Bananas
Yellow dolphins burnt together at the tongue,
they kiss each other like acrobats.
The joint, a husky squirrel at work
fuses them together.
Their stripy pyjamas are melted onto their skin,
grabbing at them like lovers fucking.
Once broken, the joint is as raw and moist as meat,
never drying or healing as wounds do.
The separation is forever
and the distance between them those of stars.
Their necks are broken easily,
their pyjamas torn from their skin
for them to be ravished,
their spider like web mutilated.
No blood gushes from their wounds,
instead their blanched skin stares up at the sky
waiting to burn.
Autumn leaves
Once again molten leaves adorn my feet,
parting like the sea as I make my way to tea.
I am a beeched whale underneath a bed of leaves
that seep into the corners of my body only to crawl away.
The leaves go on their hands and feet
slowly and assuredly to my hips where they linger in the air.
They are swimming breastroke towards my eyes,
a place where they want to gather at like mice.
They do not touch her though,
too scared to touch her vinyl skin.
Instead they watch with me as she gathers them,
and like snow throws them towards me.
They are distilled in the air
and fall as lightly as fluff.
Her coppery hair and yellow eyes play with the light,
and from the distance she looks like a bloated leaf.
She wrings her hands in the leafs,
as if they’ll heal the bruises bought about by playing in the mud.
And like a true leaf flutters in the breeze,
falling gently into my arms.
The white princess
She lets the paint brush swell and fatten in the paint.
Once greased up and as supple as a new born beats it against the tin.
She does not know what will happen next and it is just her instincts that guide her clothes off.
She is naked now, nipples staring forwards like guards.
She is careful at first. Careful not to spill the paint.
But as her body is slowly immersed in white becomes ravenous for the emulsion.
The paint tickles her thighs, breasts and neck,
falling like rain onto her bum.
In her mind she is a beautiful white princess, all traces of her former negro self removed.
Wooden toast
Your face, a sacred parchment in which I rest my fingers,
a quilted coffin stitched up from debris that walk the acid streets of London,
that are burnt under the silver spooned sun and taken through the veins
to forget the already forgotten dead, whose tombs call out like sirens.
Strumming you like a guitar, fingers swiming through vibrating strings
celebrating our union;
a welding together of metals,
I watch you undress slowly.
Our lovemaking fills the air like fog,
spilling like ink onto my skin, a piece of blotting paper
wrought only to mask mistakes
that time has transposed on us.
To have married,
to have borne children,
to have lived another life,
another lie.
We spend our days unravelling linen,
letting the yarn fall through our fingers
as your hair seeps through my fingers,
butter through wooden toast.
Cycling in Tuscany
We cycle over broken records fused with glue,
skin not quite healed,
bicycles tingling like triangles
in the air that suffocates us.
Our feet push down harder and harder,
as we ride uphill,
with our backs bent,
curved like the hose on the fire extinguisher,
so badly needed to settle the flames
that rises like vapour from our skin.
Our bodies, balloons sinking,
not quite filled and struggling for air.
Sweat runs down our backs as freely as the blood in our veins,
collecting into a ravine on our shirts,
one in which it is forbidden to swim in.
The Engagement
She looks out onto the hills that undulate like waves dying at sea
as air wraps itself around her neck as if a chord chocking her.
Beads of water trickle from her hair like fig milk
onto her bare shoulders.
The smell of freshly grown herbs cut the air,
invade her senses and settles like dew.
The gold band dances light around her finger,
moving its hips to the beat of her heart.
She breathes in the still air, that is very much alive and green,
flickers her hair.
Sunscreen spread onto her shoulders stings her pink burnt skin,
the pain of which lifts other pain like mere kites in its breath.
Travel Sickness
The purchases of Chanel and Sylvia Plath’s poetry
shelved on her lap
do not stop her from rinsing her hands with the dry air,
nor pacify her stomach
that twists with the elasticity of rubber,
as the car toys with her crunched up body,
a mere puppet to be manipulated.
Her head is a marble rolling down hill.
She totters out of the Vauxhall and walks,
head bowed like a hellebore
in servitude to the fresh air
that it inhales as if tobacco.
She climbs a path
and asks an elderly lady for water,
only to be refused with politeness,
served up like bread to the needy.
Listening To The Walls
The house’s walls wake me up at three am,
beg me to listen to its nightly terrors,
I soothe them by singing lullabies.
The windows have bars across them
that tease the walls’ vermillion tears
that appear like lightning.
At dawn the walls dance flamingo
with me as their partner,
pressed firmly against their porcelain flesh.
The All Knowing Sea Shell ΙΠ
The sea, not cerulean like the sky
but algae green,
tumbles like haystacks onto the sand.
He fights the waves at first,
fights them for her,
thrashes when they thrash
and undulates when they do.
He soon tires of the struggle
and resigns to become a merman,
forever in the sea.
He grows scales and a tale
where his legs should be
and is now seen by sailors,
who give him wine to listen to his song.
The All Knowing Sea Shell Π
I try to claw my way to the horizon,
through the waves that bounce me like a tennis ball,
but the waves
that took him there
elevate me like an electronic lift towards the sand.
Hands held out I find myself pirouetting through the water
as I stumble forwards.
And only when the waves are on level
with my eyes
do I realize
that he could not have swum above the waves.
