Quarrymen

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

We wake, shale-eyed,
clutching at cold, sharp edges,
 

pebble-smooth warmth
eloping with sleep.
 

Dawn finds us on our knees,
scrabbling in the grit,
 

searching for crude tools
to chip away the grey.
 
 

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free verse of the unfettered

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Not all things can be contained:
casketed in rhyme, scanned into
a neat line, strait-jacket-strapped,
iambic packet-wrapped –
 
 

the way
summer butter
++++++++s l i d e s
into beachfire toasted muffins,
 

the hush of a shared
alpaca blanket as it
+++++++++++silks
against salt-naked skin,
 

or you, in the morning;
charcoal lashes
++++++++lifting
through a sweat-glistened fringe.
 
 

Ritual

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Lacquer clogs my early morning mouth.
Spitting curses and acetates, I watch
as her barely-there bottom
 

perches on Kohl-smudged porcelain,
spidery legs dangling from the
toothpaste-tinged rim.
 

Eye-liner daggers drawn,
parrying tongues and tangling elbows
we jostle for space and giggles,
 

jousting in a lotion-cluttered arena,
hairspray mace and mascara lances –
fighting for glass.
 
 

Sinkhole

Dreading dawn’s vertigo ache of first-wake light,
sound bite quietude a hushed interlude
as carnassials gnaw at gut.
 

Nausea burns constricted throat,
fingernails scrape at chalk dust entrails
of a dismantled reality.
 

Cotton-sheathed, saline-soaked wretch,
wracked and ruined, slinks back down
into caliginous midden.
 

Though light climbs agile through the blinds,
the damned diurnal will not dredge up
the dregs of fragmented flesh today.