Romantasy

 

This is... Romantasy

Laying on top of sheets, like witch piled sticks.

Limbs placed around ritualistically.

Bound like the oath given by a lover's samurai.

 A place of allegory on which to slay the king.

Where dragons are known to dive,

hunting on the wing.

Needle over vinyl on brushed stereo HiFi.

RPM forty-five: "I'm straight I'm queer I'm bi."

There's no such thing as committing original sin.

It's all been done before.

Over ankles, wrists, elongating spills over the floor,

Winter sun runs shadows like cats.

Mint winter air pinking skin in natural habitats.

Like seasons, love is cyclical.

"Love the sinner not the sin", as if they're not reciprocal.

I love you both.

Sinners sinning.

Don't panic, not everything's satanic.

Like walking with a collar doesn't make you a dog.

Or a religious man.

Operating in a society of binary low-key aggression.

Where the weather is important.

Extreme conformation is aspiration.

Fucking... being a man's man is an occupation.

We suspend our belief system that this is living.

To run fingers over the frame of mass delusion.

That this is a scene to be seen in.

That we have armour that is glistening.

So we tie ourselves in sheets and knot the linen.

To be rid of sports leisure fashion.

From feeling these people are Martian.

From being afraid of nothing.

To lay sticky skin to sticky skin.

You and you and me and me.

Sinners Sinning.

Butterfly Exits The Head

You come like a musical note.

You come like the crackle of lit Cuban leaves.

You come like a stab somehow missing an artery.

You come like from a bygone era.

You come like burning sienna.

I beat like a pen on a love letter.

I beat like barefoot on floorboard timber.

I beat like the next sobbed movement of my heart.

I beat like a detonator counter.

I beat like a flicker of burning sienna.

We will fall to our heart-shaped knees.

We will spill over-flowing froth from coffee cups.

We will show our teeth behind full lips to those we want.

We will see God wet with rain.

We will be buried with burning sienna.

Your eyes like changing skies above me.

Your voice like May flowers in a beastly wilderness.

Your body like a river winding through this religious land.

Your lips like lights of home.

Your hair like burning sienna.

Can I squirm like a contented cat under you?

Can I share that across room eyelash glance with you?

Can I watch you dress and buckle your shoes for you?

Can I do anything for you?

Can I come to your burning sienna?

Your unrequited office love can go suck it: you don't get more unreachable love than for the dead

 This is.... Your unrequited office love can go suck it: you don't get more unreachable love than for the dead

As the servant turned by vampire,

I am turned by you.

I adore it.

As the hypodermic pierces flesh,

I am pierced by you.

I adore it.

Lash me to the yardarm, set sail at the brewing storm

And still I will not be as sick as the sickness from which the poem's born.

As the priest prostrates to any deity

I offer myself wholly prone.

My love: temple to your heart of precious, glinting, stone.

 

The only pure thing is fallibility,

It offers no respite.

I adore it.

History collapses, memories fold, rain is hard.

Everything vacant and cold.

I adore it.

My love is tactile as colour; blessed and cursed

And my love will only matter in this unmeaning, undead universe.

As the comet tears into the black star

I'll rescue you from nightmares

My love: a dream where something in this fucked place cares.

This is a straight down the line, no messing, stone cold love song (AKA: we fuck with pain)

This is....

A straight down the line, no messing, stone cold love song (AKA: we fuck with pain)

You wanted something faster.

I wanted something flashier.

But I don't crash with you.

And you could never stand second hand looks.

We've both known trauma.

We both know to be gentle with another.

We talk about starting up a funeral parlour.

I say we should call it the House of Eternal Rest.

You say it's better to name it House of the Dead.

We agree how we would decorate; 

In keeping with a deadwood town in the Midwest.

And we laugh about hiring a taxidermist.

It's a deflection; neither wants to die first.

I'm not throwing up because of my addiction, I'm throwing up because of what I'm addicted to

 

This is....

