Startled from warmth

Startled from warmth

By cold electric paroxysm

Through galvanised experiment limbs

 

The black cough that shakes me empty

With sudden shock

The bitter voltaic thrill

The unexpected frenzy

Of more than comfort

 

I was licking cream from a bowl

That folded along a hinge in the middle

 

Memories of hands warm and unseen

Are alarmed like basking shoals

By hands cool and sharp to the touch

The icy fury of loving

 

A savage passion finger

Along ink and roses

My thighs flat threads

Wrung like damp leaves

While her kiss a tiger’s head

 

I was chased by a spider

Rapid across a chessboard of sheep

Patterned with the detached

Moves of a talented boy

 

We are evening flocks rising above the trees,

Pacing, sniffing animals

On the forest floor

Lost for our night times

Bryophyte Intimacies

She has eyes of snow-grey sea words

Riding rags and tatters with their dogs

Along small-coal ash urns where the homunculi hide

 

Gypsy-hatted doorbolts spring open of their own free will

And draugr rattle silver in the wind

Over barrel-headed tombstones

 

It is a mountain touch

A green bird

And caramel dissolve of ice

This island lip print

This cascade

A hydraulic face

The forbidding mechanism

 

The soft craving is unthawed,

It bristles with coals and spikes,

Lava not yet liquified

 

Split-tongued landslip of leaves fossilising

Snapshot dinosaur embrace

Of whiplash tailbones in soft clay

 

The sleet of hands that are held softly

While the dovecote baboon

Binds your ducks with wire and straw

 

Embracing each disassembled body part in turn

Holding the lost numerology of rainfall

 

Feet wash up like fireworks fallen from the trees

Hares run like tears down valley floors

And every laugh I have ever seen

Slips wet across this table

As bog body fingers lace in blue-flamed peat warmth

And the kiss is a ritual ringed with teeth