And saw the skull beneath the skin;

And breastless creatures underground

Leaned backward with a lipless grin.”

“And yet forgives the Butchers knife.”

“Westron wynde, when wilt thou blow,

The small raine down can raine.
Cryst, if my love were in my armes
And I in my bedde again.”
Sing goddess of a valley
Where trees thick the ground,
They huddle and twist,
Beneath hills that leer under the scouring of the wind,
At night, black clouds watch the rain thrash
And rendlings clatter through the blasted heather,
Bertilak’s keep bursts from the ford before the falls.
On the side of the valley with the evening sun,
He hunts for deer and boar,
And for the wild bulls at feast time, when the news
comes in from the cold.
Sing of broken wagers and hidden favours,
The green girdle that three kisses hid,
Shamblefolk and kickers and feelers
And the feeling of fingers through rusted knickers
And the Baron’s court and the ravens ranged the
forests,
That led to the mud and the cockles,
Where undines find out that men don’t breathe in the
wet,
And watch the bodies float as they wail and scream
into fishermen’s nets.
Triton smashes black ships on black rocks
And a woman stands clifftop, sodden with rain,
Dripping with the blood and the fog.
Walls close in.

Sing goddess of a valley where the trees thick the

ground, huddled and twisted.
The ground scratches and cries under their feet, grey
and greyer in the dark, new car smell, killing jars.
Round the shed that time, playing check up till they
caught you.
“dirty.”
It felt heavy in your belly, and open, and don’t tell
mum. Please don’t, that girl down the road she said
she didn’t like it, played it down school behind the
prefab and didn't like the tickle.
Their hands twist and flap at the ground. two boys go
over to another, half their age, and they hold his hand
on the cameras. From the magazine aisle to the old
rec, down into the woods, scheduled for clearing.
Sticks and stones.
Those fingers close on shoulders and air turns to wet
flesh, sodden and felted and the ground cries as they
come closer, scratches from their feet sharp and
shrieking.
“You dirty cunt.”
Wet pants.
Balls tight, high chested, the first fist feels millionaire
against the wet cheeks, and the second and the third
curl up the boy balled with his hands over his head.
A noise comes from a sliding zip and mud slap
sounds of piss that darkens his shirt, those ones you
get for big school, colour of the sky in a dogshit town
Remember that boy who brought in his sample for
medical day, burst with a kick all over his homework.
The centipede clenches closer, one set per segment,
crashing jaws underneath the rocks, in the dark
places, where fat white eyes lie blind.
A syringe plunges into a shipmate’s patience. Good,
well done, sign here, relax, sleep, he looks after it all,
their angel they call him
They come closer, grinning tumours, cats fucking and
screeching, neck biting sharp, closing fingers, and
they grin close enough to see, wet eyes, wet lips,
tongues hot and pink behind broken commandments,
fangs shattered and rotten fish and carcass moans, and
the stink of shroud damp.
Breath heats the skin of your face, muttered slurs in
wet dreams, hard hands, squirts of hot and cold
sticking fabric to thighs.
And word for word, the blade chimes out Bach
backwards played on the bollards,
turn around and look, see the thing shrink in wardrobe
doors.
The sword sings blackbird clear, pie sweet, clear as
Svalbard summer, sweet as eye contact, six seconds,
seven, counting time in shared breathing, red faces
and bruised lips.
“come on, let’s go.”
.

Stations of the cross arrange in backwards fugue.

Walking slow and brave from Christmas feast to
block,
Pierced eyes and spears to trees,
Screaming at the sounds of a harp in a forgotten
meadhall.
Dragon, bridged by old one eye and John’s Satan,
a tall tailing at the end for contrast.
Masqued Oberon operating with Titania, Gloriana
ballet slippers kicking.
Strung up at the tower.

Mills spewed enough to prove evolution by natural

selection,
savaged to coal dust til they brought in those trees,
that flake their black
through the years,
and give lie to industrial camouflage.
They didn’t stop the mills, brought in workers who
didn’t know their rights,
For thirteen hour unbroken shifts,
shifting palettes of waste paper in the hot room,
forty three degrees in the summer.
Towers split the fields of corn and pasture
Belched out their soot.
Men and women went to churn the mush
to cash in the paper mill in the belly of the boiling
devil.
They clanged the door shut and pressed the red button
with the fat rubber cover.
They kept them on zero hours contracts and wouldn’t
let the native lads work the same rooms.
It hissed at night and sucked in the workers and the
digital silver in payroll and energy, and rates and
insurance, and didn’t pay rent or mortgage fees.

They grow in the hot and the dark

in the ghosts of clacking looms where boys and girls
in rags and curls,
lost limbs and fingers and lives.
Didn't clear out in time,
and women and men sold their pinched cheeked cutie
pie pouts
for gin and for three pennies
upstanding in the smell of piss round the back of the
pubs and palaces.
They grow
They grow from the cracks, showing in the gesso,
slapped over the premature mewling of the speed of
light
Which left its clues and its knots in the chords of the
heart strings and harpsichords.
They suck on the light and the warmth and the love at
the cracks
in the damp
and they swell and squirm on bloating hate
and people stare to the corpse fires in the river of the
sky
or the ancestor’s arrows and bows
or the furnaces of fusion, ten zeros bigger than the
back of the turtle they ride
Tectonic forces and gravity wells.
and the orgasm to lotus leaves.
Well,
the forest howls and a bone blackens to fever and
broken hearts bleed down steps and border walls,
and trains cross a continent to fuel fires that stink of
the ash of bodies
They tore them for the most high,
the man in the castle, bearded and bloody
at the top of the mountain, feathered in skin and big
banging
and screaming for foreskins or broken hearts
and begging gold in foreign lands
a smallpox blanket and death masks and a skull under
the hill at the end of the story.
Horses and men scream across the deserts and the
planes and the mountains and copper and cordite fill
nostrils and turquoise warrior burn out the children
downwind,
coughing the habanero from their lungs
in blood and blood and blood
or after the ash falls, black lung.
They grow and click teeth
and grow and extend beshitted kisses
to men who would make geldings,
between the legs,
between the ears
and they would lead and have led their eunuch herds
to willing slaughter and cage
Here or there?
Put in place and planing the edges to fit.

