WEEDS
earth,
the essential nature of sensation in the spine smoking weed,
she said, in deference to his mother's rhododendrons.
plants derive ethereal
connection from the water my daughter bathes in;
the ego, the obligatory game show host's recreational golf game,
goofball golf game, ball of my balls golf game,
the blazing end of the 18 holes and too much air sucking
every conceivable innuendo from the preparory school's
philosophically inspired repertoire.
my lunch money for thick, white custard
every single tuesday.
oh fire,
she said, at the hot end of the furniture store,
in between lunch and oxygenated water retention;
I bought a bulb for my salt lamp and saw the river and floated a barque and cried in the dark,
in the corner of the hut, where they kept the dead bodies
saline fresh saline fresh
where they kept the dead bodies saline fresh.
we wandered along the colonnade, my roman sorceress and I,
and I was rejuvenated and equipped with an incalculable self worth,
when the emperor declared
the minimum wage for oligarchs would be...
yes, and I went there, she said, sucking off a centurion behind the colosseum.
wind!
well blow me, she said, extracting an oven mitt from her remarkably earnest vagina;
hot, baked scones and strawberry jam with clotted cream and tea.
debris falls from the sky this morning, is swept across fields and the housing estates
where I played as a boy, so fullsome, wholesome, loathsome
in my innocence;
reneging my spiritual inheritance for a pound of nepalese hashish,
like merlin on a moped in america.
wheretofore now, young hip, hop, hippie, hoppy, hypnotised
horses in the lowering sky, the inconsolable sky, where the wind rushes up
my back alley with a ferocity borne of misappropriation.
wrap up! she said, too many children lost in the cracks.
PUPS
blue merle on the mountain like the shadow of lenticular clouds
cloying marzipan from your primary caregiver's melodrama.
announcing a leopard in the laundromat, at once elegant and saturnine,
for the amusement of melancholy children
slouching mawkishly from the gene pool.
we had no precedent other than an implanted precognition.
I was precocious, I was strange, I was never going to change,
so we sat in the bar and you scoffed at my bilious vaudeville necktie,
the way I fondled it conspiratorially.
I had the fragrance of an orange.
there was a dwarf star in the hanging basket you stole
from the presbyterian greengrocer,
but we could never have known he had cancer.
jesus fed me. no, wait...
mother fed me, jesus bled me, the devil red me...
or blue me, I can't remember which.
I was working in a working man's club in the 1970s,
somewhere near darlington, when he came up
and called me darling, and I buckled at the knee
and reflected seraphic glory
all over his sweetheart stout.
the brindled hounds are baying
while I perform standup in the bathtub.
blue merle, blue merle, the moon is shining like a pearl
brought back from the refrigerator on a plum coloured evening;
and the mountain holds a space in the crook of its neck
for broken hearted babies and a gaggle of laundered priests.