The library held the bridge of heaven:
a 4-metre squared skylight, solving water
large enough for hush, and
– a child’s Richter scale of vowels and first
words: duhk, back-bird, cook-hoo,
the fiction section, the giant cat-fish
making the earth quake
alphabetising
– Admiral Perry’s gunboat
gestating in the harbour – the gift shop’s revolving doors.
You can start any of these recipes in advance
by soaking your chosen fruit in liqueur
(tip: male fruit should not be peeled
and does not always need to be deseeded)
and by preparing the sweetbreads –
poach the sublingual glands in milk and honey,
tweaking the creamy sweetness to suit your tastes.
How you progress from here is up to you:
once stretched, drape the tendons on the bedposts to dry;
punch the air from the lungs and leave them to rise;
or hickory-glaze the ribs for charring (be prepared
to get this delicious sticky mess on your lips and thighs)
but I always begin with the skin,
scored and rubbed with oil and salt,
and then the flank, dusted in flour and browned
in a heavy-bottomed pot, sloshed with wine and stock
and simmered until the meat falls from the bones.
Seven women roam a caldera in the mountains.
One starred in a ‘90s sketch comedy—wigged
damsel Fabio strummed the lute for. One knows
how arms at sea say, Save me, above the waves
and below; her red one-piece’s cut grooves
her legs like the grooves in a unicorn’s horns.
One is a magician’s assistant. One is Ace
Ventura’s girlfriend. Two are sisters on Full House.
One, an actress who served in my school canteen,
stands a head taller than the rest, neck choke
-chained gold. Down on the flatlands, a villager
gleans the scent. He climbs, and looks. The formation
resembles a deer hoof. I’m the leg. I maneuver
the hoof to a lakeshore, swim it to an island castle.
•
The villager swims the lake. Enters the castle.
His body hair drains. He can’t feel his bruises
swell, yellow, but it happens. The bruises are lust
in the way that skin is lust. Hunger too. The bruises
are what his famished village has made of him,
a wandering wound, a balm seeker. Tennis balls
in the guttering when as a boy I’d scale the roof
to retrieve them, felt rain-flayed and soiled to
rags: this is his indigence dress in the darkness
of the great hall. There is one light source—
a mirror, backlit as if with moonlight. Wedged
behind, edging from the bottom, is a scroll.
A kingdom and more for he who slays the ghost
that cannot be slain, whose terror hour is midnight.
•
… that cannot be slain, whose terror hour is midnight.
Were the villager literate, he would have read
this, run. But the myth doesn’t vest him such power,
nor does a negotiable summons thrill out my chest
hair by the root. He climbs again, up to a garret.
Lights the table candle. Everywhere, the grace of recent
movement: tomes on werewolves, frogs, and dragons
lie open as if just perused, tassels chewed, stroked;
the candle wax is soft and skin-warm; cobwebs
stream off a globe of Earth; shadow cobwebs stream
off the globe’s shadow. Between a unicorn’s eyes
streams a lone hair, long as a boy is tall—omniscience
and invulnerability in war to whoever plucks it.
Then, the door, wrought of water, not iron, bursts.
•
Wrought of water, not iron, the garret door bursts.
On the threshold stands a Cyclops. The villager
sees, in that yawning singularity, a servant’s quarters
or carriage house in which the captives huddle. Come!
Come! It may be a bedroom. Are there bite marks
in the bunk wood? Is Mars’ light jaundiced on the ceiling?
It may be a bathroom. Are there razor sheathes
stuck in the heating vent, like truths between teeth?
Nail lines in the grout mould, toy-soldier-green?
The Cyclops attacks. The villager spears its pupil
with the table candle, and from that tumult of sun
-beams and roars carves two perfect halves, which fall.
Out of the split drifts a voice: the damsel. Kiss the gold
to claim the gold. The women envelop the villager.
•
The women envelop the villager. The women
whirled Earth and its shadow. The women, who
were hidden, flare—solar flares. The villager
shields his eyes. The women laugh and bleat and bawl.
In front of the villager sways the actress.
The villager kisses her choker: lips, tongue, teeth.
Her swoon upraises purple smoke, and antlers.
As the smoke settles, seven deer emerge. The deer
bolt the garret. Rather than bask in the blazing
corona that will save his crops, feed him, the villager
dons hunting camouflage. The camo pattern
matches his bruises, as if by design. The masking—
a balm. Need supplants wound—a need I need to hunt.
There is no point, no time. Seven caldera deer run.
