It’s Sunday.
You are collecting rhododendrons
from the front garden with kitchen scissors.
I’m searching for ladybirds–

a new population has sprouted
and each flowerbed crawls
with scarlet beads.
I block their path

with an outstretched palm,
and when they climb aboard
they tickle a spiral around my arms.
we have built them a paradise,

a shoe-box of beetle dreams.
Our favourite is Arabella, who
has one spot out of place,
but we think it makes her more beautiful.

I asked you why you walked with a stick,
and you said that your legs were worn out
from walking the whole of England.

I asked if anything else could wear out,
but you grown-up
smiled and did not answer.

They drove off in the car
and you gave me a smile
and a wink. I had free reign
over the sweetie drawer.

We were infinitely happy
eating Werther’s Originals
and watching Countdown
on your pink velour sofa.

You are possibly the only adult
who understands me. We walk to
the Co-Op and you buy me nail-varnish
and a magazine.

We spend hours in your jewellery box,
each gem has a story.
You drape a coral chain around
my neck and tell me I have fabulous
collar-bones.

We converse in loops,
as though my face triggers
a cassette tape you recorded
eight years ago.

You like the view,
you can see the church spire
and the road is quieter
in the evenings.

You wish that you could still
ride a horse, and
you never learned to drive
because he said you would **** someone.

They tell you not to put
bird food on your balcony
in case of acrobatic rats.
You feed a friendly pigeon in secret.

Your nails are crinkled,
like a soil bed ready for seeds,
they lived in water like soggy tissues
when you were nurse.

Now you live under a centipede's
back, an exoskeleton of notched
houses, with the wrinklies.

You keep falling now, but
it doesn’t seem right
that they can't pick you up,
like you used to, them.

I rotate around you
on a slanted axis that
shows you more of my left side
and less of my scarred eyebrow.

If I were a whale
my phonic lips could sing
the distance away
through an acoustic habitat

but I must rely on outer space
to deliver my love call
in tact - for I cannot shout
loud enough,
I am too human

I am too small
for this love, I can't make
it reach you,
you're too far away.

It scares me that a muscular *****
and repeated rhythmic punches
are the only things keeping you
from being eaten by the ground.

It scares me there will always be
cities I will die without seeing,
always a little more
I could have done.

It scares me that you like to rock climb
and balance three fingers
from a cliff face, four hundred metres
above the ground.

It scares me that when I go to sleep,
I lose eight hours I will never get back.
Sometimes I lie awake
and ******* eyes aching.

It scares me that the world
could consist of electrical activity
raging inside my skull
and I would never know.

I leave behind
a signature constellation of half scraped
blu tack smattered across the walls

a scrawl in braille to the shell's
next inhabitant: life is out there

I was here, living
I drew a picture of an elephant
for no real reason

I didn't follow the news enough
and skimmed books like stones

I persuaded three friends to beam
from a glossy page at a birthday party,
I cut a cottage from a magazine and
tacked it with a daydream

I hid from the clocks
and watched pounds stick then fall
stick then fall

I lived in this room,
now it's your turn

I love you,
Eternally and really, really.
But somewhere on the way out of
Our message history
And between my lips it got lost
In a translucent bubbled tangle
Of instruction and expectation
And I accidentally
Made it seem like
Hate.

Nigredo
Crawl to your calignous cave, where
The carbon walls will encroach your gray matter.
Choke on the ebb of your gnarled reason. Left imploring,
You will breathe the expanse, planets will taunt you.
Negligible, your ego will dissipate,
For you do not matter, are not matter, will not matter.
You will take the cathartic dragon,
Purge the soot from its gaping nostrils.
Shadows will multiply and thunder your eyeballs
Quick silver tears will swarm your porcelain peel.
So below, As above.


Albedo
I erupted from my candescent pool, where
The ivory baubles pirouetted in the cerulean sky,
Stimulated faith, insanity, rhapsody.
My unblemished chalk fingertips traced star-letters,
“I do mind, am mind, will mind.”
Bathing in this serene elation,
I released the congested swallows,
Scattered feathers upon the wasteland.
As above, So below.


