The Black Returned To Take You Back

I chose you
– defective disciple,
over the priest, grandparents,
my own mother
when she wasn’t filling the flapping
mouths of other peoples seeds.

You chose me
– the bastardised baby,
linen-white orphan, quiet (soon to be
quieter) catholic spawn.

Feeding, feeding, feeding,
met with six-year old, high-nosed revulsion.
“They will say she looked lovely and slim
in her box”, you said. I willed it to starve.

To shrink this magnetic tube
that drew your metal to its belly. This trunk
of rare fruit with its barely healed umbilical handle,
uninteresting limbs, two activation buttons
to make the doll jolt, to make the skirt hitch
and drop. Such a tease, wasn’t I?

Who knew lullaby’s could be darker than sleep –
the flat crotch rub,
the pinched breast chaf,
stone-workers hands,
fingers like files.
The smell of dry knickers
on your face.

You left a hole in the night path
that used to gulp me every time – fucking
cold men like a succubus, fantasising
of pillowy female arms.

Add twenty to the six, twenty-two to the four
and thirteen to the thirteen. Superstition
is not your friend now.

This is your exorcism, god-substitute,
of your sad bones, scuffed neck,
musty, moth skin and throttled heart.

My new chest heaves and hauls into every day,
like a great sea, breathing rivers of fire.

As yours gropes like lead rainwater down
choked drains, pipes and sewers.

The sunken only rise in death
to meet their own entropy.


Forkis.