Behold the dam
My unworthy teeth have built.
It does not hold -
We talk rich and act poor.

A hurricane, a spring tide
Will easily smash this flimsy fourth wall
To smithereens.
This futile struggle against the waters
Will not do.

No lives were taken
In the defence of this unworthy fortress.

Birth was and gave fuel;
Childhood transit.
The mob at the interchange
Fought, hurt, stole, ran,
A girl deported, escorted by invisible arms.

A ticket and she was off,
One of many maiden voyages.
The mob bade her farewell,
Waving admiringly,
A baby wailed
In perfect synchronicity with bells and gibberish.

It is night;
The black sky glows with neon nothingness.
A woman, round, refined, sips chamomile tea,
Her husband reading the papers.
Faint amber light envelopes them wearily.

Fifty one minutes past six in the morning
The train is one cabin short.
Papers scream outrage,
Newscasters express puzzlement,
The mob prays.

The missing cabin shoots onwards,
Shrouded by black in the noon sunlight.
It races to its destination,
Pathetic and small in the horizon,
The woman sips tea,
And her husband reads the papers.
A baby wails
In perfect synchronicity with the shriek of the train's wheels.

The days dance
Excruciating as fallen confetti.
Silence is a siren,
Not the playground it used to be.

Hunger is a landfill
With no reserve price
For Lady Marionette
and her stringless idol;

They long to be engaged.

Gas, lipids coagulate
This ugly mossing vessel
Rises reluctantly, rays rueful
Contorted,
Conflated with everything fungal
Then suspension, now sunken
Sediment never looked so bad.

Possessed by my own soul,
Please exorcise the
Shell
I tear skin from skull

Room is sticky, campbell-smelling and oily
All parodies me.

These words I used to write will sing no more
For no one's here and everyone is left.
These songs are haunted mansions on my cliff
Crumbling in derelict decay.

What will we do with all this broken wood?
Lonely normal snails are strange and meet.

So now you know,
So what else is to hide
When you flog and whip indiscriminately
This excommunicated horse.
This pinata is dead.

To be cold, to be empty because
Nothing will change.

To be unfeeling, to be black because
To be otherwise would make no difference.

To be alone, to wash white
To embrace
To fear
To need.

That I were not alive.

Electric,
You are my baby
Amp
Powered by battery
My violent ferocity.

Today, there was a eulogy
Seventeen babies
I packed them into two bags
Delicious crisp crackle of metalbone
Two proud towers left standing.