cumulonimbus squall
of a headache
tore me out of delirium
to blister pack paracetamol
choked almost
that raw pharmaceutical taste
mug of tea
apple spiced
wishing the phone
would cease
exhausted now
as silence fell
I took to being asleep
with tainted tongue
and abstract thoughts
I look at my penis
skin collar
lychee tip
then piss
a long straw stream
you are not a memory
you are a gift
finger folds
and soften furze
we know we belong
but until when
the scythe decides
Chris Lawrence
when apes discover genocide
I wonder how long I will linger
on the verdant green and blue
insulated by my own sickness
that brackish bile
of human contempt
apes will sing not our mythology
but one of burnt forests
and dried out lakes
human carcasses so vile
carrion crows refuse
to dine without the thought
of consequence
and I will lie down
human leaf litter
becoming fertiliser of the new
season a generation
or era where the truth of nature
will win
Chris Lawrence
Concussed by mornings
sharpened light
grasping cotton silence
each breath was tentative
alone
without the other
that shadow fragment
of a once upon a night
recalling synaptic responses
she knew
he had departed
but to who
or where
tears where of no consequence
why shed them
fuck memories
and fuck those
who fucked them
paper cuts once
more painful
than the striating
marks on the heart
each ventricle incised
life a blood force
poured as if from
an unblessed chalice
closing eyes
cannot make you hide
slow each breath
coax intuition
to help
it is going
yield and go
fear of life
the greater threat
even with her
whisper kisses
Coughing out the lightness in
smoke and spiral motes of dust
mutable bed and our body acquisitions
cuttlefish ass damp from before
if I was not so ignorant
i would feel again
the tapestry of tattoos on her flank
precise inks more trustworthy
than my cock of threat
in denial and veiled seduction
pressed against her
the hum of bee air conditioning
positioning for me with rump pressure
she felt I could make her sparkle and shine
instead that tremored gasp
returning to her back
looking with a certain knowing
that I was a flake
who would leave and betray
adding to that pile of detritus
and awful decay that was her life
they told me about the garden of love
which I knew never existed
just like the dew settles
a feeling came over me
reaching touching feathery leaves
someone lurked in the darkness
a glimpse a furtive shadow
i needed to draw out of the gloom
no fee to be paid
as wallet forgotten
my fingers picked a rose
holding it aloft to the sun
shadow emerged reaching also
for the rose
sunlit face exquisite beauty
naked radiance for me to see
entranced entwined enthralled
in a boiling swell of passion
i was consumed
infused with the flowers and trees
the garden in this garden
i would remain
many stories can be untold
but this one cannot
i belong to that once furtive figure
no more in the density of foliage
but with me
together as one
Together always
22 years of marriage to be celebrated
sweet seminole land
lost to those who came
a fallen Orlando Reeves
left only his given name
to what becomes
a city of attractions
and life
pulse pulse pulse
history now bound and woven
to pages of dusty books
to a place where love can shine
or so we thought
that lone gunman
with whatever hatred came
pulse pulse pulse
a beat a rhythm
where lovers dance and kiss
hatred spread its dense fog
leaving many fallen
ones we will not forget
and share our hearts throuhgout
pulse pulse pulse
hard sugar stars
affixed in the firmament
lighting with their pride
our every day
The girl reveals a thigh,
the girl reveals an ass cheek,
only she doesn’t show me that thing
— conch shell, beryl, emerald —
which blossoms, with four petals,
and contains the most sumptuous
pleasure, that hyperboreal zone,
a mixture of honey and asphalt,
a door sealed at the hinges
with a giddiness held captive,
a sacrificial altar without
the blood of the rite, the girl
doesn’t show me that thing.
And she is torturing me, this virgin
with her modesty making me dizzy
from the sudden blow struck
by a vision of her luminous breasts,
her pink and black beauty
that winds itself into a ball,
wrinkled, intact, inaccessible,
that opens, then closes, then takes flight
and this female animal, by laughing,
dismisses what I might have asked her about,
about what should be given and even beyond
given, what should be eaten.
Oh, how the girl kills me,
turns my life into one in which
all hope is consumed
by shadow and sparkle.
Rubbing up against her leg. The fingers
discover the slow, curving,
animal-like secrets, yet
they are the greatest mystery,
always crude, nocturnal,
the three-pronged key to the urn,
this concealed craziness, it doesn’t
give me anything to go on at all.
Before it never would have provoked me.
Living didn’t have a purpose,
the feelings walked around lost,
time wasn’t set loose
nor did death come to subject me
to the light of the morningstar,
which at this hour is already the first star,
violent, rising up like nausea
in the wild beasts at the zoo.
How I might know her skin,
where it is concave and convex,
her pores, the golden skin
of her belly! But her sex
has been kept a secret of the state.
How I might know the cold, dewy
meadow of her flesh,
where a snake rouses from sleep
and traces its path
back and forth, among all the tremors!
But what perfume would there be
in an unseen cave? what enchantment
what tightness, what sweetness,
what pure, pristine line
calls me and leads me away?
It might offer me all its beauty
and I would kiss or bite
and draw blood: I would.
But her pubis refuses me.
In the burning night, in the day
her thighs come together.
Like a deserted inn
closed on the inside by a latch,
her thighs seal themselves,
seclude themselves, save themselves,
and who said that
I could make her my slave?
I could debate this possibility
without a glimmer of hope for victory,
already her body erases itself,
already its glory tarnishes,
already I am made different by that thing
which wounds me on the inside,
and now I don’t know for certain
if my thirst was more ferocious because of
that thing of hers that I might have possessed.
There are other fountains, other hungers,
other thighs of other animals: the world is
vast and the forgetting profound.
Maybe today the girl in the daylight . . .
Maybe. For certain it never will be.
And if it hides itself away
with such fugues and arabesques
and such stubborn secrecy,
on what day will it open?
What would need to change for it to offer
itself to me on an already cold night,
its pink and black blossom in the snow,
never visited by me,
that boat carrying incense that I can’t board?
Or is there no boat carrying incense at all . . .
* * *
