the Crab Cactus dies and gives birth to itself

Every Year. unfurling towards an imagined desire

it buds hastily, hungrily, reminiscent of anatomical

illustrations of blushing muscle fibre or the skirts

of a child’s synthetic pink gown, worn without fail

through the aisles.      the meat section

                                        of the grocery store

                                        provokes within me

                                        the feeling of:
                                                   [your palms, imprinted with quarter moons,

                                                   rough and foreign to me]
          [the melancholy valley your hips cleave

          in the lonely tether of night]
                                        [the whorl of your hair bores into your skull,

                                        pointing to singularity, Mind]
                                        the lyric of:
          two enrobed women

          wheel an abandoned

          shopping trolley from one side

          of Buranda train station

          to the other at 2 am

          as though to peel

          this imposition of nouns

          from the translucent skin

          of the land beneath
and as though to disrobe our serpentine inland sea,

bloating with translucent pollutants and dead fish

and swift Walt-Whitmatic catamarans. three donors

to private schools summit Moriah but cannot condense

the city into the shell’s hole, octopus-borne.

death spares the dental hygienist who bores

                          my teeth down to stumps with her diamond

                          incongruous light.
                                        sometimes i recognise,

                                        in perspex reflection,

                                        the essence of me
                                        and your muse

                                        is the Sage archetype,

                                        swilling mulberries gin
                                        but i am your staunch

                                        deuteragonist

                                        in the waning of spring.
          the blood is slow-moving, becoming the sheets.

          the ancient cat loses weight while we sleep.

          coiled like a nautilus shell, or a foetus,
the Crab Cactus and its identical spawn

flowering either side, like Plath’s snakes,

unraveling.