Rubedo**
Soon will be a crippling inundation of crimson diamonds,
That will shred and tear her dusty membrane,
Waning shards will slowly clear and stitches will surface.
Recognition will ignite from her shadows and
Golden love will germinate in the sandy dunes.
Leaves will gather to crunch her toes.
The vitality queen will reign from her throne,
Encrusted with life, stone in hand,
So above, As below.

Sometimes we would make it
down the corridor
to bath-time,
As penguins
Teetering; me, and tall; you.
Your giant feet
Were my stilts as we waddled
Left, right, left
All the way,
To the brass finish line.

gargling laughter pours
through hands and
cloaks fingers in slippery
oil
so they slide helplessly
around the pencil
like a fly creeping up a
car window only
to thud back to the leather,
but

lexicons bloom
like cancerous lilies  
when the gentle flicks
of the black letters kick
a barbed ball into your
lungs.

The Torn Cartwheelers

“In the first place, let me treat of the nature of man and what has happened to it; for the original human nature was not like the present, but different. The sexes were not two as they are now, but originally three in number; there was man, woman, and the union of the two, having a name corresponding to this double nature, which had once a real existence, but is now lost. In the second place, the primeval man was round, his back and sides forming a circle; and he had four hands and four feet, one head with two faces, looking opposite ways, set on a round neck and precisely alike; also four ears, two privy members, and the remainder to correspond. Now the sexes were three, and such as I have described them; because the sun, moon, and earth are three;- and the man was originally the child of the sun, the woman of the earth, and the man-woman of the moon, which is made up of sun and earth, and they were all round and moved round and round: like their parents.”  -- The symposium, Plato

- Back when we were cart-wheelers;
we rolled in unison with braided spines.
A woven chain of muscular fibre;
our interlaced vertebrae
assembled a duality of one.
- Made of moon, we lived as stars.
Invincible wholes, we felt like Gods
Free-wheeling on our myriad limbs,
tumbling through clutching forests,
Basking in our lack of direction.

- We grew arrogant,
Toes tight in our four shoes.
We hungered for dominion, impregnable,
Never conceived of life apart;
how we might be broken.
So we were reckless; scorned Gods.
Bulging with trepidation, they conspired
to put us in place.
- Ripped down the middle, we bled
until roughly stitched with forlorn seams.
Our unfurled marrow now two in place of one;
Female, male, we were earth-scattered.
- Jumbled and lost, we torn cart-wheelers
Were compelled to walk.

- Inconsolable, we wilted,
Unable to function as halves,
we combed the earth for our whole;
Calling vainly on spindle limbs.
- A handful triumphed and united,
Only to drown in euphoria when
their entwined locked bodies, starved,
Yearning only for fusion.

- Now we are accustomed to solitude;
dissipated stitches left tougher skin.
- Until we meet a silhouette of our half
Imperfect but concurring
our jarring zips catch often;
some irreparably,
But we feel again the semblance of solitude,
Crave to be two halves of the moon.

Owls on bicycles might be riding the ridge
on the ceiling which, for now is nameless
but has a concept
that it’s escaped- for an owl somehow balances,
quite  s e r e n e l y  
but this isn’t sleep
it’s a fragment of my brain
falling off and dribbling down the p
                                                                i
                                                            l
                                                                l
                                                              o
                                                            w
into the papers to be glazed over.
Insomniac lust for
memory consolidation
or brain function restoration
(perhaps)
Escape through paralysis

a world you can rule
without lifting a fingernail

A nocturnal paradise the other side of a boundary
I
can’t
break
through.

It was mutation. An  aside that pushed
the boundary and slipped
further than madness  
                                           (Distilled water sank
                                   the cup on the sideboard.)

Necessity prevails,
                                  But
(sister, don't project your ugliness onto me)
It aches. The muscles of normality (the ones that pretend)
                           burn with the acid that used to feel satisfying.

Now, chiffon veils tug away in fingers of
neon sprites              (floating over Naumburg)

A spirit can only be free for so long
before it's locked away.

