ECHOLOCATION

for SM

This was our way of keeping in touch.
Touching base with the time.
The time I had woken before sunrise.
Sunrise today is at 07.33.
At 07.33 you were frying eggs.
Eggs were eaten at 08.10.
08.10 in two separate counties.
Counties that yawned the country open.
Open the curtains, 08.22.
08.22, clocking off.
Off into the day like a train.
Trains of thought that spirograph back.
Back out and back into the dusk.
Dusk, 16.14, and a prayer to home.
Home, where it is just gone sunset.
Sunset today is 16.36.
16.36 and I go outside and watch bats.
Bats echolocate here and in Yorkshire.
In Yorkshire are you hearing this?

SPACE INVADERS

for SM

The docile turds that curl from under skirting boards

at night, then labour round the carpets and laminate

like ponderous, fecal figure skaters, are pernicious,

though they seem dumb. I catch them by the fridge,

investigating seals with probing stalk-eyes, hunting

weaknesses in pizza boxes left in slime's reach.
Aliens, that come from Mars to drain the juices

of your fruit and veg, may slither by your genitals

as you sleep. You will know they've been by morning,

when a semen slick is pooled around your thigh

Their vapour trails that start and end at nothing are a threat:

you never saw me coming and will never see me leave.

VILE AFFECTIONS or A TONGUE TWISTER

for SM

Shut them in,

With their triumphs and their glories and the rest.

Love is best.

— Robert Browning

Lips, interlacing labias with lips, and labias

of lesbians, lipped and licked and interlocked.

The love of lesbians on tongues and lips

and clitoris and clitoris are licked and rolled

like tongues that flit like hummingbird wings

over labia and loll like bodies rolled together,

linked and locked. The legs of lesbians laced

and licked and kissed, the skin, the labia,

the clitoris are kissed and kissed. The love,

that locks the lesbians in linked embraces,

lifts the vulva and the pelvis into orgasm, is Bliss.

URBAN LEGEND

for SM

The only urban legend I believe
is that deadly spiders travel 
from the tropics in banana crates 
and are hiding under buckets 
in our cellar–head or shed 
to bite our fingers when we need
to mop the kitchen.

I have seen them, and their nit-like
bodies, pretending to be hands
in webs as wide as duvets
underneath the floorboards.
At night they come up
through the carpet like dragon's teeth
and scurry and creep up the walls
and in shoes. 
Our feet are afraid of death.

Nothing can kill them. They live
in my dreams and are covered
in neon stripes that say,
in flashes of yellow and red,
We are coming for you. We are coming
over continents in bunches
of bananas to murder you.