He left in the damp, feet wrapped from the chill. A

band round his arm smelled of rose petals and orange
peels and thigh muscles and a throbbing night, and his
mouth tasted of bile from the peat in the fire.
His shoulder felt tight from an air kiss, a shiver his
neck couldn’t shake.
The taste of the tower stuck to his tongue, sweat and
iron and moments of inertia.
The stone king had brought back the last of the feast
and a fox that barked and chattered with tricks
til they’d flayed it and left it to smoke and to cure.
Screamed and begged it had,
same as Nero’s candles that one feast down the
appian,
same as Roman quartered gunpowder sacks,
drawings of hangings and dungeons and autumn
tortures.
It moved to clockwork and scream and petrol, the
tower.
The forest stood at the foothills, corpse by copse after
the bridge from the four field system.
He saw a kite floating above a scuttle in the black
fourth burning,
painted still year by year,
as regular as the flooding of the eye,
black soil.
The unfilled garter burnt a line on his arm, to burning
face, and sweat at the bottom of his back, stinking his
underclothes.
The wilderness took him,
the forest levelled around him, old as purple.
Three kisses for a fox and a final feast, guided by
flashing eyes and a fireside promise almost a year
ago.
A thousand powers flicked into ones, into a string of
nothings. They built the network into Roman roads,
Persian system for the postal service.
They built it into a spider’s dome, a Medea’s web of
clues to set a solution to a golden oldie programme,
hierarchies of angels and algorithms at a bucky angle,
from ant to Adam to losing the ninth in the press of
black woods for a bag of silver from the mountains in
the middle of the atlas.
They reduced her to loving men’s lusting in the end, a
throw away line in a circle of hell reserved for pagan
women, babalon.
“The world tree lot or the Lemurians?”
“The world tree lot?”
Over in the rift, petrified roots spread into bedrock.
They measured the diameter big enough for a
shopping mall in the other place, one of the ones
between the mega ones, not yet swallowed up. They
use an equation to work out the height, touching the
clouds and tickling the thirty thousand feet crowd.
“The Asgardians?”
They put bones in the ground to play tricks, why stop
there when you can chuck in a tree that turns the scale
of the terror lizards and thunder beasts to myrmidons,
you could put a city in the canopy of something like
that.
“The Golden Church of Bramley?”
“Thule?”

Before the handprints on the walls, the thirty two

symbols you find all over the place between the
interglacials, before we had thirty two concepts to
scratch in charcoal and clay and madder, before
smallpox and mania conquered Eden.
The forest had places to hide, eyes peeping through
the leaves and vines. It had roots to catch and hide
sleeping striking snakes or silk burroughs of eight
legged queens, crowned in carnage.
“No, hang on.” He says.
Art got carried with them, before the calling of the
ocean, older than following the buffalo, elk,
mammoths.
“Global culture.” He says.
He raises his arms, looks down the blade of the
dagger, along the edge.
He says he once saw an afterdagger,
On top of a mountain with Red,
a storm fell and frigged about them. She took it from
a salamander's nest.
She knocked her ass on the toilet door, kissing him
“Shit." She said
She grabbed at the half brewed bulge
“Come on." She said,
Her tights slide down
bent over
she wets her pussy with a palmful of beery spit
And he pushes his cord against her ass.
“Stop.” She says
He laughs.
“Seriously.” She says.

Outside they flag taxis, smoking, squinting in the

street, swaying.
It shone, how clay shines in the wet, before the river
dries, how the blue against the shadows of the canopy
shines, how the lake glows, through the seven gates,

“Remember?”
“Wait, was that you? Did we do that yet?”
He raises his hands and drops the corners of his lips
in a shrug.
“well, this will have to do.”
He shakes the blade around in his left and drops his
arms, rests the tip on a papyrus.
“stolen from the secret wing of the British Museum”
He says.
He dips into a pocket and unwraps a square of paper
and holds out a feather.
“Get this ready.” he says.
He raises a finger to play with the dimple in his right
earlobe.
“Yes." He says
“Yes.”
He counts one, two, with his free hand, four.
“Okay." He says.
The thumb comes up and then he claps his hands
together. Thunder rolls.
“Red’s done the breach.” He says. “Come on.”
Rain turns the sand barren and it sucks in the light
and the water hisses loud so you have to stand close.
He shakes water from his hair with his fingertips and
points at the cubes of concrete and rock diced around
the jetty, an abandoned fishing rod shudders in the
wind, its line tangled around boulders.
The rocks feel slick with the lubrication of the wet
sand, rolling dust when your fingers slip.
He cuts a length of line from the sundered rod and
ties it in the space between two of the cubes, weighed
in place by a couple of burners from the lad at the
phone shop.
The sea crashed over sodden shoes, backs pressed
against the sides of the jetty, scratches through wet
cotton.
He smiles, water dripping from his lips.
He’d stopped on the way to scoop sand and shattered
seashells into a black bag, one of those you stuff into
your pocket when you take the dog for a walk, to sign
washed clean tree stumps and lamp posts.
He drops in three copper coins and drops it in the
boil.
“Any last words?” He says.
Sleeping knights in sunken underground bunkers
Flanked by dogs undreaming
and sleeping swords ,
They guard the ship,
Odin, Ganesh, Poseidon
One eyed one tusked trident windtalker
Daddy magpie
Open the gate
Oncle Cobra don’t be late
Papa kraken just won't wait.