In my eleventh full moon of freedom,
her soft contours are memories;
scars speaking tales of collisions
like the pale dots sandflies left on our ankles.

a pearl gazing to a thousand faces
how can we breathe like we will remember
teach our feet to paint the paths from the mountains
into a story we won't forget?

On the news, they said she will be blue,
not in colour but occurrence
twice in the month of July.
A blue moon, once in our blue year.

So we stand beneath the open sky;
we watch her rise as the sun sets
and the belt of venus draws a soft lilac curtain
across an aching night - we wonder

will the moon feel the same
from our grey pavements when we walk home
in a yellow-tinged darkness
or is she waning into her final sky?

you look but you don't see me
you see her without looking
you look at me whilst seeing her
you look at me without seeing.

she sees me when she looks at you
she looks at you without seeing
she looks at you, seeing her
she sees me seeing.

I look at him seeing her
I see how it's looking.
I slide out the door without being seen
despite them both looking.

We are gathered here today in a space
cluttered with you and you who I’ve cried and tore
The voices that I’ve played in my auditory canal
When sentience has made me raw.
And our collective limbs have babbled through fields
or roved on roads of tyre
Watched mitosis play with our fingers
So our heads float to bricks that are higher  
We are sewn together by memories
Shooting synapses bounce inbetween brains
The first time she wobbled a milk stone
The pink cardigan left on that train.
We will stretch out our patience to mountains
Nearly burst in our tallies to ten
But there’s always a rope shared between us
Always straw in our symbiotic den.

if we run into each other
fast enough perhaps we’d
collide and fuse
like atoms in the sun.

our lips would melt into one
spark heatwaves
to warm planets, keep
them beating, beating, beating

on. our freckles would inherit
the force of their creator,
turn to sun spots and
spit fireworks for new-year

like dragons. a humble human dream,
we'd be stars, we'd be one.

I tried to turn you into a poem,
to reach my thumb to the crown of your head
and compress you, deflate
and swallow you like the pill.

I never made you into a poem
because you had me pressed to the wall,
and the blinking cursor couldn't swim
in our plastic hugs.

Now I've made you
into a poem, and squashed
three months to thirteen lines
I can fold you up; crumple
you into a sock drawer.

Lips around the base
of a sweetcorn yellow balloon
expanding, turning translucent
its atoms straining, reaching
in a purple attempt to touch fingers
with the next.
Inside, my mirrored breath in lungs
incapacitated
and dry. Sand,
they brought deck chairs and lay
beneath my expanding solar
bubble I am
cultivating, in a gassed
mansion of glass
oblivious. Singed edges
and twisting cells replicating
they laugh in cones and
board planes until there's a

Bellow
And without
Nourishment the balloon
Gulps to die.

He turned us into palm trees, dusty toes
pressed into my inner thigh.
A cold wind of collective breath,
breathing in, breathing out,
pulls me sideways and under
yellow man remains inert, straight-faced.

Then we fold, the room breathes in,
breathes out, my calves whimper.
Toes and fingers pull like magnets
my rope in place of his elastic,
unravels.

Now we are dogs, my paws crawl
to the front of the mat. I think I am
a Labrador, downwards facing,
upwards facing, breathing out
breathing in the stale studio air
I want a walk, or a biscuit
my spine extends, somewhere in my head
I growl.

Yellow man wants us all to be cobras
our spines dissolve, we twist carefully
slide a wave across the desert floor
and swallow him whole.

I still wonder of those whispered words
you latched away
in chains of a tongue
I couldn't reach.

I wonder if they were slippery nothings
to erode my clumsy fences
or denizens of your subconscious
written in a bolder ink

I envied your elegantly robed secrets
as the morning sparks
brought the weathered realisation that
we had waded too far

they don't know like he does how her bottom teeth overlap at the front like boat sails / or that three moles on her thighs are the perfect example of an isosceles triangle / they don't know that when they sleep their feet fit together like bunch of bananas / or that when she traced circles in his hair it made a direct imprint on his soul / that's why they say she's not worth it / that's why he knows they are wrong.