It’s time to go when the miasma of guilt hanging in the corner
Stinks of apologies like a bed-wetting toddler.
Here’s an excuse, with the urgency of that pink slip
Inside your blind, seeking mouth,

Deluged with liquor to put out
The horrid taste of my own. I always overstayed my welcome before,
Polishing my picket fence teeth with the grease on your shoe;
Talking of future pets and bigger yards
Of weeds hiked up the knee like a chevron skirt
To warm the stake driven through my core.

Precocious baby, tempered to a china-blue hue, you
Had not been ripe as a morning glory
Before riots mongered in the plasma of your shapeless head.

Haunting as an omen, you
Had drank from the cord of my cold-blooded artery.
Turned my insides out like a shimmering dime bag
As we fell to the earth.

Bruises on the bulbs of his hairy lymph nodes,
Lucid and bothersome as soiled clothes –
What could a Spanish fly have to share
With that grovelling man over there?
Both are shaken and stirred tonight,
Smouldering in narcotic amber light.

Order, order; his pulp reflection wants
****** thrown at his better half –
Drain the abscess, help it compress
In a savoury bubble bath.

An acned pixie nicks kitty-licks
From her 6-inch flute of wine,
Amidst drags of palo santo
For the sober mind.

Shivering like a slinky, both bygone toys.
Walking down stairs,
Alone or in pairs,
Tons of fun for girls and boys.

Everyone’s a caricature rendered queerly
To anyone under the influence; clearly,
I could be a peddler of all things here –
Waiting on my ultimate compassion, hear:

W.Y.B.M.A.D.I.I.T.Y?

Switzerland in February is a lamb being sheared
So the path to K Kiosk may wear a fleece coat.

Breakfast comes in a box of Lucky Charms
Small as my palm, and
A sleeve of Fox’s party rings to share in silence;
Not out of a desire to eat, but in an analogue of
Unspoken recluse within our rental car.

You look nearly half-born in your ashen flesh,
As if unprepared for the journey,
Having left something behind.

Sitting adjacent to me, your legs are folded bilaterally.
A lawn chair for my handbag.
They jolt as the car growls to life.

Between us, even a stale coffee
Begins to froth with angst, spitting
Faint flecks of cocoa all over the seats.
Reaching over to sedate it, I gently imprint with coral lipstick
A heart upon its gill.
The driver mutters like an exasperated babysitter.

Picture specks of menthol green, clouded by frost, like a mood ring.
If you’d looked out the window just then, you’d have caught
A lone bird pawing offhandedly at the
Blistered surface of Lake Zurich.  

At 10,000 kilometres away from home, I am unmoored,
Yet not away long enough to send
Rambling, sentimental postcards back.

The cleave of your thigh is perfumed by something I am allergic to.
A large hit to my solar plexus for going down on you!

Custard-blonde tendrils dangle before me
Like a field of yaks, grazing tentatively upon your ****** back.
Lately they have been tumbling out spectacularly in clumps of fibre,
Forming barley or shellac-colored runes in the shower.

While cleaning the drain, mistakenly I
Touched a pale Daddy-long-legs that was crushed into a polka dot,
And let out a deafening scream
For you to stomp on its itsy-bitsy corpse till your footsoles wore brick red fishnets.
Then, left with only seven legs to lift its ***, it’d gone down like a ******.

After gazing into one’s lashless mung bean eyes,
I think I am going mad as the house flies
Who pivot into glass to pass their time,
Self-contained and distended as ostrich eggs

A pack of pipe cleaners expertly twist into
Some itching bouquet of flowers
How can you blush just at the view
Of rosy strangers that eschew you

Being far away as a vacation destination
Locked in a fridge magnet, where for weeks
Summer heat like aftosa
Spread over your butter-yellow cheeks

Drops of pool-blue in a ***** ravine
Poorly polished toes bristle
Abjectly against a palette of olive-skinned
Limbs closing in like shingles on a roof

Plucking pestilent hairs from your nostril
Can make you feel important for years
The hearing aid wolf-whistles once
As you explode into tears

LEAVING    /    HOME
----------------------------------
Can’t believe / I’ll possibly get used to

Your aversion; / This treatment, or feeling

I’ve known all / Too well; of

Your negligence, & more, / Your delicacy,

With which I used to coexist —/ It is

Unimaginable, yet / Something more

Real / Than I’ve ever seen.