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.

It is the long road again, the one of
Blackened memories
Forced to wilt.
It is the road to compulsion, every face
Hope and disappointment carving
Deeper. It is tender
Intoxication
That calms the beast and brings it
To a dance. It is a
Swerving
Single lane of gravel, lights beady as the accusing
Eye of Cerebrus foretelling
Longer loneliness.
It is the road that sucks you
Dry of energy with each step.
Cars and eyes blind and run, but never one close enough
To claim the offering.
It is a road chosen,
Through sheer obstinacy and idealism, the one that
No one walks and
One walks all alone.

It is a road that you've been
On and off awhile, where music paints
A weak foreground, too watered to conceal
The lurid obscenities of the truth,
A Picassoesque deformity
Of perspective and truth.
This road leads to the end of walking,
To that which is solitary and taming,
Quiet and sweet. But
This road strengthens and hones your limbs,
So taut and sculpted
Like a honey horse, but who's looking?
This road passes many people,
Many tired, some tired of running,
Too few alone and walking it
For its own sake.

Are you leaving?
You can't expect everything to be fiction
Erased at will.
I'm retrieving
Every single contradiction
You ever spilt.
I remember
Your two heads lying
The sign of endless here.
Sole contender,
I have been trying
By dying alone in beer.
I want nothing
But to finish what we crossed
And already started.
Please stop laughing -
Your derision is coarse
And makes me smart.

The patient springs of honeyed voice
Belie the sullied scars rejoiced.
Conniving sweetness of this boy
And bashful youth to underscore
Celebrate tenacity undisclosed.

Your mouth, your heat, your purity
Disclose your love - this seraphim
Of long drawn sighs so delicate
This is a requiem for you, my dream
Ever lovely as tender wind.

Forgive me, my love, for I am young
And I desire the heat of freedom
Your everlasting fall is my humble descent
Deeper into warm embrace.

They are waiting
For me
Their mouths open, gaping
Tin love with thick voices.
The beast is never let in too soon
He waits outside for the night
He waits till just before dawn.

It was not you I wanted
It was the alcohol
It was the night
It was absolute abandon.

They are inching in by the yard
Taking over my lids, my fingers
Chrome shackles and smooth vermillion ribbons
And I cave in

My heart shall stop.

I say,
Fuck the establishment
Because I am a free woman
And your shackles are paper in my hands.

They say,
Come to class and take the exam
Because you are a student
And we are the school that never breathes a line.

We say,
You are the past
Because we are the future and we say you can shove it
And take it up your posterior.

They have their books, their notes, their endless assignments
Designed specially for excellence
Academic rigor and professional integrity
And their mundane chase for honours
Made routine by the year in year out stream
Of paupers
Hungry for paper and that meagre qualification
Not so meagre if you think about
Four grand to start with
Lots of green to throw around
Especially when you have no time to spend it
When you spend all your time at your desk
Your styrofoam prison
With your clients
All criminals, all tortfeasors, all contract breakers

But we, we are the free
We are the generation
And we say we rebel
We rebel!
We have our beer, our youth, our visions, our life
And we have our time to do what we want with
We are not bogged down by essays
Marking, grading, planning, scheming, thinking
We are not bogged down by the law
Because we are the free.

The face that throbs with red abandoned heat
With smooth green can of steel, chrome luxury
Your eyes white dancing girls that admonish
My small red window, yours are clean as teeth

Papers, books, words and endless ink
Fly like thoughts suspended in this room
Your hands are small and warm like sausages
My body overflowing in this cell

The polythene that covers threatens to burn
This smoke and malt, tobacco in its home
White torso and white suit deliciously
When hunger crashes, lit profanity

Your scraps my bane, your wooden mouth my store
Of cotton so inadequate and poor
But luxury whets and it wets my parched throat
With sore abandon, Golgotha, you are mine

Delicious sensitivity, this rich pink artifice
Wind cool and comforting
The rich textures of auburn atmosphere
Wisps that stroke and cascade
Down and around the nymph

Everything smooth, taut and warm
Heaven, you die and are reborn
Harsh cardinal black, why is this
The most sensual combination?

Floating, I am in a mist
Wrapped silky around me

So I went and collected my babies
Six of them, cold and inviting
Steel babies wrapped in their cardboard mittens
Loving and mine, all mine

They flow down my throat, chrome love
Rich as I guzzle them
My deliverance, my babies.