At five past six on a milky morning in November, naked
from the waist down, dripping
perimenopausal sweat into my first black coffee
of the day, I wrote:
Be who you want to become
But first, know who you want to become
Jesus Christ, I hate it when I channel Gandhi at the crack of dawn,
the grainy difficult dream in which I’m trying to fuck Atticus, a lover
who left twenty-four years ago, still prowling my mind like a starving shark
I want to become Tyler Durden without the mental illness but the only club I belong to is
the one-parent-dead-the-other-has-dementia club
but I am trying to become ambitious so I read a story in a back issue of New Scientist,
To touch and taste a comet
and am so underwhelmed by the picture of Comet 67P’s bulbous shape
marked in cheap primary colours where sunlight falls or not
that I could never guess Comet 67P is a wildly alien landscape with only a few spots safe
for landing
and I think Christ, there’s a metaphor for life
The world is a kind of nothing place and I am like a rubbish pile inside and yet
To touch and taste a comet is written in font more elegant and bewildering than any
comet that I feel something I have no language for that may be out of my reach forever
I am striving to become brave and write good poetry
which means I must write Christ and Atticus three times
in this poem because three is the number of betrayal, Atticus
oh Atticus, who gave me a garlic press when you left back in ’94
Made in Switzerland, she has forty holes where the flesh worms out in a pleasing way
You held her higher than a trophy and said this garlic press is a metaphor while I hid
behind cheap red wine, not knowing what the garlic press was a metaphor for and
feeling too scared
sad
bored
stupid
to ask
I imagined my intelligence as tooth-sized back then
shrinking to flea-sized in the sober days
with a surface as fragile as fresh fallen snow
Some days the garlic press reminds me of a speculum
Reminds me how careless we were back then
How you lost your mother as sudden as a gunshot
How seven years later my father went, twin towers fallen
How that house with its glimpse of the dirty river from the enormous
red-bellied bathroom got demolished but the garlic press, she’s lasted
Her hinge a little loose she remains what she is without striving to become something else
In the end I want to be truthful
useful
hopeful
but ending is always the difficult part because fucking is not a metaphor
and we were always somewhere in between, Atticus and I,
his name always too much on my tongue
our pain always too much in my belly
which is almost definitely literally a metaphor but some days I still don’t know what –
Like my mother, I would like to be forgetful but my dreams won’t let me
I want to touch and taste the comet
Handguns smuggled in apple pies.
An internship in the belly of a whale.
A cat with two buttholes for eyes
and a single eye under its tail.
Fingerpainting done without joy.
Carbonated barbecue sauce in a can.
A sense of humor only privilege could destroy.
A former president living in a van.
A black-leather-jacketed seagull tracing
a pentagram in the sand with its wing.
Silences words are ever erasing.
Eagle feathers stapled to a chicken wing.
A condom stuffed with a pizza slice.
A plumbing problem in paradise.
A bird’s nest passed as a collection plate.
A chihuahua barking through a megaphone.
A magnolia growing out of a sewer grate.
Technophobes worshipping a crucified drone.
A boy band eating salad from a trough.
A powdered wig on a Rubix cube.
A pseudointellect you can’t turn off.
The shadow cast by a single pube.
A sprig of kale in the end of a gun.
The courthouse steps slick with lard.
A mustardy dildo in a hotdog bun.
A throat slit with a used gift card.
Hitpoints lost by reading the news.
A ménage à trois between three yous.
Cologne so strong it breaks the fourth wall.
A bear trap set and concealed in a purse.
A war memorial in a bathroom stall.
Deodorant that makes the world smell worse.
Multi-millionaires mistaken for gods.
Imaginary enemies you’re paid to fear.
A curse where you nod if anyone nods.
A psychotic woodpecker pecking a mirror.
Landfills constructed exclusively for art.
A redwood tree whittled into a pawn.
A cannibal choking to death on a heart.
An upside-down shopping cart trapping a swan.
Present and past in a vicious rap beef.
A level of joy indistinguishable from grief.
A symbol you’re asked to misperceive.
An attorney who only takes payment in pie.
A cult whose leader asks you to leave.
A single ghost stretched out over the entire sky.
A bad dream that’s a good dream that ends too soon.
Pecan shell armor on a samurai roach.
An empty gorilla suit dredged from a lagoon.
A winless team with a tree for a coach.
A vending machine full of cowboy hats.
A bra stuffed with pages torn from the Bible.
A civil war fought with baseball bats.