On the beach two cars pull up, prowled up to the

ramp of the jetty. They flash on Van Halens, aircraft
carrier, soccer night floodlights. Men get out of each
car and watch a van shamble over and pour out
gorillas onto the sand. The light flashes from their
mesh and dull ablation. They roll from the door as it
slides open, knight sticks gripped in thick fingered
punching grips. They lope along the jetty.
He looks over the edge.
“Shit.”
The dagger in his left, he slides into the shadows of
the breakwater.
The pound of armour and flesh charges closer, rolling
and beating the ground. Thick masses of muscle,
overalls and plate, visors, swamp along the concrete
that spits into the sea.
Silhouettes of a landslide, the light grows brighter as
it sweeps stark on the folding fisherman’s chair.
“Come on." He says.
“Come on!”
The nightmares clang forwards towards the fall as the
men by the cars hold their hands in accusing fingers
full of lead.

She holds out an infusion that smells of ginger and

lemon in a rough ware cup. Her veil moves when she
talked.
“Here." she says
It tastes of geraniums.
On the screen the squad picks itself up and knuckles
and squats and lumber through the darkness,
scrambling over the edge of the camera and out of
sight.
The men with guns move in and out of shot.
The screen flashes off.
She waves an arm at a book on the floor.
In Grimmett Fell, on the Feast of St John Baptist,
A right hand spell brought the beats.
“Ready to walk the mandala?”

In a cave on the side of a mountain.

They pounded rocks on the walls and the bones, and

they painted ashes on their face, hot from the edge of
the fire. The walls danced to the smells of the meat,
carried far as two days. They’d run it down after a
night and smashed the panting thing’s brains in, broke
its ankles with their rocks.
They rubbed fat into their eyes at the tears from the
smoke and went into the dark places of the cave. The
fire had turned orange, dull embered, coals as they
came closer and painted their faces with the ash.
One of them began to sing
“I know the words, but these.” He says.
“Ace of cups came up again.” She says.
“Dress for May.”
“This too.” She says.
She reads some false cassandra from the scrap of a
magazine, take a break, chart, TV times, when did
you last flick through one of them Scorpios.
when did you last flick through one of them Scorpios.

Over in the North, giants sleep, banded by ancient

forests dreaming of war brides
burning great halls, red eagles and broken shields.
They fought the last time in the mist.
They threshed that day, until the sun broke and a rider
transfixed them,
a song of stillness, he’d learned it from a traveller in
the woods
a price of the night by his fire and a song of his own.
Song of Albion, turned to stone and crushed at a cliff
He gave it to her spun from a sliver of moonlight, the
song, still.
Her skin tasted of the cave, sheltered from the
cracking waves, outside the rocks, June afternoons,
too long in the sun, marketday when the harvest came
in.
The sound of insects, tearing paper, drowning
creatures, the sound of a profane claw seeps out into
space. It cries on the edge and comes from a place
that you can't point to.
“Archons.” He says.
Clerics scrape floors from another room, a hall, a
cathedral, packed with the bald and devoted, weeping,
smooth, smooth, smooth. They weep from hollow
eyes and cut throats, smooth the chant.

“King of rags, king of rags,

lock your homes, pack your bags.”

Locusts scar the land when they swarm, every seven

years. The first ones to slip from the ground dry their
wings in the sun. They take off, frantic from the
pincers of the ones behind, the swarm feats on itself
as it strips the fields bare, locusts. See plagues, see
egypt, see prophecy, see Mammon, see the kingdom
of someone else’s heaven.
The sound opens up, you can see it, it shifts and
unfolds and flashes, the arms of a mandala open out,
eyes blink and turn and the arms open. Come, come
closer, look awhile. The arms open and the eyes
blink, they focus and geological irises dilate and
contract and look back. The arms open, come closer,
look awhile
In the dark, in the dark a light glows a thousand
thousand away, thin, stretching, calling safety it
smells of raspberries. It loosens the weight, the
tightness in your arms, come, come closer, look a
while.
Fingers turn numb from touches from tentacle sins in
the gloom. Come closer and the light grows bigger,
older, shivering cold, come closer, let us keep you
warm.

“Hush sweetling, please don’t cry,

come and wear your crown of flies.”

The air thickens, nitrous oxide thick, ketamine thick,

is that dancing over there? Ketamine thick, is that
dancing over there? Is the dancing over? There,
Ketamine thicks the glue. Wait, wait
the light.
The light
wait
light
“Pay attention.” The thin man says.

“Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.”

The room focused, dust on the floor collecting in

trails of fluff.

“Health and safety notice, please do not sit on the

floor."

The management had signed the laminated poster in

times new roman, naked mannequins pointed to
empty clothes rails.
“Poster on order." It said.
“Cleopatra’s problem came down to the fact she had
no direction.” Red said.
“Atia had too much you mean?” He said.
“Those curses, creative as the bible.”
“Set them back at least.”
Nam Galenus é Sarano, Asclepiade, Cleopatra, &
aliis, medicamenta contra alopecia exscripsit:
iisdénique nunc solis nunc mixtis usus est. Sic enim
in libro Cleopatrae de ornatu scribitur: R. muscarum
capita.g.v. contere et affrica capiti alopeciâ laboranti,
& certò sanabitur.

Over the way, a woman speaks in punched out

syllables and moves her hands in time. The man
moves his lips in silence in response and she kisses
him on the sink, jewelled fingers on the back of his
head.
“pay attention.”

“find them, find them,

Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow” She says.

