exercise in melodrama
2002/2017, unpublished
We travel down the white box. You’re pushing dreams inside my mouth.
Tasting toxic euphoria. Carpet glue and burning fields. Ambrosia.
It's the Baltic sea in those coves you conceal yet constantly mention.
Deer darting through your hair. Hunters holed-up in hedonistic bramble.
Someone cries a lake of verbosity, but you don't get wet. You're busy
sending memories down river to a more progressive town. Shadows
climb your face like spiders of candlelight, acrobats of orange
and curry yellow make strobing foxtrot, flickering flamenco.
Suddenly you change. Your eyes are fog on an icy mirror, blotting out
the image of someone you wish you’d left behind. The slave ship inside
the bottle. The zombie choir. The words that make other words impossible
when the lamps are out of reach. The lion inside the walrus, where acerbic desire
makes love to a boney hooker. The soiled sheets. The unwashed window panes.
Your fingers on my Kantian buttons. The eightieth plague of soggy locust brains.
Spoiled cinnamon sticks of dynamite. Extruding forms. Dark opinions.
Sharp sideways smiles and weary travellers who cover their carmine hearts
when they see your silhouette. Simple questions: Where or whom are you waltzing to?
The violence of vertical lines.