I'm not throwing up because of my addiction, I'm throwing up because of what I'm addicted to

Fear don't fail me now.

Fear be a tortured preacher.

Civility be a skeletal creature.

And I will die of complications.

Blind luck or dumb misfortune got me here.

Hanging like cat's cradle on hot tin roof.

Where I pretend like I'm not a product

of necessitations.

And I will die of complications.

 

Barely holding to the filthy midnight

sickly moonlight cobweb sail.

It just won't catch the wind on these oceans.

And I will die of complications.

Because life is about taking positions.

Putting bodies where they need to be.

The symptom not disease

Will cause me

To die of complications.

 

For someone what was will always be.

For someone what is will never be.

It's happening perfectly.

We absorb and spill out transcendence.

We caught each other's eye.

The ground beneath did not split apart,

to my surprise, I'm surprised.

I've been circling you circling myself

Bringing hindsight to a Prior Fight.

Duelling pistols drawn to our backs.

Reincarnation is something I can do without.

I study, appalled, at what once was there,

disgusted at what I now present.

I voice: "What's dead is dead, for all I care!"

But I don't really believe in it,

Nor in astrological confessions.

The stars align:

I will die of complications.

 

Sunlight shines through a petal.

The moonlight chills the bud.

Foxes aren't nocturnal

Instinctively they know the safest light to hunt.

And what is consciousness

If not a signal received from the mothership?

"So, let's get down to business

While we still can raise ourselves to the cause"

But I can't understand their insinuations

The winner doesn't change

Between philosophy and human remains

My death by complications

And what of apparitions

If not broadcasts intercepted from outer space?

Because the best of us are detuned actualisations

Never in quite the right time or place.

Just by being we distort the natural law

Resisting the inevitable,

the human conditions, the societal manipulations

Causing us to die of complications.

Shapeshifter

 

A crow lay one day quite dead. The late afternoon clinging to it.

Its imprint on the window pane, shocked into being.

The stars above me are screwed up scraps of paper.

I threw them way up there.

On them, written previous indiscretions.

I glued them so they stick in the air.

At night I look up and stare at all the constellations.

Here on the earth of my limitations.

I once crushed a lady bird.

I once told someone I had no choice.

Taking my comfort the dead can't be disappointed.

Passive aggressive Ouija.

Granny always proud but concerned about money.

I don't think my ideology is healthy.

I need belief in me the dead can't be disappointed.

One day I can't be disappointed in me.

I once buried my bodies in you.

I once stood soaked through to the sin.

 Crossroads on the highway say "your place or mine?"

Chewed honeysuckle and geranium.

Fish feel free to swim but they're still in an aquarium.

Sometimes divinity doesn't seem so divine.

Sometimes humanity shows itself as being human.

Every climax casts out a confession.

I once thought fire was sped up time.

I once wanted to burn the history, all my failings.

Pureed into test tubes for unusual experimentation.

Don't think it always was this way.

Concrete alien crafts with square tiles for carpets.

Probed by grey suits beside photocopiers with tablets.

Morning abduction meetings require Geiger readings.

Absurd language lacking meaning.

I once didn't give something I should have given.

I once read a science fiction story from nineteen thirty seven.

A time traveler pinioned a prehistoric bug specimen.

When he returned to his own denizen:

 Fascist pessimism was the political scene.

People added jam after their cream.

A rain of heavy night swept the land of the King and Queen.

No one much cared how this came to be called living.

I once shocked an unhappy memory into being.

I once wondered if disappointments cling to the dead.

Swan Vesta

This is... Swan Vesta

Lying between your legs.

Head on your hip while you read Brecht.

Doing anything else would be a waste of time.

This inclement June.

I nuzzle into your cotton.

My rib-cage slips under my skin from my breath.

My fingers sliding underneath the elasticated band

Of your ankle sock.