He points to a place in front of him and says the

coffee goes here, the glass of ice goes there, tea there
“Let the robot do its thing.” he says
“What?”
“The meta programmer, the shaman.”
“Never whistle.” She says.
On the table a set of cards, blue and red and yellow
backs, a sort of cross, they flirt in the breeze and the
top one lifts a corner.
“Pay attention.” She says.
The unholiest made these ones, fowl when he
straightened his face for a photographer, one for the
gossip rags.
He back and forthed with an heiress, dab hand with a
brush, and she painted the designs over and over until
the paint dried the messages.
The knight of rods, red headed rampiron, sword in
gripped fingers, face through the slit of his visor.
The hermit inverted,
the secret glimpsed hand of the racket of Maynard,
tickling up a black swan.
A catholic boy’s first kiss outside the vestibule,
outside the cloistered ones
first taste of probing tongue,
first bat at night, sailors delight,
the second mouse gets the cheese.
“Peanut butter in these post Shazzam times.” Red
says.
She holds her breath and swallows something and
points at the third card.
Defeat, touching bottom in the old canal, let go,
everest birthed itself after the death of the Tyrant
King, after ice and fire from the sky turned them all
into magpies, one for sorrow, two for chance.
The illuminated and the invisible swim the water,
follow the streams of bubbles to the surface, deep
breath time. Madness and enlightenment hold hands
down the path.
“Squeeky bum time.” He says.
He stands up and slings back the dregs of his coffee
and scrunches the stub of his super king and trots
inside. He leaves behind the signs on the white
porcelain, a city in the mountains, dust from the
South, biting insects, closing jaws, spilled tangles
spirals of the first law.
“See how that works." She says.
She swirls away the city with a tonguefull of her own.
“Transliterate to hexameter please.” he says and she
shrugs.
“Be grateful we don’t still get this stuff with a mirror
at the bottom of a well, polished from copper.” She
says.

“Come with us” They said.

She looked up from her letters, scratches still and
picked up her flute and followed the men.
Her father had a beard, not as red as his brother’s, and
had won him a wife for a cuckolding, and scars on the
backs of his hands and his arms and one on his chest
from a thumb width miss.
And he had gold, and he had ships and he had men,
and their souls to throw at the walls.
He had no wind East.
“Come with us” they say.
A cigarette drops and scratches out under the toe.
“what?”
“No time.” He says
“You know why” she says.
“The things that scratch your soul and keep you from
well rested waking, those replies each night, that
bring a twitch to a midnight liver, and the bile, and
just get in”

At the flat around seven or eight, up the stairs that

wind around the wooden lift. Paper street, one
entrance, enough front to park a big cat.
She takes the key.
“Wait.” She says.
She dashes and he whistles and stabs at the main
road. It smells of fried potatoes and dust and dog piss.
A billboard along the way says, “redefine quality of
life.”
Traffic lights, nail salon, chicken shop, bargain
booze, bus stop sign.
“Armed police patrol this area. Unpredictable times”
She’s got bags of salt when she gets back.
They draw a circle with the salt around the two cars
on the other side of the street, a Japanese and a
German, and draw lines along the ends of the road.
The white crystals brilliant and shush from the tears
of the bag.
He spits salt on the ground.
“Give us a hand." He says.
He pants at the door and holds out a bag.

The rest of the ouija board?

Madmen and mystics swim the waters thrashing or
floating.
Schizophrenics and sorcerers cleaved by swimming
class.
Where had you gone, the day the city fell?
Bright, bleeding walls, beshitted and besooted,
the siege had ended after tenth year.
Ten years since a besotted boy sold an apple for the
swing of a hip.
They smashed the children’s heads into the rocks at
the end,
that baby boy who smiled and wept at a crest,
the Myrmidons did,
all of their kind.
The gods died that day,
chests crushed by the city stones.
They’d thought they’d won that day, and they left
burnt offerings in the charcoal of the gardens, and the
slums, and the theatre.
They gloried in freedom.
The difference between dictatorship and democracy
lies in the time between legitimacies, at death or
around a leap year give or take. They thrash into the
voting booths and choose their game, no time out, no
quitters, and they started to lose. They choose the
colour of the collar and the rings on the hands that
hold the leash, and they beg for kings, call from the
presses and the polls for long lipped tongue orchids,
call for the purple and the vermin they use to trim it.

They’d thought they’d won that day, and they left

burnt offerings in the charcoal of the gardens, and the
slums, and the theatre.
They gloried in freedom.

They thought they won that day and left a

crematorium and a charnel house, the smell of fat and
bone on the bonfires,
funeral pyres for the gods,
the ones left over,
the ones waiting.

Human sacrifice by proxy in the throat slit beasts,

and oats
and honey.

Someone fell today, a fading black spot,

fading, and when dark came, clattering teeth and
bones kept the voices quiet.
They leave behind flecks of stone and always
the butcher marked bones and handprints on walls in
the darkest places,
the hollows in the body of the earth.
Hearts and whispers orchestrated the shadows into
playing batteries of drumming angels.
Hark!
Men and women tore their skin as they crawled
through the tunnel under the walls,
their breath hacking, eyes burning and bloodshot from
the smoke and the terror and tearing out their hair
where all the old women had been raped and
murdered before their lament began,
the young ones too.
The city burned over the horizon,
over the mountains it choked the air with its stink.
They looked at their hands,
at the dust on their hands,
and the blood,
at the dust on their hands,
and the blood,
and the scratches on their ankles or the blades of
unquenched swords.
They carry daggers and bows and flasks of wine,
a gold change, the curse of Diche.
“Which white horses? Anchises?” He said
“Civil war or tyranny?”
“Crete or Italy” He said.
The tigers of wrath fed that day on the horses of
instruction, song of experience.

Man closed himself up that day,

until he saw everything through the chinks of his
cave,
his safety against these things older than the axe
heads
bees and milk heavy women they dig up ,
older than the thirty two things they find around Paha
Sapa,
before the dreamtime old,
older than an apple or a fig or pomegranate and the
thickness of soldiers’ sighs running in blood down
palace walls.
Hot thighs for a sighing priestess
No,
No,
blood on the altar and the wrath of grey eyes.
The mould came back again, in the corner of the front
wall, behind the cupboard, keep the door closed in
the ark please, Napoleon hides under the futon.
Somewhere a psychologist rolls a dice,
somewhere a king rapes a wife.
And the wind cries madness,
paralyzed in the choice between a big bang and a big
mac, royalty with cheese
Bangladesh or China for your buy to forget gladrags
and gilded clobber
Left or right?
Tight balls and sweating hands at a cross in a box,
confession day choices.