A conch shell sued by the sea for libel.
A lighthouse pierced with a thousand knives.
Five thousand years of unearned high-fives.
Sinister lamplight striking parked cars.
A sexually transmitted fear of clowns.
Statues of Liberty on the moons of Mars.
Velociraptors waltzing in wedding gowns.
Misery misremembered as strength.
Miranda rights delivered in song.
Election years of infinite length.
Books banned for being too long.
A bouquet of okra in a suitor’s hand.
A ninja brandishing a butter knife.
A crown of thorns on an ampersand.
A softball game that changes your life.
A dragon doing sit-ups in a cave.
A tiara on a tidal wave.
I went foraging for a full plate in the forest. / It’s attractive to have a lot on your plate. / An empty plate may be an act of defiance, or politeness. / A plate has no time to consider its surroundings, it is obsessed with its own fragility.
It induces such an appetite for ribs
to know I was the first person to call you honestly.
The names you’ve tried on collecting in my cheeks
like bar mix. The woody aftertaste carried over
to two burnt matches suspended in the air conditioning
with our feet up on the vinyl seats of the last
train south. Caught it by a whisker
running through the stench of cement away from another
obligated goodbye. Elope with me.
It’s another way of saying your name is a birthday cake
you never ordered. You have no other option
but to eat your way out. While the walls are on fire.
In that trendy bar. And everyone is singing.
Singing by name. And patting you on the eggshell
with a countertop. Whites frothing forth over clear liquor.
Now, all stations. My palate is filling with paper serviettes
and the violet blooms of cracked pens. There is too much to say
the words are smudging across the fleshy triangle on the back of my hand.
Navy motion draining into my stomach straight off the sloping window.
Staring back across the grey opening of the carriage floor
the woolly unspoken fills my ears with nausea and pops in a minty bubble.
To be fair, we weren’t intended to be commuted this way.
Rain and the road
Shake hands at the coffee shop.
Bus stop.
Break, shift
Like that automatic kiss
Filling bedsheets
Compressing the morning into moans
Before the sun is up
–don’t go
Back to
Fourteen years of never loved you
Six years of never knew
Three hours of this.
*
We cover the mirrors
And grieve for
She not dead yet.
*
Back from the night before
Blue circles under eyes
Shadow of touch
Keeping bare legs warm
In the rain.
#17
As the match burns down, Natalie Chatterley passes it between the fingers of her right hand and the fingers of her left. The can of cocoa beans corrodes. Angus Mingus’s pillow splits open.
Ruth Reith unstitches the patches from her denims. Bradley Ridley bites into a block of blue soap. Desire dissolves like salt, murmurs Lola Wheeler. Dustin Mostyn’s doughnut dough won’t thaw.
the erosion of the process of erosion is cut short by the process of the erosion of process, thinks Ruth Reith. Bradley Ridley ties his shoes in an ununravellable knot
Nerys Harris draws zigzags on the dusty table. The radio resumes its woozy songs. Natalie Chatterley returns the robin to the rusty cage. A line of paper windmills rotate on the lawn.
#18
Lola Wheeler takes down the mirror and gazes at the wall. The pebbles wear holes in Audrey Chaudri’s pockets. Hank Strunk detaches the balloon string from its rectangle of card.
Lola Wheeler recites from the reference books on the relation between the relations between the relations between things. Audrey Chaudri’s matches are too damp to strike.
Hank Strunk uncrumples the typewriter paper. The herons hover in on an intermittent wind. Lola Wheeler snaps her hacksaw blade. Rainwater runs off the corrugated roof.
Hank Strunk feeds the larks the lawnseed. Audrey Chaudri lets her wristwatch wind down. The shallow river ripples like a slow realization, says Lola Wheeler over a glitchy phone line.
#19
Angus Mingus catapults pebbles at the lemonade cans on the wall. Natalie Chatterley appears in the photograph twice. The salty spaghetti gives Hank Strunk rumbly guts.
The raffia unravels in Nerys Harris’s hands. A blue crow chews through the crocus roots. Angus Mingus pours coffee into an ice-cube tray and places it in the freezer.
As her concentration curdles, Nerys Harris suggests that in theory the theory that theory requires practical proof probably requires little practical proof.
Angus Mingus returns to the library and draws doodles in the dictionary. The midges move like smudges, Nerys Harris says. Natalie Chatterley slits open her mattress. Hank Strunk’s rubber boots rot in the rain.
