1
Thirty seven shades of grey to paint it with,
a substance that sticks to blank walls better,
better than these grey words unable to give
this poem the tone, shape, and weight of it:
Picture - emaciated shaved stick men dead,
not sweetly-sick and gingerbread, hand in
hand, walking through a hole in the clouds.
Instead, picture a river crossing on a fox's nose
for a mouthful of broken buttons and bones
as yellow star footsteps crush calcium shells to sand.
I look up, watch from the rock on the bank
as sick men dead, their skeletons still cased in itching skin
walk, heads in hands, to shed each earthly tingle.
Their skin is stretched to the seams of experience,
hollowed eyes expect a final metamorphosis
to rip away the layers of memory locked
in each dissipating cell dusting the crisp air.
2
It is the same as when I watch my catalepsy
and in each seizure, my dark angel feeding
on the chemical waste of catalysis. A catalyst?
Rebirth then, the sky filling with my gluttonous
clouds, sucking misery through yet another straw.
A miscarriage. The juice in my new dead body
is not the elixir of liberation, but a botanists brew,
a time released liquid mixture in an alchemist's phial,
to make just more skin and bone and body and bile.
I am sick of Frankenstein and Holocaust and look
for the scent of ylang ylang, lavender and frankincense,
not found today in my words or thoughts, but each
dripping twice as essential oil, mixed in with the paint
on the palette-knife. Around this sharp implement,
I am reminded that painters live longer than poets,
which is why I start now, to write this out - to find
that it has just been written.