Sing goddess of stolen fries,

and butterfly claps and kisses,
sing of killing jars and the birth of tragedy
balance the Sun and the king of the mad,
tearing a kingdom from human flesh,
bread and wine,
twice born
He came from the East,
a thousand generations before,
a flood had smoothed between the legs the people left
undrowned
Smooth behind the eyes,
smooth between the ears,
smooth smooth smooth.
Somewhere in France, needles click to the rhythm of
last words,
and in a madhouse a man raves
chews off his tongue to visions
of frigging and sucking and rutting
Blood and cum and blancmange
He writes in filth on the walls
they chain him up
they beat the bottoms of his feet on Thermidor the
first,
and still they hide his books under mattresses and
whisper his words in bookshops and bedrooms.
“Fuck my eyes.”
“Licking at his beshitted ass”
“The crown, the sword, the scales, the cloth.”
“Are you coming or what?” He says.
Pray to papa to open the gates he says to hold on to
your howdah, grab a tusk.
Red drives while he calls out in the night.
“Jimmy’s got the whooping cough,
Timmy’s got the measles,
Here we go round the mulberry bush”
He sings it out into the sky twisted from the window,
rake at the gate of hell.
“Pop goes the weasel”
Seven times, then he tumbles back into the carseat.
“clunk click every trip.” He says.
He pants to catch his breathing and shakes out his
shoulders, rests his feet on the dash.
“That should do for now.” He says.

Beyond the stars, the King in Rags moves

how vinegar tastes, how garters feel.

“Well done.” He says.

She’d won on roulette at the casino and bought

margaritas with a stack of chips. They made them
with sour mix and they tasted of glory and victory at
the altar of an unknown god, robes, moon crowned,
the polished skull of an apex beast, bear, elk,
mammoth.
Do you know when we got here? The people before
the cross, before the stars, the ones before the ones
who chipped obsidian, before the ones that took a
murder cult to the jungle, fed on the blood of cities
and a sort of Vienna hot chocolate.
They carried peat, or certain woods they knew,
certain words, smoking across frozen oceans, or they
left footprints on the beaches where the kelp bridges
took them. Wolves followed and sucked the marrow
from the bones they smashed with rocks. They ate
them all, the sloths and the big and the small. They
cut down the two trees, and they knew, and they
prayed at the altars of murdered divinity. So it goes.

The first gold from across the horizon,

fought from Typhon, the glory of a rose at the end of
a chariot race.
In a city of gods, hacked and mined and quarried
from salt and the bodies of slaves,
choose Blue and Red.
Remember the way the stadium shone?
“Yes.” She says.
“This is for you.” She says.
Lines, intersecting ink in mandelbrot shards,
golden pinecones.
Get them ready keep them clean, stay vigilant, signed
the management.

The light hit their faces through the windshield, the

streets bright as salt, and she asked for a cigarette,
took it lit it and sucked at it while she drove.
“You read Noam?” She says.
“Collaborator.” He says
“Accelerationist!” She says.
He laughs and she says that the illusion of choice
exists in the vacuum of real freedom, only one game,
and let’s face it, you didn’t get chose to bat, a fielder
at best, or bench, anyway, you heard the spiel before
the coke pepsi wars of the counter revolution, all over
the wink and a nod from a drunk reptile, what a mess.
That whole thing.
So you want to play a different game, like him? Or do
you want to go back to the boxes to drink champagne
and banana daiquiris, or sit at home in your flat with
cups of tea, too pisspot for hobnobbing?
“You must have been queen of Croydon.” He says.
Big hands and one eye and head breaker,
watch them perched on rocks,
still,