#20
Audrey Chaudri draws around her left hand, then sharpens her pencil and draws around her right. Nerys Harris’s cider sours. As it bounces, Bradley Ridley’s wet tennis ball leaves its outline across the pavement.
Natalie CHatterley muffles her timpani drums. The moths get lost in the rigorous mist. Sassiness softens like sandpaper, says Ruth Reith and stretches out on the bench.
Hank Strunk refills the cartridge of his inkpen with water. Thistles rustle in the fitful wind. Our conversations convey little besides the conventions of conversation, Lola Wheeler supposes out loud.
Ruth Reith walks out of the walk-in refrigerator. Angus Mingus shivers in his towel. Nuthatches nest in Lola Wheeler’s bike basket. Nerys Harris skulks home in her socks.
I loved your frilled neck,
Red drips off a cliff by the shore,
Freckled nape, your love,
Surfers,
Surf in.
Ruin, urin rinu runi niru,
Something, something more,
Around the wreck, ah, [ruin] [rune] [wrecked] [reckon] [buysell] [swarm] [drowned coin]
[wicking],
Surfers
Surf
In surf,
Your name reversed.
Farther out, by problem agglomeration
Flocked about the ruin [swapped]
Aggravating wounds [unlocked] [exacerbating]
Can’t have writtenother text underwater [wrong, correct]
A place to not liveRedbacks
Sizzling lava sea
Wave,
Waves,
Give me waves,
Waves
Danger
Sluice in washing brack.
Waves,
Rough in
Guards and guards and guards and
We can’t be wrong for long
Never ever Ever ever ev—
Verevereprieve
No wish
Inexclūdō zone
Larvae
Swampers
Swamp
The swamp.
Rain falling
Fairy ringing
Soil inhabiting
Climate futuring
Elm butterflew through, [true] [trouvé]
Whatever
you never got to use but got used to now’s x—
Remains
For ever
Collapse
your light struggles
recoups under sprinkler dirge
supports broken
tree branches stacked by sidewalk end
unsuspecting snapping something inside
NO ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS INCIDENT
this painting is silent and still
wooden box shrouded in moon cloud
occasional rustle pulled by stars
falling in a hurry
everything out there will never come back in
A TERRIBLE TRAGEDY
fog creeps through the low-cut grass
misting a forgetting seen through sadness
won’t you oh won’t you be curious
of what’s beyond the veil
buy a sneak peek called
SUDDENLY AND UNEXPECTEDLY
a death in everything but name
in my hands something rough
jumps me I’m late for infinity
but it’s just my dog dreaming young
living this world
and proud of it.
Sometimes it’s a decade before the world finally hits.
For instance: the simple life caught up with you
by accident. Outside, the heads of kangaroos
are put in a bucket and mashed up like potatoes.
There is always infrastructure, or lack of it:
the papers piling up on the desk, the shortage
of housing. The plants reach towards the light
like silence reaches towards sound, and you
no longer know where to put the slap-dash
of your life-waste. Empty those buckets
on the neighbor’s front porch and go home
to your wife. Fuck her from behind and then
make her a cup of tea, as if that’s a decent reach
towards equality. On the other side of accident
green turns to brown which turns to green again.
Plurality becomes one-one, not one-two,
which is not sense – it’s nonsense, and kangaroos.
