The page might tear so easily

So easily a face can rip in two

Two legs, cricket white, might rip

Sinew torn tissue. Too

Golden the eyes circled by white

As white as sharp, as claws

Our hero –

                        onyx eyes,

yes

Raydell      Derrell

the boys  who would

who could

make chariots

for        gun-shaped    paw

                              . .

Rest   upon them             pitbull

Find piteous birth        allow

:       white to every hue

      not purple but blue

not blood,         sardonyx

eyes not

eyes     as claws

Dogs don’t see

colour   they say

such lies               :

Visions made of tails

                their

              empire

Cannot get around it, a hold of it

The sight of it: meant for admiration

For distance, not to be touched or

Scaled, not a chorus but an indecipherable

Opera. Pale molten notes, and hard.

What it must be like

To put a son in the ground

She wears him on a small button

Between cancerous breasts, Les Pitons,

Silent like a moon, days out of order.

Cannot get around it, a hold of it

What it must be like

Now the house is gone, crushed

By landslide, a family still

In it. Such majesty we cannot leave.

How can you live with this?

Ancient voices

Climbing to green tips.

They no longer inhale—

Red gnashes cutting steepness.

Somewhere, the land secretes sulphur,

Breathing, breathing, breathing.

Who can live among it?

Between dark and the daylight

Not worth a hospital trip

Dropped white sac, cubicle locked

Empty sea without shore

Seas relentlessly aspire

Chopped, made whole by a stranger

Who fears what you are

Stolen skies, surging fire

What you become, could not

Mountains toppled evermore

You came to show us you could

A tell-tale heart pauses

To scale the enamel wall

Locked in by slick fortress

The dim light before light

Feet too small for comfort

A whisper and then silence

His arched body ready for levitation

Leviathan spores sculpting reversals 

A white rainbow of marble limbs, marvelous arch

Cast at last in veined strictures:

Two arms, islands defiant, no pot of black gold

This face from another body, a fighting

Samsom grinding teeth, clenched fist on breast

Ankle elbowing nippled mattress—one side

Curled, automaton—tip toes, loins

In thrall to a secret gravity. His, this ocean

Bending planets into oblong shape

Faulted moon-struck: never more solid

When you turn the page somebody dies.

The coroner remarks, at    airports 

anyone can          take your suitcase off

the  luggage carousel    anyone can   

walk in from                the street

pretending       suitcases are theirs

the suitcases are theirs      you have nothing

inside it          at some  airports

anyone can          take

nothing to declare

End too soon, turn back the page

Let him ink something else, sketch

Someone else, else lilies blossom

Estuaries of ironed hair – mortified

And throat numbing               pink

Overcome us, from the outside,

Sleep upon us as we go. Let us stop

And rest in time, be born again

Above paper-white road

Perhaps I should start where he was free

Silver wheels, shed of leather, flaking

His               robot eyes at our feet.

Love them, like him, my kiss on flat chest

       Seduction an inquest as to death,

Silver, not apple white, the faultless carriage

On roads so asphalt they’d never hold

All that slips from these plush seats

Is carnage. Perhaps touching should be free.

Each candle got here on its own

dripping wax on memories

the climbing furniture

dreamt towards hills.

Flame, abandon mahogany

encase me now in wax

in case I am impossible, as possible as I am made

Lick me, where you have been

Forever

ready

for lift

–off

in return

                        come

fare

                        again

over

teeth

                        sail to flood

*

Focus on the other animals

things have been set in train

conspiracy suits the rural life

those who disembark

                        stay