Lihpappil

I thought I’d met a gentleman

I thought he’d been so kind

I found him on an onion roll

But then he sent me blind

Half filled, twice milled, friendly man.

Pullets on Pulpits

Mocking a hen

I think of her laughter

Again and again.

Since then I lay so still and
So long that I imagine her and
my blood settling into place and
draining and
pooling beneath me and
skin as a thin membrane
keeping the sheets clean.

“Bees in your knees?” 
She would have asked

Streaking, bleaching, tying, heating
A weekly obsession until
brittle remains are cut
painted wet slithers sliced to the floor
we compliment each other
brave intimacy and caring composure

Screaming at the cafe
At the top of your lungs
High pitched and undone
Smiling sipping on peppermint tea
I think to myself this has been fun.

When we sleep in December
The one thin comforting sheet
Ends crumpled in the centre
Our damp skin quickly touches
In reassuring flattened sighs

Beneath the almost frozen stream
Needles bear down
Freeze against us
Standing on their ends
They fall to the floor with a clattering hand
Buckled knees
A crease forms down the drain
Screams in the pipes thump out of rhythm
Folding into the steel

I pushed it into a tightly bound jar
A fraction escapes in a trickle of thought
For a thrill I watch from a distance
But never hold it
Never smash it into a thousand pieces
Never free it to breathe in sobbing gasps
I feel it rise on a whim
Out of the cavernous home I made
I grasp at the edges and fold it into itself
In the pit of my scarred stomach I return it
Locking the spitting venom into place
Insisting on composure

It was just another evolutionary step

Before we started naming it a chicken.

A little broken kettle,
Doesn’t know when it’s boiling.
It burns away.