Psyche Lights Her Lamp

Oh, if I see your window
Baby, do you feel low
Waiting on your fear, no
Waiting on me

‘Lamplight’ by David Essex

Her bedside lamp wears a stocking mask,
a disguise donned in haste, as we spin
our clothes like sycamore seeds and fall
in the gauze-grey light, in the spring song
of a single mattress, where Teddy
Ruxpin once told his tales and listened
to her secrets. Fall as arrow-struck
lovers and land on memory foam
in a miasma of Hugo Boss
and stale sweat, a ball pool of biscuit
crumbs, where we flounder and gasp as pale
as stranded seals. Our cries are tuneless
honks of passion: mouths like two Dysons
sucking up dead skin cells, as we grind
our pelvic bones as if striking flint
to spark a light. Her pupils spiral;
her eyelids are windmills fluttering
on a sandcastle. Her face flickers:
the kohl-lined beauty of an ersatz
Egyptian princess in a silent
film, whose cupid’s bow fires flights of four-
letter grunts. And when she cups my face
to lift it as a chalice to lips
that would sip my jugular for wine,
she strokes the bluebeard of my jutting
jaw and looks into my unfixed eyes,
which glisten like slugs on the moonlit
leaves of my cabbage head. While she climbs
the slippery slope towards a peak
still lost in cloud, she clings to the crags
and outcrops of my back. An ascent
she makes alone, as I concentrate
on sawing wood: buttocks back and forth,
far from the slap and squelch of fecund
foothills. So far between us, I bridge
the gap with a message sent in waves
of DNA. Dash, dash, dot. I wring
the chicken’s neck in a voudon rite:
back arched and shoulders locked, I shiver
round the cold fire, the white hole blooming
in her belly. I see no shooting
stars, for love is not a firework show,
nor writ large upon the firmament,
but a fever dream, a contagious
touch between two victims of a blood
disease. We are bed-ridden, burning
and delirious. She rests her head,
with its spiked crown of sweat-permed ringlets,
on the drumskin of my chest and taps
an anarhythm with fingertips
caulked black by last night’s polish. She snorts
my hair away from nostrils dainty
as two Dresden china teapot spouts,
while I roll an errant pube like leaf
tobacco on my tongue. Tell me, tell
me you love me. As a gamekeeper
sets his traps, she places words – all steel
teeth and hidden spite – and waits for me
to trip the trigger. The temptation
to say No sits on my face, silent
as a black cat come to steal my breath,
so I feign sleep instead. Though climate
change may thaw the polar ice-caps, it
grows cold between us: her nipples spike
my side like icicles and the damp
patch below her perineum forms
a skin of frost. There is a shadow
creeping up the wall, as sinister
as Nosferatu on the staircase
and I scent her thighs anew: the scorch
of nylon as her stocking is drawn
to the electric bulb, like the wing
of a monstrous insect: Mothra flies
into the atomic, flaming rays
from Godzilla’s maw and immolates
itself in the final reel. My snores
pronounce the curse of Venus: to walk
the world in pursuit of one perfect
face, only to find it comes attached
to this fucked-up soul with a not-so-
mythic quest of my own. But I have
her number, so might phone tomorrow.