LITTLE BIRD

for MH

My nanan
is just a little bird
these days.

She is a birdcage.

She is so small
nobody knows
if she is in bed or not.

She is a pile of sheets.

Her heart breaks.
She has pain
in her stomach.

The bird is trying to fly.

"FOR DANIEL RADCLIFFE" BY FRANK O'HARA

"A leaving word in the sand, odor of tides: his name"
— Thinking of Daniel Radcliffe

Daniel Radcliffe
actor
native UK
intrepid at being
everything
living yet

Requiring to know what
absolute excellence is? it's
definitely
contractable
loving other
infected
fabulous beings
feeling 
each is never not unfixed

ASH

The nursery was plagued
with white and black flecks
on the tender skins.
They had not hardened to bark.
The fingers had shed their leaves
and the limbs had shrunk.
Stumped to obscure shapes.

They tried burning the bodies,
but the disease spread flies
through the forest
of sparks and smoke.
Everywhere foxes and rabbits
squealed from the spiral.
The charred witness of the trees.

MENIERES

for SM


I was helicoptering over the Gambia,
the blades whirling around my head, thundering
the dust up in windmills and eddies.
My ears were spitting white hot sparks,
the air cleaved open by the chopping rotor
and I was violently sick. I was looking
for something that didn't move. Something static.
The world was a tumble drier. Churned blankets
and clothes. A pile of rags caught up
in the agitator, turned. I was falling out of the sky.
Spiralling down. Corkscrewing pavements
and smack I was under. Diving bell deaf.
At these pressures you're listening through wool.
Movement is slower. You're floating
among the fish with hook teeth and marble eyes.


*update! Thanks to Spangle McQueen now with sound: Click Here for Soundcloud

This poem was comissioned for charity by Spangle McQueen. It is about the condition Meniere's Disease and the funds raised by the poem will go towards the Meniere's Society. I would like to thank Chris Packham and the forum members of Meniere's Disease UK.

LOVE POEM (TO THE ONE I LOVE)

I wish that your eyes would fall out
and all your teeth blacken and your hair
would grow greasy and thin or come off
in clumps in the shower, where red swirls
the water from the blood that would puther
from your burnt, peeling scalp and your face
would turn jaundice and bloat like a corpse.
I hope you get cankers and lesions, pustules 
in your armpits and kneepits and groin.
I want you to pant, knocked sick with pain,
fall bent like a coat hanger in arthritic agony,
go bunion, go bone, a death marionette.
Then will I come and rub oils on your flesh,
kiss life to skin, raise dead and you'll thank me.