breathing getting heavier,

until they erupted into rocking and screaming,
grasped the stone over head and smashed it into the
trunk of the fallen tree,
each time,
before they went off into the trees,
alone or ahead of a troop of their followers, flea
pickers, fighters and fucks.
Big Hands told her what she’d heard from Whitehair.
The beast came in the dark the first time.
Beasts had come in the dark before.
It took two of the carried children, Dry Tits screaming
at her wet guts in the ground. The others raged and
beat the ground with their feet and stepped off the
trails for long enough to break baited breath and dash
into the group, eyes in the dark they’d seen before.
The beast came again that night, took High Climber.
They moved through the forest, back to Old Place.
They found a nest of bees and honey and that night
Honey Sniffer wailed in the jaws of the creature, dead
in the dark while the others threw stones and
screamed.
Half of them shouted their arrival at old Place, trailed
in with their eyes down, heads bowed
In blooded arrival, wounded.
ScarChest met them, squatted, and showed teeth,
pointed away from the water, away from Old Place,
away from the weaned and untitted playing in the
shallows.
Cobra Brave came behind ScarChest and rested a
finger on his back, squatted behind him and drew a
knuckle through the litter.
They had died in the forest before every breath and
after every death. Births came and beasts had come
before. Why didn't this one leave? Belly full to move
on for a mate.
Here at Old Place, they ate acorns and honey, and the
beast came again. they threw stones and lashed with
the fragments,
cracked to shatters
and that night and the next night another died, this
time to the roaring and blood of the creature. They
followed the drops through the trees in the morning.
It lay along a fallen trunk, licking a tongue through
the fur, shining with pain. It took Long Arm by the
neck and left her gurgling in the roots of a tall tree
and ScarChest and the others lashed out with curves
of black stone. Its teeth flashed as big as the world,
and the first Big Hands, silent, grabbed at a rock and
launched himself from the root ball of a shattered
tree. He smashed the rock into the creature’s eye
socket, into its jaw, into its skull, into its jaw, into its
skull.
It screamed louder than thunder and crashed into the
undergrowth. They found it that afternoon, wheezing
and blind and they pulled out its teeth and ate the
meat.
Each day,
Big Hands, the first,
he smashed a rock into the loudest tree,
the beast did not call other beasts.
“So wait, they found religion?”
“No, stories.” He said
“Stories of a ballsack god.”
“And so ended the golden people, who ate only
acorns and fruit fallen from the canopy, for whom
death had the meaning of a mosquito on the neck,
nothing more to seem, destroyed by the rage of gods,
their jealousy.”
“Cuckold double penetration.” Meadowfoam said.
Today the French army played DaftPunk while
Caligula sat in his tower, rambling about collusion
and glass.
“Have you seen the Thule lot?” He said.
“Chariot. calling it.” Red said.
“Oh, all right.”
“Purple liver, daylight owl?”
“So they decided to patrol the seas.” He said
Red stopped at the lights.
From basement to bedroom, clicking at blue lit
keyboards, some Frog worshippers got the attention
of those clowns up inside the Pole. Someone told
them about crowdfunding, so they got themselves a
boat, bought it cheap in Sri Lanka, they got it from
Kidney Vetch, remember him?
Kidney stepped through the doorway into the bar,
Outside smelled of fish and drains and spices and tea
and inside smelled of cigarettes from soft paper
packets
They turned up in their cars driven by men with grey
gloves, imagine, in that sweat, and the Oddfellow
with the black shirt said the specs. He had a black
mirror as a stretch goal and an othermagnet where the
compass should go, one of those new plastic ones.
Now, the Baptist ticker spews tape the whole time, he
had a card with the Bavarian lot’s name on it, the
George Washington changelings and tapped his watch
when he spoke and looked at the framed picture of
Vera Lynn, the one with the signature. His eye kept
going back and he tapped his watch again.
“That woman.” He said
He bought the boat for a ransom that day, pissing his
panties over a golden girl long gone. He bought a
boatload of Tamils to crew it.
Hear they jumped ship at the first site of Aphrodite’s
crowning, and the captain got pulled in for people
smuggling.
He snapped at the end of his middle finger, so it
thudded that table and his eyes drifted and he laughed
a sucking high pitched scratch, tracheotomy hyena.
The eunuch he’d paid for that night said he had had
him take the jizzom back into his mouth under pain of
flogging and made him call him empress, pegged
with a jade dildo.
“My Queen.” He’d said.
The blackshirt spunked out his second wad and called
out.
“Filthy Boaz, harlot Joachim, tickle my Malkuth!”
“As if we didn’t know.” Red said.
“Prescribe a session on the cum eaters channel” Said
Meadowfoam.
“Ships can get fucked." Vetch said.
He’d tumbled during a storm on the eye and ended up
crusted with salt,
washed and cracked up on a beach where they drank
nectar straight from Art Nouveau pursed petals and
greeted each other after pure backs.
“Sack and crack forever empty.” Vetch said.
And then near field communication scrabbled at the
edges of their auras for marketing details.
Do you know that those fridges you get nowadays
map your flats? They scan your chips moving up and
down the corridors, see how long you stop for. They
package up the stops in the shitter for marketing cunts
to sell you electrical goods and toilet paper.
Thirty minutes in a two by three room, adverts for
Bran and two for one on syrup of figs.
The data leeches slipped at the edges of the gap left
by Meadowfoam’s cookie cutters.
Double penetration, threesome, cumshot, facial, teen,
mature, amateur, big black cock, rim, creampie, cum
swapping, fisting, deepthroat, gagging, midget,
watersports, bukakae, slut, orgy, babe, erotic,
japanese, latina, yoni, redhead, titjob, anal, solo.
New windows opened in the satelites and knicker
sniffers that surveilled them
They gathered at a city, where wolves and lions still
slept and hunted.
“Others are coming, best behaviour”
“By the pricking of my thumbs, something violent
this way comes”
“Gangbang?”
Broken bones built the city, the tears of women
behind doors, and threshed blood of slaves.

Light, two knaves of wands, opposed ripples in a

lake.
Two brothers, twins, comet cursed, moonbound,
antimoons, they grew up by the river, near where it
started to break into the estuary,
before the barrier, after the power station,
before they filled in the docks for silver towers.
They boxed each other and broke the old businesses,
one Brixton poof after another,
dulwiched blades in dark alleys, so hot that summer.
“And? Skip to the money shot.” Meadowfoam said.
“Well, we’re off to see the butchers of Bow Road,
Bethnal and Brick” He said.
Bugger, boxer, toil and trouble, Judge’s vice and top
shelf doubles.
Exposure in tomorrow’s Sun if you don’t tread
careful,
for the upper sort,
a broken jaw for the lower lot,
at best,
or a shotgun on a blasted heath, or a bloody dagger,
shooters and shivs.

Under the railway arches, by the petrol station it

smells of spark plugs and grease and a backroom with
a radio and a calendar with tits.
An old big cat rusts on the ramp. halfway lifted,
enough for a crouch if they didn’t have the pit. It
drips oil, one an hour. Pitch flows at one drop a
decade, twenty three to the power of nine times more
viscous than the river. Thick as twins blood.
On the ground they lay out a flick knife, a cigar, a
roulette chip and a french letter, a peasant, a noble, a
merchant and a priest. They put a candle in the
middle and a pot of tea and cake. They play Lulu
backwards from Meadowfoam’s speakers.
Om Mani Padme Om
greyhound odds two to one.
Above, weight shifts in the cockpit of the Jag.
It smells of Rothmans and brandy, soap and talc and
Bay Rum.
Stitches whisper swords at snitches on Tall Talers
Street
Sphincter clenching rage, heart pounds, don’t make
contact with that one.
“Look at me”
“don’t look away”
The whispers come and come loader, roaring into a
single pair of razors, stuck together for that damage
you can’t stitch without scarring, two warlords in
hand stitched clobber, boxing gloves back at mum’s,
made up the old room how it used to be.