i dream a lot
i dream of a man wandering a forest
smoke exalting from his shoulder blades
i become paint
wrapped around my skin
i move like rain
and swallow moonlight for dinner
when dawn comes
i hide myself beneath
a blanket of wind
the man returns to me
moments before i wake
he tells me that water is coming
says it will fill me up
heavy with gold through my body
he tells me
it will make me whole again
the water becomes a spectrum of light
exiting the cave of my fingertips
lemonade begins
to shut down my organs
i become swans
hunting lake water for diamond rings
when naked men visit the edge of water
the swans hide enfolded in liquid silk
in my dream
mexico becomes heaven
for women carrying fire opals
in their coat pockets
last night
suburban dogs find solace
in a meth addict’s backyard
goldfinches get married in a tree
then fall to their death
i get a tattoo of it
yesterday
machine guns followed me home
until i fed them with halo water
tonight i bathe with mermaids
in a moss pool
eclipsed around my thighs
men with paradise skin find me
lying on a black sand beach
overdosed mirtazapine pooling
from my mouth
my collection of spiders
crawl behind my eyeballs
in my dream i shave my head
then commit suicide later that evening
and then i wake
I wake up with a toothache
violin lesson pain
on the lower left side
nothing for it
the infection will drain
to my heart and I’ll probably die
better phone mother
and apologize
I didn’t make it, ma
I’ll email some notes
for the eulogy
and a list of people
not to invite
actually, ask anyone you like
I go out
pace the day like a
beach towel in the spin cycle
Colgate grit crunch at the place
where molars meet
bus
bus
bus, my salvation
I saw one once
crush a man in High Street
apologize to mother
that’s no way to think
but oh so easy
so so easy
I get the five sixty
free food jazz bar shout me a drink
pethidine grapes
I’m no connoisseur
but it feels like a pretty good year
double thumb bass dude
rifling in my entrails
triple crotchet something something
snare
look at all the kids in here
rhythm from the toes
to the tingle tips where lipstick smears
they’re going to make it, ma
lazy youth today look
they’ve nothin’ but the music
that A diminished gonna drain
to my heart and kill me
just like that
imagine that
dropped into a kidney tray
all my fear
with a delicate hi-hat ting
I’ll give it another year, mother
and call you happy birthday
My room fills with perfumed petals, sleek like the back of a wet seal. There is nothing I can do to stop them from covering my bed, my dresser, my closet, my pants drawer. Eventually these petals will cover my throat, my eyes, my ears. For now I look at the ceiling, stained over the years from vinegar and baking soda experiments and spiders making their home. Beautiful, in a way these petals are not–the vulnerable imperfections, the candor in it showing itself for exactly what it is.
It must be hard to have a baby
with an insipid man-child who
while still being the best boyfriend of all your friends’ boyfriends
is a bad lover and dad. Oh Miranda—
it must be hard to have a baby and an insipid man-child
boyfriend and a law career, which is why I always thought I would be Carrie
even though she is a bitch on the show and in real life
even though she only ever wears $1,500 shoes and dates
badly, even though her boyfriend is probably named after the size
of his penis I thought I would be her—
it must be hard. But now that I’m older
Sex And The City is a very old dog that has been taken
to the vet and put, gently, to sleep
and is remembered fondly, like this cat whose picture and dates of birth and
death are displayed in a frame in a front window I walk past sometimes
but instead it’s marathons of episodes and when you watch them
you realise that nobody really cared about representational politics
on television in the late 90s, not even in New York and you,
if you are me, also realise
that maybe you are not Carrie
or even Samantha, who doesn’t love anybody and beat cancer
and worked at a Dairy Queen once
when she was a teenager even though all her friends came from money—no
you realise that you are Charlotte
or perhaps aspire to be Charlotte
who married her divorce lawyer and adopted a baby
and who lives on Park Avenue, and the only thing she wants from life
is a nice set of plates from which to eat her Chinese takeout
Echinacea
When I first moved out of home I lived in a share house with a lot of interesting people. After a while I cultivated a very itchy rash on my wrist, which spread to my armpit. I also had a very bad flu so I went to the doctor.
He looked at the rash first and instantly recoiled in horror and washed his hands in the sink. Then he put on rubber gloves.
‘You have scabies,’ said the doctor. ‘Do you live in a dirty house with a lot of people?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
Then I asked him about my flu and started telling him about something one of my housemates had told me about. A herb that is good for curing the flu.
‘I think it’s called Euthanasia,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ the doctor said. ‘Sounds like a very good idea.’
Youth in Asia
I was born in Japan in 1970 so from then on I was constantly thinking about my own youth in Asia. I made stuff up. I always believed that we had lived in the shadow of Hiroshima (which in reality was actually a tiny flat quite close to Tokyo General Hospital). My brother and sister attended a local school and were taught by the nuns to speak perfect English with a Japanese accent.
We ate what the local Japanese people ate.
It was food for thought. Did I somehow ingest radioactive isotopes at my mother’s breast trapped forever in the milk or radioactive material trapped in the first solid foods and watered down beer my father put in my bottle to make me sleep?
It would have been in the water. It was in the air. It is still in the fish.
‘Oh my god. Am I radioactive?’ I would fret to myself in 1985, all safe and warm on a beanbag in Ashburton watching Countdown on TV, tearing sheets of nori into squares and sticking them onto my fingers and thumbs with saliva and then licking them off one by one like a lizard.
Euthanasia
There were rules when you ate with my grandmother.
‘Get your elbows off my table,’ she would say. ‘Hold your knife in your other hand, that’s the wrong hand,’ she would say.
