"cng" poems
this bitter green dawn
does not move the city
that in crisp antiquity
spreads her thighs, her palms
her fingertips licked
with drought and the soft sweet
stink of the night
rubbery skin
flavourless as a leaf;
her armpits and knees
gape with rasping mouths
and the basins of the neck
rugged stretch
striped and on
up the sloping stumbling face
gaunt as concrete
where carts and rickshaws
startle and snort
succulent bulbs part
mechanical and jagged and
through the gutter
sallow eyes watch
cement tunnels
tumble and twist
the taste of thick leather
mossy on their walls
there are feet too
thousand toes
with chipped windows,
stooping they swell, and
there are dry highways
of the calves
where nothing lingers.
it is morn now
the birds gargle
and a thin yellow kite
shivers like a hanged thing
on the spidery scaffold
of an electric tower.
her salty streetlights
stare like iron
in the urinary winds that shoo
crusty litter
in between ******* and crevices
of eyes, sills of the hips
the cracks of the elbows
butter sun scatters
and coats the houses viscid
flies come
torment the quiet awake
her men barge out
hasty and mad
and vehicles shake
a thousand breaths
exit: their CNG sweetness
caking in the nails
and jamming the doors;
pungent liquids churn
and ignite in taut-limbed engines;
now gears tick and click
sweating rancid
and thick
leaking on roads
and roiling canals
gruff huffs and coughs
now the sky is grey
and cool
a cadaver
now loud ears unfurl
bare as banners
and shrill winds
pound hot-metal on skin
—
the bark-wood body
turns
and reveals the moors
of a stoney back
where steel rods
bend
at silly angles
and where they protrude
their same old tang of DC
and the same old
tingling of it
now a sigh escapes
the latex lips
and shutters shudder
over spiced eyes
now all is red
like hot tea on tongue
and the tongue tinkles
with the sounds of the heart
that ripe an onion
pleads to be pulled
out out out
and peeled
layer by layer
until it is none
and now, the familiar viscosity
soothes it again
and it swoons limp
a fat still-born
in the womb
Apr 24, 2022
Apr 24, 2022 at 11:18 AM UTC