Photo by Francesco Ungaro for Unsplash+
Cat. Night. Hunting
The third eye opens. Treasure:
How dry linen pops into flame
With spark and magic instant.
In the sweet live dark the trees drip life.
Small victims. The air is a dead poem
And my skin hums with what crawls out of it.
Blood. Sickles. I am blood, a sickle.
The moon blows cow eye round
And bloated, pregnant and ready.
Rustles, ear caught, rivulet into the labyrinth
That moves me (muscle, skin, bone, nerve )
It’s many fingers slit and golden.
Still, paw pads skim matter, not touching
Or being touched. How many shades of black is love?
How many species has perfection? Leaved branches
Silhouette stark black on black between me
And moon eye light. I cling to the blood sweat smell and shiver.
Something very near is dying. I am wood and flesh.
Soil, bone. Night my madness,
Murder home.
Lazarus
The music comes in my bones,
Out my bones, sheer notes, holes
In the surface of the mother sea.
Old salt cries, clenched in rock teeth.
Cellophane weed slides and waves,
Clumps of hunger
Around shelled in eyes.
The strong has gone sleepy,
Is one soft body
Green, white, green, white
Bleeding warm music,
Carving blood to fire.
Time is a door, a hole, a hand
Pinching shut. And I’m in
Wave split-second free fall
Curving into the only thing
That will still hold me:
The slip green sheen of light
Across green water.
Vertigo
Distant crickets. Air brittle as cold wax,
Hands, stiff white, blur the flame
Rising to the whir
Of fat moths against screen.
Tonight breathes sweet
From leaves and rotting.
New lives rise and shiver.
Stars cry sharp pulses
To millions of eyes.
My cats loll and sigh
On the sills fat and stupid
With plenty and light.
Night seethes, is mother, is brother,
Is infidel, the same liquid spine
Who danced limbs before space,
Eyes before sight,
Mind before things and time denied him. The same
Now creeps and slides,
Past ragged wings, inside.
My small hairs know before I
This return, this renewal. I turn.
Cats tense, cry. We press the screens
Alive for the teat
Of song and pattern,
The sharp promise of a fall
So intense it holds everything.
I become again
A fiend who begs for drowning,
Entranced and burning,
My fingers on the wick.