She would spit on her fingers or a tea towel or fish out an old tissue from her pocket and wipe the stains off my face aggressively like she was washing a spot off a car window or rubbing something out from history altogether.
things walking
rent and pinched nerves
south Africa/ive never
like a dog w/
displaced hips
my cloud of bugs
your cloud pretty-much
thinking hard; the dogs walking hard
they each know each
other, not big into
looks like a junkie i kinda
know. my sister i kinda know
froze wind trilogy
sky grass, whatever mental illness or health
i want to say i know what you mean
but i might not be quite there
the way i was speaking to you was good
and held by august 30th
cranes taking the skys temperature
literally taking it on
your cloud of bugs never really came together
they wd have tho
a dog that can play footy
a bug that can land on moving water
you thought i was flying forward
my nose is not that big or is
it lyricism later, walls
sets of anything
horses? cups? a glass of water –
not available.
treble –
not available. trees – available, some. no migraine
still now
but thought it would be warmer
if yr still in theres intent
theres just enough stress
forgive me — i have a meanness — a classic whisky-swilling gnarl
like a cardboard cutout of bette davis at a bar
once i sat at such a bar — in boston — and picked a fight
with my cardboard cutout
but perfectly respectable boyfriend at the time
who i would not call my boyfriend — because
they do not grant permission
to the mean among us for love and the affiliate benefits
the good faith — the valour — and the immunity from
that great speed
with which the mean
are disposed of —
o god — the dreadful spectre of postmodern metastyles — pastiche and self-loathing —
is thick in the room of my meanness — nothing is safe —
to be mean is to pick on the weaker man —
his human body — like carrion
on the open planes — like a dot
on a disc of snow
the inverse of meanness
is pettiness — pettiness like
the late middle english bastardisation of the french
meaning something made small —
like a bastard, or a petticoat —
the mercenary rustling
beneath a skirt —
to be petty is to be mean without power —
to pinch a scullery maid for a bruise —
to ignore the missives of a well-meaning man
in favour of the pleasures of a bar —
of the deep berry red of a drink
meanness, at its full extension is cruelty —
meanness is to cruelty a stick-up to a shooting —
cruelty is meanness to the power of whisky — to the power of femme — the shrew
being the only sympathetic character in western canon —
it is absolutely no fun to go mean without power
the mean without power are mad —
they have arguments with themselves
alone with their lunches —
they give awkward and uncomfortable
keynote addresses —
the power of the mean is this —
to consign noble motives to others —
who — in your wake — have no choice
but to turn up their collars to the wind —
to walk out the door
better men — the power
to compel so many
to go outside for some time —
taylor, everybody made me cold but nobody ever gave me money for it
obviously taylor — having read simone weil —
you know that we direct spite primarily at our fellows —
so cruelty is a function of oppression but pettiness
is the secret service
of our collective undoing —
ensuring social cohesion
in a post-fordist and kindergarten sense —
like putting babies
in a tar pit — the rustle of a thousand skirts —
a sly smile — a dry laugh —
a dopamine shot on the other side of a monitor — like a moth
squashed on a windshield of a kia —
but meanness, taylor
is an act of great — and thankless — generosity —
i won’t call it revolutionary but —
without it — you could not live in a big city —
performing high production value acts of menace —
to receive meanness is a promise by projection —
by the perverse logic of the universe of blondes —
that one day you will be so big
nobody can hit you
the mean among us remain in medium sized cities
in undemanding bars — performing our low budget
pop country duties
to a small, but committed audience
of one or two
William had a throat infection.
William had a viral infection today.
William had a viral headache hence his absence.
William had a viral headache, hence his absence.
William is recovering from a chest infection –
could he be excused from swimming?
William seems to have lost his music book –
could the boys check?
William had a viral headache hence his absence
William unfortunately caught
a nasty viral bronchitis
William had a viral bronchitis.
William is unable to swim,
due to a lingering
“gastroenteric
germ”
William is to be excused from swimming –
he is still harbouring his virus
William had acute gastroenteritis
William had a throat infection, hence his absence.
William has recovered from the chicken pox,
but will be picked up at lunch time, i.e.
no sport
And what is left is skeleton.
What is left is buried.
They were right, it
does come in
waves, that hold you
under, as you writhe and
ache, for a surface
that you can’t
place,
that pull your mozzarella
body, in every direction,
that swallow your breath, again
and again,
and just before the Stockholm
syndrome kicks in, and
you befriend the
depths, it wanes
and you wade to the
shore, where reminders
lap and promise that
it won’t be always like this.