This ghost wears glasses,

that a wedding band
and the dark and the darker emperor shout and red
face in the back of the Jag
“Don’t look” he says.
Neck prickles, tight shoulders,
wait for blade between ribs, or club to the skull,
“My fucking manor” He says
Thick with the drunk of beatings and protection
rackets.
Pray well, don't look, but soak the rage,
here in the black candle,
anger to open the door in the breath that snuffs it.
Bite your tongue and listen to the bloody words and
ready for war my sons and daughters.
Whetted blades for the slaughter.
They rant and scream at the broken jaws they missed
Burn them out
Burn them out
Headaches and short breaths,

Get the sword they say,

all swagger and scarred fists,
get it from the lady
“lovely lady” says the one with glasses
Get it and take it back.
Black rocks and best fighting socks,
get the blade and take it back
We know where it went,
after the cold hands and last breaths.
By the water.
Away from the field where they fell.
Broken jaws.
So they listen to the two heads of John The Baptist,
Reggie and Ron and made their claims
“Does no bugger good” Ronnie said
Long enough in the shuttered up workshop, long
enough for a headache behind the eyes.
“Time gentlemen please.”
The shutter went up and the Carbon Monoxide
diffused into the sky, and they felt the bliss in their
blood cells.
The ghosts exit.
“magic works best with a little death.” He says.
“Time gentlemen please.”
Back at the flat they taste their new allies’ help
look out the window at the sun,
blasting too bright.
It turns inside out into a grey sky, the clouds drag
themselves churning from the sea.
Over in Texas they’ve started moving the hurricanes,
they get the big weather over there.
Time
Please
Gentlemen

“Right, yes.”
Cars slip by in the low pressure night, after the rain,
you can still feel the cold of the sea.
She shakes her head,
“You won’t." She says
“You wait." He says
A harley hair dryer two streets past, just gone
midnight, and she keeps her elbows pressed in when
she sips at her wine.
“listen to this.” She says
She leans over.
At this point in the story, something revealed itself
which would end up crucial to this whole mess, but
right now, no consequence so we continue our walk
along the spiral.
King Arthur’s true heir, gifted by lake.
“Only been there a few months, year at best." They
said.
A few pits spatter on the blade, easy enough to polish
out, you lift the rust with olive oil, and move down
the grades of paper, wet and dry, stone to silk. It
didn’t sparkle in the sun, but sometimes it shone
brightly enough. She wrapped it in a map of the world
with a stretched out kingdom of Prester John, bigger
than Massa Mussa’s. She put it under her bed next to
a couple of books, astronomy, rainforest birds. She’d
folded over page twenty three, a Papuan dancer that
wore a shirt the colour of the twelfth dynasty beetles,
faience and spanish pencils. over a little black dress
of microcarbon black.
Go right through the Higgs field,
You have the golden ticket!
Time to get the meatsuit on
And find the pastures of the flesh.

Draw the line from there to there, twinkle from one

cobweb to another,
along the Penrose corners.
A woman on a cliff coastline dances in Blake’s
broken reflection,
slums staring back at heaven’s kingdom.
That day, the last of them died,
same as the day that started it all,
with the apple on the mountain,
shepherd boy with a swollen cock ready for lips,
the day the city burned.
No, not that one,
the day the brat king gave his daughter for the praise
and promise of plunder and blood.
He’d called the weather for the fleet that dawn, no
shepherd god,
no city god stayed his hand.
The girl died and so did the rest,
the city burned and people forgot,
and near a temple on a hill, a man said only on and
off, binary philosophy.
Imagine a world where that didn't happen,
and that’s only a couple of hundred years,
no ram horned red headed king, son of the sun god,
son of thunder,
the beast in the night, demon eyed,
Imagine no hero of the thirteenth,
consul for life father of father of the eternal city,
mushroom murdered or was it a fig in the garden,
Small change flips the now, but history remains,
the most August,
spawn of a fuck goddess,
high priest of the temple of Saturn’s son
and founder of a dynasty of incompetents and
inbreds, who swept along on an army of slaves and
blood on the sand.
Bread and Tits,
circuses and smash hits
We need to stop the blade,
wax crack the gap,
cross and clutch her to the stars, swapped for the neck
of a doe.
We’d open the door and get him over again,
after the first visit,
first victim,
fade to green.

He’d go for the tin,

and the wine.

The amphora it comes in have fatter cows, bigger

horns than the ones back home, different to the ones
they danced and leapt with on the sundered isle.
The wine comes from young vines and chalk, other
side of the country from the tin.
From there, back on the wrong side of the mirror,
“We need to go back in time and rescue a princess.”
He said
“So we live in the real poem, and not the imaginary
one?”
“You’re getting it”
“you want to crash time?”
“Well turn around and click three times and we
might.”
You cut a thread and everything falls, eight billion
people from then until now, before the city fell to
when they built a tower of gold and gaud.

Wait, what’s he got to do with anything?

He marks the ground zero for a world a pretender god
never fouled.
Secondly he brought the land with him,
without the shrouded body,
or cup or spear that started a death cult,
all that focus on the last few pages of the story.
The man who tried to smuggle a convict all the way
from Gethsemane to Tintagel,
without all that insane obligation,
he’d come just for the joy.
And tin.
And third.
Yes?
Imagine the scenes all played out, a series of images
all lined up in a movie, interspersed with moneyshots.
“Of course." Says Meadowfoam.
Well take all those stills and map them out on the
floor,
the places you didn’t visit yet, leave space for them
too.
So you do that,
rescue the princess and change the focus of the
movie,
make a different map, and some scholars change their
speculation
from Sophocles to Aristophanes,
and Hamlet might find a different Ophelia,
but Macbeth.
king hereafter.
He will still call himself by other names where
curtains shush.
“let’s see how it goes.” He says.
“Down the mountain walls
From where pan's cavern is
Intolerable music falls.
Foul goat-head, brutal arm appear,
Belly, shoulder, bum,
Flash fishlike; nymphs and satyrs
Copulate in the foam.” Says Red
“Profanity!” says Meadowfoam.
Kidney Vetch stepped through the doorway.
In the dark a candle spilt itself onto the front of his
overalls,
and water dripped from the green pipes.
It smelled of vinegar, and his squinted his eyes.

