Excuse Soulja Boy,
He’s here every morning —
Here for the same reason as you,
Would you believe it?
Shrink wrapped voice:
Nice squeaky cling-film
Round the larynx.
A few escapee YOUS!
And CRANKS!
Maybe even an OH!
Very little past that.
But why are you so hushed?
Who’s netted your tongue,
Loosened your cords?
You don’t want to end up
Like him, do you?
No, I thought not.
So say Aaaaaaah,
And let’s see what we can do.
I.
An–, GREEK: without.
–Orexis, GREEK: appetite.
It’s true enough.
I lost my hunger for just about everything:
Love, fun, people.
I hungered only for hunger,
And hunger meant control.
I probably would have dragged
My unfed muscles
Across a mile of
Shattered willow pattern crockery,
Just to hit a calorie deficit.
And what do we see,
Depicted in said fragments?
A father’s consternation, blue.
A sister’s muted concern, white.
Friends smashed, morals smashed,
My feet blooded, a celery heart in each hand.
II.
Writing on the topic proves challenging.
Not emotionally — I’m a certified sharer —
But pragmatically.
My brain’s changed;
I find it hard now to pull on that old suit —
It’s a tight fit.
Oh, tell us!
Won’t you tell us?
The master-poet smiled.
The smile meant no.
He adjourned to the coast to die.
From a clifftop verandah he peered down
At the swash, hoping for a glimpse of Venus,
Birthing on the waves.
He didn’t see her,
And so he lay down to die.
Crowds bubbled to hear The Simile:
Students, professors, aficionados,
Past lovers, fellow poets,
Those who knew the master-poet
As a sardonic cad.
Ahem.
I’m like the tooth fairy,
In that I’m secretly your Dad.
I know the universe works mentally…
I know everything.
Later still,
He came upon a revelation.
We all see it differently.
A summer’s breeze
Is nothing is
One soprano in an Aeolian choir is
God’s breath is
A brotherly flux in air pressure is
Feeling balmy on the skin after
All day sending emails.
More though,
The mind is as malleable as code:
You can edit, you can edit, you can edit.
He realised later that God was not one
For guarantees.
And if not He, then who?
Misery clinched the crannies,
Constant as thought.
He was a wind-up lantern in semi-solid fog;
He scarcely saw his hands as they worried the crank.
As a child, God made him a solemn promise:
Life would be good.
Not in so many words,
But in overstuffed stockings and doting grandparents;
In Milka after school and waterslides in France;
In a vat of cascading Lego bricks
And a familiar hand to flick the bedside lamp;
In imagination– yes, imagination most of all.
The sun did not rise today —
No —
He pounced unannounced,
Shouldering his jealousy
Into the unguarded Earth.
He’d seen, you see,
How she seldom shied
From the lips of the breeze;
H’d noted too
The chiselled moon,
And how he’d come early,
Adorning the blue.
So as long as he might,
He kept his lover in sight,
Stifling her surface
With a cloying love bright.
Her grass he yellowed,
And my skin pinks,
Blushing until, reluctant,
He sinks.
She wanted so bad to be edgy,
To square her rounded mould:
“Adidas for Joules, vaping for baking,”
Was a mantra she to herself told.
Each day in her cap a new feather
(She donned a fresh peak from Ellesse):
MD, EDM, and avid Corbynism
Were the limes from which she squeezed zest.
But one balmy afternoon whilst reading–
That Postmodern bulwark, Infinite Jest–
Her eyelids drooped, her head soon followed,
Until her chin found respite on her breast.
She awoke — oh horror! — to a shapely
Metamorphosis, a most peculiar bodily lesion!
Where once limbs and curves, now
Twelve vertices: enough for a dodecahedron.
Upstairs, I hear it through the walls
A monologue, it seems
Hers pitched so high
That is spears the muffle
His —
I assume it’s a his —
Too low to detect, like a whalegram.
You can hear tears in her throat
But not the words.
Sad, heart, fucking.
Somebody has done this,
Definitely a body;
Only personable cruelty can elicit
Such pinpoint hate,
Not malchance,
Nor thorny fate.
Like ermine in the summertime,
I’ll need you
Six months ago.
Shorter Poems 