Hair-dye.

Every time you dye your hair

Everything changes.

Polaroid flashes steal away

Baths of crimson red,

Sluggishly exploring your

Pulchritudinous membranes

On incandescent pictures.

Carcasses of bobs and curls,

Battling for voices,

Lay scattered and

Consigned to oblivion,

Slaughtered by

Paranoid screeching engines

And  schadenfreude.

Mother whines at

Tarnished towels,

In a marriage of

Bleach and beats

And warmth,

Finally.

I woke to find

Luscious spirals

Wrapping themselves

Adoringly around me,

Senselessly,

A thwarted panacea.

You recoiled

From maggot feasts

In your mind or

On the pavement.

And she glared at me

Through cruising blinks

On frightened eyes,

And cut it all off.

Wife Beater.

A wife beater sits, wearing a wife beater, downing a wife beater.

Slams his corpulent fists down angrily,

Demanding another,

Until the whole world goes blind.

Arguing over the purchase of over-priced tax-free minty breath,

Weeping and cackling fiercely as

Money slipped through his limp apathetic fingers,

Soot snug beneath his clammy nails.

He paddles through this familiar pool,

Laser green and indifferent,

Gasping, giggling.

Infancy creeps up, curling the tips of his desultory

Chapped and cracked lips.

Grey roots standing tall,

Armed with bulwarks

Battling time.

She sat

Pigtails and buckle shoes,

Watching,

Enchanted by the decadence,

Nauseatingly thrilled at her own youth.

We are immiscible.

I gulp us down with emulsifiers but, ultimately,

We split.

Films.

I want you to be miserable like me.

I’ll hide your cream and pretend he’s mine,

Steal his long words

That made us so unhappy.

I adore your tarnished lungs,

Sluggishly inhaling boredom.

Caged in wild melodies,

I ate the key and forgot.

Three in a madman’s attic,

Rummaging through overflowing beige boxes

That tasted like pancakes and old bathrobes.

Silky ectoplasmic flesh,

Electric like his father’s stanzas,

Verses of wisdom flew like doves

And his mutilated larks.

Softly outspoken and

Spent.

Caustic lichens reveal your

Amoeboid excuses,

Forgotten as the tide gulped them down

Like moribund, growler cakes, silly and tasteless.

Projections of sweet celluloid images of sweet ideals;

Sweeping proboscis lunges out from his body

Protruding, Infringing,

Selling pageless books on the side of the road,

Gasping fanatically beneath embalming helments,

Absent-mindedly kicking coffeepots on our way to seclusion,

Led to believe in joy at bus stops and romance,

Typed angrily on plastered buttons,

Clicks of misunderstanding,

Horses and carts in mixed up orders and hums

Of hazy jazz in Roman notebooks.

I'll write you off.

Three in a Studio.

Caked in face-paint,

Insignia of art,

Or merely of fear.

Clamour of yak.

Yakety yakety yak.

Aloof, a spoof,

You cackle and incriminate.

Her strokes caress,

Clumps of colour

Erode the shores of madness.

She laughs

And asks “is it alright?”

We shrug in flocks,

And gawp at charcoal brains.

And her, who sat stricken,

Conjunctivitis of perfection

Snarling from her absent eyes and

Bucolic morals,

And she always had

The thinnest paintbrush. 

Skeleton.

His lips quavered at the edges,

Cloaked in sepulchral balm

And tumescent tones.

Subcutaneous calamity seeps through dusty pores in

Achromatic skin ridden with dents

And crevices, in which I stored secrets that would have made you gasp.

Cold kaleidoscopic eyes,

Bore into me, Tuesdays and Wednesdays,

Prompt with taradiddle,

Histrionic in his soliloquies.

He despises me already,

I remember not why when I scurried and worried for years.

Voracious for what was left

Of his intellect.