in yr eyes
an air balloon. in me

& by the river, we rock
back and forth

unangry

light shines upon junk
as if to find a man, a woman
there, a tooth-pick
through her, getting thee
gristle out, that piece of
animal in there.

you hand me the money
and i give you the
swizzle stick. you ask
for a plastic monkey
hung on the edge.
i skewer the
cherry and open it
for you. it's GLOWING.

you turn to stone
shortly after, shaking
like a silver birch
being cried about. OH
you say and check
the map, run your fingers
down my polar caps,
out and over into space-
my dark matter.

Superman put his hand
in the fire to get the
glasses, but you won't.
yours is in your pocket,
clutching at the
diagram you've drawn,
cold yet safe like milk,
of a solar system
intractable,
where you are called sun.

you fell out of love
with my feet.
here and here, you hung
your wet thoughts
on my rickety line of
bones. i blundered on
in love. you spoke with
a shuttened mouth, of a
system too far above us,
as it was.

and futureless, my
crow's feet led you
outward to death.
oubliette i was and
dreadful, a field
of mines and mine
between
the brotherhood
and silver flesh
of girls unspoiled
that i once seemed to be.

your glinty thinking
is what i get caught on.
my sky-
a thousand lanterns
lighter.

here is the first part of a poem i'm writing with ross sutherland about the difficulties of relationships between men and women. it's to be an exchange and i'll update it as more gets written.

1.
gut parkas

they make parkas from gut.
gut parkas. you are mine, inuit.
this warmth comes out of you
like street-lamps.
you're a forest and a dial-
for centuries we've been kissing,
presently.

your sleeping arms. i can't
decipher them. your mind
is dark scrub and the tribes
that hide within it. i can see
their torches and their
white-as-skulls. we are waiting
for buses and trains and trying to
get out. i cry 82% of the time.

when we fuck we're not there.
you give me haribo from a plastic bowl
and tell me i look like a squaw.
i get lost in the artex, it's a vortex.
your fez is all crooked-
we are compost, limes.

2.
bona dea

in museums you tell me of bona dea.
i nod and nod, the warder in my cleavage.
we talk about breaking up,
the tongue on a tooth, tonguing it.
you are moving to greenland, then
salem. i admit that to carry on
would be pointless. it's pritt stick.

your jaw makes me wistful.
i like your teeth on the left, a
bolt of light comes off them.
if you were a bonfire then i would
be around you like naked girls.
seppuku, you whisper
like it would get you out of this.
i lick a tissue and clean your
mouth up.

we're science fiction, but
if anyone looks we're rom-com.
i dream of you in antlers and skin,
in winklepickers, kapow.
the criminalistics prove it,
that cup with your saliva,
the fingerprints in my hair,
you're in it.

3.
wagon wheel

you have your lunch-box
with your wagon wheel.
you offer me some by the crater.
i press my nose up to the glass of you
and take a reading.
you are telling me how
things go. i'm
not listening.

you do maths on me, like
magic tricks. you pull a rabbit
out from my double-breasted,
it's a sure-fire winner.
i am in a world of sounds,
bright shouting. it's baltic.

i buy you glittens and dwarfodils.
you hit me with your spork.
i'm wearing jeggings and a coatigan,
half way there.
we're hybrid, spliced,
men of many moons-
through the january stabbings
we're ancient.

This weekend I went to the horniman museum which is now my favourite museum of all time ever to take some photos for my book Tunth-sk. These are the ones i like best- though the human jaw one is sexiest i reckon.

Just so I can stop thinking about it. It is actually boring now I say. I think I even mean it. Errata say that she definitely didn't lose her virginity when she was 9 in the treehouse, he just put it in. That doesn't count does it? We disagree and agree all at once. Since then, since before I think. In a clammy old garage I looked up in the sky and whispered to him: Hello boy I say, I wonder where you are? We write lists of every boy we ever fucked but they blow away over the balcony into the pool.

Mum and her straight back. Good posture like me, she say. Ballerina style. She walked up and down with Bird. Bird was 3 days old and knew it, but not much else. My tits were hard as toads. My daughter is usually as thin as me, say ma. Look at her now! E-normous! she say. I blink but I am cut in half and can't feel much else. The dads kept coming in to see the mums. My mum brought me walnuts. She gave me these cups that go in your bra. They catch the milk she say. Drip, when your baby cries, they drip. I won't manage I say. Don't be stupid she say, you just do. You're not the first woman to have a baby AND YOU CERTAINLY WON'T BE THE LAST.

I stare at families like they are fish. I watch them drinking tea from each other. Here and there a man lifts a child high on his shoulders. Definitely more family than me and my 1.2, the missing element of husband. Husband. Yes, but is he husband material? the girls say. I say well yes, he is made of matter- he is husband substance. They are bored of my unravelling. The villa is throbbing with chat and the linear equations are all wrong. I am pinned onto the holiday like an example of a badly tied bow-tie, the anti-princess. I am stuck in the cinderella phase, my glass shoe fogged up.

MILF. You're a MILF they say. Thanks I say. Men like it, the milkiness. I am the Lady of the House of Sleep, good and bad. Bird is the real child though, and that upsets them. The magazines say if they love you they will love your child. That's a lie but I haven't the heart to tell 'em. It is bound up with the equations and hard to put a finger on. Love is like time, and people know fuck all about that. It moves in the same way and is unreachable. The girls don't believe me, they think I am on the unravel again, childish. I probably am.

you keep coming back
in a different guise.
first you were blonde with
the curly wurlies,
but now you're dark with
bloody lips and
a geographic tongue.

next you're bound to be
shimmery, so far
a blood-fluke that ghosts
inside me and talks me up.
i will be beautiful
for 0.5 seconds
in a wrist-grip called wow.

we will drink spaghetti and cry.
i'll be crime scene tape
wrapped round your head-
your eyes will be eggs
smashed into girls
from car windows.

you can tell me your
ronald mcdonalds,
and i will slice you
with the letter knife.
one moment you will think
i am the one but the next
you will think i am not
the one.

i'm rotting in front of you
of course. you undo my
bra with one hand,
i think thats new.
if i close my eyes
i feel all the mouths
and punctures
that ever were-
my skin, dreadful with joy.

i have this collar and up it
rises around my head like
a ruffle. i am a ruffle.
it is a fashion halo. i am fashion

ed. girlcore.
we pushes the dough into
a diva. washed-up i certainly am

not! i can hold my own
hem. up round my ears. there's
my frillies.

but don't shout about it.
sit with your skirt firm
over your knees. don't be needy,

learn about their passions. rage-

find out what makes them tick.
put on yr suspense belt.
keep it all tucked safe in yr
filofax.

be sistrly to yrself
and blood like cupcake mix
on your licky tissue
will follow.

you open your mouth into a yawp,
gaffer it up and hit yourself
with a tuning fork. grnnn

did your mother not?
you suckle on and tell us
the results. we are winning you say-
our team .

i turn sideways in the mirror to check
my belly. it's still there.
i think to myself i am a landslide,
bright as a butchers window .

your shock is a big dark dream-
words take you outward i have sin it.
sin it.

the position you occupy is one of
someplace.
you say poetry & i do.

where i am not
whittling you take the
pocket knife and pocket

it. deep in your warlock apron

twisting
on yr pitchfork.
i wouldn't put it

in the past you
held this walnut with
cc'd fingers

and cracked it til out came
fireworks
of tired trumpets.

we go upward on and in my
dreams you appear
entirely.

i hesitate to say that we
wouldn wouldn't would
i hesitate

too. say! we may be
two sides of the same
groin-

ze portcullis, la reine