memories onto your tired head
so you’d ache for no mattress
where you once hoped for a shower.

He filled up the bathtub with ink
and told her it was art. She asked how they
should wash. He shrugged his shoulders, and
then he mumbled something about buckets.

She cordoned off the  kitchen,
said he was not allowed in and that she
was conducting experiments
regarding the solidity of limes.

He exploded their duvet so
Feathers pirouetted and flew again.
He said they had found their being.
She said that maybe it was time to leave

He followed her down the street, just
a few steps behind. Watching her hair bounce
upon her shoulders he wondered
what would be the best thing for him to say.

now I see you were chipped from these streets
and your beauty sings like a starling picked from his nest
you don’t belong with us, our sun can’t colour you in
without going over the lines
and our drink will erode the stone beneath your skin
you had better return to your glass city
before you hold too many of our hands
and we pull you into our grey sleep.

She breathes in their shadow-
the terracotta dust sands down her weeping lungs
she curls in silence, tearing.

They have dented her skeleton
enveloped her dreams in a pounding cloak
she crushes her knees with her brow.

In the kaleidoscopic blackness
She dances shapes into her mother’s softened guise
“I am thinking of you”

A crack in the atmosphere barks,
Shooting splinters draw constellations beyond her eyelids
She crawls underneath the table.

She prepares the book to be closed.
Bends back the spine so they will know where she stopped reading
The next half will be different.

It is time
that devours us
In its envelope of becoming
It yearns for our uttermost
Rose-flamed desires
For its own
immortal daybreak.

she lived on the only street
in Rattenberg, the smallest village

in all Austria. because it was all
she knew
and all she loved.

in the summer, she lived in the
kitchen
away from the flies and
the itching glow of the sun

sketching designs of glass crystal
and playing records
her father played from his armchair
when she was young.
the blinds closed, the shadows

of pedestrians drew sloping
templates of bodies large and thin
she guessed their faces and painted
girls with small noses and round chins
and made the men look like him.

her sister, from the neighbour town
called in the winter months, when
Rat Mountain devoured the sun and left
Rattenberg in day-night. she invited her
on walks, said it was not good
for her complexion to live in shadow

unmoved, she
preferred instead to pace the only street
in the welcome midday greyness
and smile quietly
at the pale faces she passed

when plans rumbled of a
contraption of mirrors to steal
the day's shine from her sister's town
she prayed to the moon

he would let them leave her alone
in the shadow of Rat Mountain
a child of the night

the girl who preferred the dark to the light
the lady-moth determined to stay in flight.

she has wound
mental stitches through
her oesophagus so her bones call
to her skin,
reel it in. ten million krill
trapped in the suction
of the line of a fisherman.

Unkulunkulu arose from combusting reeds,
Conjured snaking kalaidoscopes to colour the bony landscape.
He summoned oozing crocodiles,
Mud encrusting their jagged rinds
whilst the newly vomited sun pummels it to solidity.

Then seeds descended from Nzame's hands,
Scattering, he watched the devil strive
to swallow the sun with his eager muzzle,
only thwarted as Kamui’s crow flew down his throat:
Kamui and Aionia chortled smoke as he retched.

Then, the first peoples.
Their frail bodies of earth, chickweed for hair,
Willow spines that would bend when they turned old.
Sandals sprung into leather squirrels,
Tarantulas span cord webs to create the earth-ball,
supported by posts to stop it rolling,
Steadied, it rotates:
a roasting world on a spit.

You're asleep, I think
I can tell by the way your lung contents are squeezed from your nostrils
In ever so slightly a more
Forceful motion than when we lie awake
hiding from each other behind eyelids.
And your recycled air brushes my forehead
And I think dustily of how the same molecules
Dance in my lungs
That have visited yours.

And our skin coloured mountains form scapes
On the expanse of wrinkled bed sheet
And I am dead still
As I try to keep this frozen hug
In a capsuled memory
To recall on one of the nights
You can't make it.

I dipped my hair in the ocean head-first
and a wave gulped me up and washed into my breath.