I might as well try to stop the birds in the trees

From singing as here and now stopping wanting you

"The curse of reincarnation

Is growing pains"

No more than a growl.

You say:

"Your monsters are like

 all you have read are medieval texts.

Flowers grow crooked in angled sunsets"

I say: "Leave me to preying wolves"

You say: "Even when your empty skull is found,

I'll put my middle finger into your eye-socket and

 I'll know you again."

"Writing is eroticism."

"Intimacy of writing in the ink I gave you"

I say: "I run a finger to a smear of wet ink

letters across the paper so I might place each 

word on my tongue."

Your reclining whisper:

"It's like an indie girl taught you how to kiss"

Quote "One's freedom fighter, is another's terrorist"

I spat a lot of blood out

in the bathroom sink.

You say:

"When time turns flesh,

You can twist a knife in, really mean it,

And twine ourselves between its naked warmth"

I feel every moment

When you enter my head.

I say:

"Spending time with you is a fetish you sell.

Quote "What isn't Heaven is Hell, can't you tell?"

Our rib-cages slip under blood and flesh

When we breathe.

They're coming to get you, Barbara

I don't rightly know when, but I've found myself fascinated by the very personal micro-history one creates.

This is... They're coming to get you, Barbara

Those wild floral hours.

That morning complexion of a first kiss.

Bird song, tart as berries.

Now the late bloom buds never were as red.

They're coming to get you, Barbara.

Pressed meadow flowers laid along slender forearms

and dirty upturned palms.

As the sun loves the shine.

Sweat clings to this scent like a dress.

Smudged mascara, smoked breath.

How many nights has it wore on until dawn?

They're coming to get you, Barbara.

Clawing out. Ancient. Ruin. Fossil. Contorting, sleekit.

Midwinter creepit.

They are always coming to get you, Barbara.

And they're growing in number.

Trying to consume you with their crimes.

The lives you led trying to wipe out.

You've wondered lately.

How easy it can be to fall off the horizon.

How a round world has straight edges.

Are they gaining now, is the trail ahead ledges?

They're coming to get you, Barbara.

With wet church glass eyes blinking at you existing

Don't look behind, keep running.

They are always coming to get you, Barbara.

And they're growing in number.

Rising from earth of your half remembered form.

They are the harvest and the swarm.

They are always coming to get you, Barbara.

And they're growing in number.

You can't replant a tree as a seed, only chop them down.

The woodland  you're in is your own.

William Blake, Jimi Hendrix, Marilyn Munroe.

Vonnegut, Brecht, Kafka, Edgar Allan Poe.

Sharon Tate, Bach, Plath, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

It's the weather for it

 

This is... It's the weather for it.

It feels like I could successfully contact the dead.

It's the end of November and fallen leaves on the ground

are easily read.

Winter season brings a haunting to resilience. Or resilience to a haunting.

I'm not meaning through a performative medium.

Guests unconvinced by a knock, cloth or breath on neck.

I've got laudanum.

The house has sharp, cold, air in it. My father died in this room.

It feels like I could successfully contact the dead.

By myself, I don't intend to converse because it's memories

 I've come to resurrect.

 

Acid rain

This feels very much like a B-side. Not actually saying anything in particular.

This is... Acid rain

I don't want to go out in this change of weather.

I'm not having any fun in it no more.

Watching you become acid rain.

Don't want to walk under it.

Step to not slip on its shadow,

spilled thickly on the ground.

I don't want to get soaked through.

Laid there.

Cutting sheets off from my body.

In a shower of wire barbs.

Things grow on us.

Rushes.

Thorns.

Trailing vines.

Day's eyes.

They weave and they push apart.

They save and they hurt the heart.

It's a shame how it went down.

I tired of whistling for it.

Out twisted lips, always sucked instead of blew.

When I came to see, the light was blue.

When I came to talk, the temperature was blue.

When I came to touch, the hand was blue

We don't talk about the cold weather no more.