The heat,
The intensity,
The dark,
The feeling,
The rush,

A room, black, barren, cobwebs hanging and fleshy moths feeding
On salty parchment and the still-juicy curtains
Cold permeating through grills
Below the door
Through the lock
Fighting the cracks -

And then a spark.
Alcoholic ignition and the catalyst
It grows, a hulk, consuming
Taking possession it sets the room alight
Long delicious flames
Licking caressing covering
Destroying -

And the room says
Take me
Destroy me
Bring me down with you.

Exquisite, pin thin and painted
Iridiscent rainbows
Sweet and taut, supple like nymphs
Undulating in oil and sunlight
Oil poured in
Flowing like black honey
Eggshell cauldron
Bubbling in coarse barnacle-covered steel
Rotten and rotting limbs
Crimson, pus, the smell of sin
Violet lights shine violent on carousel mannequins
Beauty a lampshade for obscene fat caterpillas
Gorging on the fingers of blue black infants
Frozen in crusty history
Unnatural painful disjointment
Limbs torn out hanging by threads and tendons
Blue red and purple streams
Spiling life essence on hungry parched soil
Bone, smashed to dust and jagged pieces
A face so crushed
Like a can flattened brutally swiftly
Tanks roll over muscle and flesh
Rolling cacophoniously
The sound of death insane and flying
Floating persistent trails in the air
Cotton candy skyline of cherry and liquor
A life so well painted, so well made up
A well-told lie

The bell and the strings gather their armour
"Fight," they roar, and the strings fade away
But the bell keeps shrieking
A formidable banshee in red and black
Tearing my hair and ears apart with her cracking talons
Like an eagle

The one outside my door is especially
Persistent
She wants my flesh, she wants my flesh

She digs her beak in the back of my head
And with her thunderous black wings swipes away
Derailing any trains of thought
Crunching them swiftly and sharply

For moons she howls outside
Trilling, her universal cry
For loneliness, for liberty, for respect
For sisterhood

For moons she screams outside
Her gullet battered, her ears torn
Mutilating the world that turned its back on her

The ugly, the cheap, the dead
Writhing in cords and threads

The bell is everlasting, it goes on and on
More insistent than the longest string
Or the longest chord
Picketing with the sharpest fences
Its white revelry
Brings the living to their knees.

Lines, ice clear
Like the cold beating down on your heart last night.
Goosebumps push their chairs back and attempt to rise
But are firmly patted down.

Where careless is Freudian, and
Hidden is not forgotten, and
Performance is prophetic

I slide back down onto black vinyl
And watch the show,
Legs crossed, arms welcoming
Your sudden proximity
Smelling like a thousand green bottles of ecstasy

Shattered spiderwebs
Flowing unconscious into intoxication
Numbing, stirring and throbbing
Mixing life with dreams
Flying in the air
And landing on the cold hard floor with a thump.

Dim static sniffing yellow dust
Coagulated as green radioactivity.
Brute of a sun
Batters mercilessly.
Tarmac withers and lungs shrivel,
Head heavy like a falling house
Bricks assail and flog disintegrating soil,
Tumbling,
The dusty avalanche of legalese.
Trudge thickly in paper swamps,
Neverending, and it pulls you back down -
Rabid quicksand.
The shock resonates within -
One, two -
And it begins again.
The night and the day play games on the body.
Left, right -
And it begins again.
Our mere shells cracking
The ugly dehydrated crowbars of the desert.
And look, here, now,
The smell of fresh meat
Yet unwhittled by unfeeling tanks
Crushing
Tearing
Devouring like lions.
One, two -
And the bird flies like dried crepe.
People flank barren rivers,
Outlaws
In the human condition.

Cold blue air
The room of mist and haze
Hushed low voices
The adultery of the audience
Hastily pushing into corridors
Where warm air blows a sultry red

The lights dim and
People flow slowly out
Thin as clear white
In the glass cage
Smelling like a one year old

The painting stirs
Her eyes follow the last man
He is lust.
Longing for him
Metal frames pierce her body
The small fragility
Chinese rice paper with beautiful corrosion

Lovingly created and refined
Worked on and displayed
But willingly on sale

Her hair falls like black tears on a white sheet
Incongruous thoughts
Like fragments of glass
Abandoned carelessly
A deadly lattice of lace
Smashed and