I chased you with a fistful of sand
but the shore caught you first
and swallowed your feet whole.

as we walked home
the moon tickled the hood of the waves,
lacing them with pearls

and the glowing beetles mimicked the stars
on the cusp of the jungle.

when you call out for me again
and another hot plate of food turns cold
with  each second that I hold you to sleep -
I remember
that I am teaching you what if feels like
to be loved without consequence
and never to accept less from anyone

when you say ‘mama’ and hold out your arms
I remember
I am creating a home in your heart for a hug
that reaches to your soul and warms you from the inside

when you tug at my ankles when I’m making tea
I sigh - but then I remember
that one day you won’t be glued to my hip
and you’ll sit moodily through a meal
desperate to return to your room

when you’re having one of those days
where you need all of me - and it feels like there is nothing left
I remind myself
these are the moments you might not remember
but that will stay etched like a blueprint
and become a part of who you are becoming

So I will read you another story
and I remember
that together, we are writing yours.

We are growing together an album of stars,
of countries, and oceans and freckles and scars,
of songs in new tongues and new airs that we've breathed,
mountains carved with rivers and divergent trees.

There's nowhere we're going and everywhere to be,
We spend days chasing lookouts or swimming in seas,
We learn from the people we meet in the streets,
We fade out our clothes and wear out our feet.

And every time my toes meet new earth,
and I discover a new corner of the universe,
I glance back behind me and your eyes see it too:
Nowhere is everywhere when I'm with you.

in art lessons, glue stuck to fingers,
a double skin sunken into
the contours of their tips.
it felt like touching somebody else's thumb,
an imposter branching from my palm

each time you left, I coated
my ribcage in PVA. There's
a gap now, between my chest
and my mouth

I'm searching for the edge, to peel
back the film
strand by strand &
shed my snake skin

she swims around me, curling through veins
in a roller-coaster cart. eyelids slowly
opening to existence,
my own miniature ghost

she has your toes. finds a fold
in my skin and follows the line westwards
walks a tightrope with your balance
and my echoing laughter.

they said it was in my mind,
that I gave birth.

one morning, Jack awoke with a distinct feeling
that something was not quite right.
as he peeled his eyes from a crusty sleep
his suspicions were further aroused by a marked loss
of sight from his right eye
as though he was peering through
a thick charcoal jungle
he clutched his hand towards his face
and was alarmed to find
a rather substantial lock of hairs
protruding from his right eyebrow.
wondering if perhaps he might
still be in a world of waking dreams
where one couldn’t really trust one’s intuitions,
he wandered over to the light switch,
flicked it on/off a couple of times.
having reached the conclusion that
he was definitely not dreaming,
and that his retinas
(or his left one, at least)
were definitely receptive to fluctuating light levels
he made his way to the bathroom
to inspect his face, with one hand
bemusedly fondling his recently grown eye-brow fringe.
in the bathroom he stumbled
across his wife sitting on the toilet.
on catching sight of her hairy husband,
she let out a deranged scream.
"darling, you'll alarm the neighbours" said Jack.
but his wife, who did not seem
to be sufficiently worried about
alarming the neighbours,
or anyone in her resident universe
continued to make strange warbling noises.
so, Jack instead decided to study
his growth in the kitchen sink.
although not made from
exemplary reflective material,
the sink was able to confirm
his impression that his right eyebrow had,
overnight, been subject to an alarming rate of growth.  
his wife appeared in the doorway.
“I’m sorry for screaming.
it was only because I thought you were a pirate”
she said. and though he knew
that this was just one in many
of a long string of inter-marital lies
that bounced between them,
he let it pass. a decision having
been decided upon in perhaps
not the most democratic manner possible,
Jack's wife fetched the kitchen scissors
from the drawer by the dishwasher.
as she snipped away, chunks of black
fell soft like feathers from sunburnt wings
and landed on the Lino.
Jack felt inexplicably sad.
they went off to work as usual,
and no one noticed
the jagged edge of his once pirated-eyebrow.

You haven't looked back for weeks.
As though you've forgotten how
Your life lines are straining through my palms
Up, you're reaching, pupils fixed on Pluto

I haven't dotted your mind
Or crossed your dreams
Though
- the rope hooked to your stomach
Dangles in my fists.

You haven't looked back for weeks.
As though you've forgotten how
Your life lines are straining through my palms
Up, you're reaching, pupils fixed on Pluto

I watch your hands bite
To a hold out of their reach.
Your hungry fingers
With their goal set to the clouds.

You chalk your grip
And the white dust trickles-
Spirals though the space between us
And lands on my sweater.

I haven't dotted your mind
Or crossed your dreams
Though
- the rope hooked to your stomach
Dangles in my fists.