On the Worksite

Stilettos must be worn on the worksite. Inclusion in the poem does not preclude domesticity. Stilettos on the worksite must be steel capped. Do not write poems at the podium. You are at the worksite. Loving that asbestos rouge; that Mansfield Bar. Girl, you work it. Cherry duck strut – surrounded by antique television sets. Whatever happened to Nicole Diver? Death by unfortunate coverture conventions. You are pulling up your opera gloves and ripping out the concrete that constipates your chest your large intestine.

There is some dirt beneath your fingernails that will never come out. But you’re lacquered like a fish against deep-sea predators in your pre-frontal cortex. The silk of your gloves is supercontracted by effluvium. Proving that it is imperative to wear the proper PPE on the worksite. The notes app on your phone does not constitute a poem. Phones are strictly forbidden on the worksite. Accident rates increase by 99.8% when phones are present on the worksite. No one has considered that you are an accident. No one has considered that you are a phone. 

We mix cocktails in cement mixers; the way the Romans do. When you breathe you exhale plaster and gypsum – Saint Elmo’s fire. Aren’t you a natural phenomenon? Aren’t I a cliché of myself? Your spit spirit spunk. Your foreman. Your skin – supported by steel girders. 

Lowry’s Girls

Well, it’s not that kinky – Lowry’s girl mumification constraint. Coppélia; biting breasts. Hydraulic puppetry living as spiders do. So – it’s not that kinky. Her body as a Shepherd’s Pie. Her feet as champagne flutes. What class, what elegance, what auction. You table tennis thing – constantly between the bats flying in the dusk. The dust in your irises your city pulling you towards the game. And it’s not so kinky, being a player. It is so kinky being the piece, the ball.

It does not do to ask questions and not expect an answer. It does not do to rhetoric. Through Seroquel and acrylic corsets. You drop your shoulders. They clatter to the floor. You ball socket. Plucking my eyebrows is an administrative nightmare. Plucking your eyebrows is sex.

This is such a fucked up city. Look at all this crap around us. The pretentiousness of colour. A historiography of artists. You are so simple to me. So perfect. My sweet graphite private thought. The Tate has no place where we make our place. Between atoms of carbon. Fullerena ballerina. And we are sitting on Primrose Hill with Ray Davies. And we are swimming in Hampstead Heath with William seeing angels. No one knew it. He was seeing you. Not that kinky. Not so anything.

Merricat 

I’m not always asleep, you know, sometimes I’m just thinking in the dark. A post-nuclear impression of what I once was. A leggy Polly Garter creature or a stoat popping babies. I have been invited to a literati party in Boulder, Colorado. But I cannot go because I am among the naked molerats on the moon. And I know all the major poisons. Applied liberally as sun lotion; masturbatory motion. When you are thinking like this you are not thinking at all. Happy dumb goat; you chewed up medicine cup.

There’s no way to make the edge meaningful. I have worked hard to cultivate what warmth I have. For three days I have only grown among the snapdragons. Time squash and stretch: what cartoon; a Tex Avery animation. Silver coin, I’m magic fetish. Dent me – I bite.

I have been invited to a literati party in Boulder, Colorado. But I cannot go because I am a lizard now – picking apart and eating my own scales. Playing myself. No instrument. Knowing so little. Knowing so bikini tiny pulled through a wedding ring. God bless Bernays our saint of corporate marketing. God bless you my darling cigarette butt. My something. My aspartame nothing.