All Things Are Poison, And Nothing Is
The sleek silhouettes and tips of their words
Dropped like wrappers on footpaths in the night
Go playing darkness, darkness, darkness – light!
With my blended-egg-yolk brain. It writhes, kneads
Pain, sloshing and frothing behind the beads
They call my eyes.
Past all their cries
I slide, and from the pulsing crook of birds’
Wings pressed into floating foam, I wring out
A truth strong and clear as a child’s mad shout,
And as brutally shushed. I drop away
Return to them and the barbed every-day.
I conjure mists, they martel through in glee,
So I turn to this. Cubes of death and bliss,
Come. Sweeten and quicken this draught for me.
Dwarf Planet
My rocks, orbiting the relentless Sun
Ache more than yours, o Earth. Two hundred years
Of your giddy merry-go-round, and one
Year of my toil is not done. Yet your spears –
Whom may Time soon rend! –
Your tubes tilted to the sky, peering past
Your single serene Moon bathed in sunlight
Sufficed to cast me out! So, yours will last
As my five dim, melt into their own night,
Seeking their own end,
Betrayed by the System. Even Neptune,
My first neighbour, my best friend, turns away
From me now, for the Sun too sings your tune
And calls me ice-dwarf. Earth, do you betray
Thus all you befriend?
It’s Pure Laziness, I Tell You
The bones plant me firmly on the work-chair
The eyes rivet themselves to the right screen -
Down comes the monkey and steals the brain’s keys.
The lizard clicks at it with a sour glare
Screaming of deadlines and of being seen
Idling thus. Terror seeps into the knees
But the monkey will not yield me the keys
No the monkey will not yield me the keys,
Though down in the curling stomach’s last pit
The magma whispers to the flaking crust
‘Nothing really does rhyme with horror
No terror nor honour nor humour fit
This bill. Break now, weakling. For I too must
Have my day in the sun to turn purple.’
But when the crust erupts, laughing though dead
It pours out a murky white stained with red.
Vulture
Your kite is a scavenger, just like me
Yet with the kite you soar, rejoice
In its dive, yearn to fly as far and free.
Your hearts lift, not stop, at its cry.
For I am the one you bind to the death
You cause. The one waiting for breath
To fade out of the children you famished.
I am the ill-omen, banished -
Your hawk is a scavenger, just like me
And not just when it has no choice
Your symbol of valour and grace can be
Found stripping the dead just like I
When all is said and done,
I will still repel you.
Could it be
Quite simply
That you find me ugly?