The master, king in chains

King of chains masturbating, bloody handed, dry
throat,
Full of shit and foul and cunt dripping beautiful,
loving, adored martyr,
the Archon, he boasts his precision
the Revelator, he guides executioners to gallows from
prison
the Paladin, he shines, silent from the fall that bruised
him
He said he’d taken to the cold, heading to the
mountains
The two men took their toll
from the men and women that come to market
It smelled of pigs
A man came to rant about the hanged god
his skin bare and flayed by the strap he carried.
The sun had come early that summer. Two men stood
by the ford,
past the cluster of buildings that leaned against the
tower they’d left behind
The big one doubled as smith,
apron and thick arms
a smith’s blink and squint,
gloves even today with the sweat.
A man said the river had burnt near the stones,
burnt from the breath of the dragon
and had warmed the whole world
He’d had a sword and a horse,
and no shield, no more
He shared a bowl of soup and left in the dark

“So you want to play queen of Croydon?”

“I usually go for the margaritas." She says
Smashed while you watch the pilgrims and
supplicants burn their offerings they get in a brown
paper packet on a Friday.
Their fingers tremble and at night they go to bed,
drunk on the brown beer and tequila the waitress
brought
“Nice girl." They said
She studies science journalism.
“The pleasure of finding things out.”
She chews her nails and ran out of milk yesterday,
dry cereal for afternoon breakfast.
She taps her teeth with a fingernail, empty tray above
her head.
“I’ll be right back." She says.
Two beers in green bottles later, after the lose their
chips at the tables, luck trickles at the wheel.
The numbers add up to the beast in red and black
scales.
They go to their room at the other hotel.
Their skin feels hot, twitching in their guts and
groins, she who thirsts, and he makes a noise when
she touches his elbow and he turns towards her.
His breath feels cough drop hoarse in his throat,
shallow, and she breathes and looks at him, She has a
mole by her eye and a smile that pushes her chin
forwards, and her shoulders shiver when he takes her
fingertips in his fingers, taking her knuckles one by
one.
He had short nails, two clips she’d told him.
“All sort of neat with the transcendental butterfly
collectors." She said.

Right then Meadowfoam goes into a Baptist

midsummer profanity festival,
all John’s words,
dancing and putting flames to trees and fireworks and
cock and endless balls,
all season,
she babbles a load that comes into focus after a
creampie feast.
Harder, harder, harder, harder, she says into his ear,
her fingers on his ass. She squeezes and he grinds
harder, so he can feel her stretching his foreskin tight
inside her, the way her heat burns the throbbing head
of his cock, and his arm aches from holding it twisted
to finger at her clit. She spits on her hand and starts
fucking herself too, pushing his finger out the way.
Wait, she says, and slips from underneath him, so you
can see the way her belly wrinkles when she pulls her
knees up to roll onto all fours, and his eyes close
when he pushes himself in. Her pussy holds the tip of
his cock for a second, and she pushes back, taking it
inside, her fingers stretch between her legs, guiding
the shaft in, and she starts rubbing at herself while she
grinds against him.
She says something into the pillow, and he grabs at
her ass, and bends over to squeeze at her tits, and
strawberry stains burst on her cheeks, on her chest.
She twists around, her hair stuck to her forehead
He bites his lip, and they stop for a breath, another
and they collapse forwards, her ass pressing into him,
and she kisses him, while they push into each other
and she sucks in another breath. Her lips tighten and
twitch, the skin around her eyes tense, and she
whispers for him to fuck her, don't stop, keep going,
slow, slow, harder, slow, keep going, and his balls
tighten, she feels so tight around the head of his cock.
She can feel it straining when he stops for his knees.
She lifts her ass a five degree tilt, and she comes, and
he comes and they sting from sweat and shaving, red
lips, red lips, and his cum drips from her pussy onto
the bed, and he kisses it once, and falls asleep.
In the morning, they come again after they brush their
teeth

Bow of burning gold,

arrows of desire
Spear of Longinus
Chariot of fire

Make a heaven of hell and a hell of heaven, here at

last freedom.
Blackbirds sang outside and she slipped her feet into
the socks her dad had bought her with the grips on the
bottom. She padded to the window.
She had a jumper she wore on sick days. It had fat
buttons made of knots up to the neck and hole in the
front and she shrugged through and peaked through
the gap in the cloth of the curtain. She could feel the
cold through the glass on her face,
A secret of black and white birds strutted in the grass,
three months’ untrim.
She’d bagged up the blades with Dad, used a rusted
rake that caught in the sod when she pressed.
She’d dreamed of crowns that day, crowns and stones
that skipped nineteen times on the clear water, and
she’d dreamed of fire and blood and murder on walls,
and she woke up sweating and shaking.

“Get in the car.” He said.

“No time for questions, trust not in wooden walls."
She said.
“Come for me." Meadowfoam said.
They’d come in the boat of a big cat, rusted on a
sunny afternoon,
the wheel arches up the junction,
a proper lather in the end.
It ended up a chase from a big fat woman. It had a
pine tree and softwood beads on the seat and
mahogany on the dash and smelled of walkies and
gunpowder.
The country changed from soot and particulates and
portcullises, girls and boys who like girls in leather
jackets to patchworks of rape fields and jersey cows,
down to where the words change. They have their
flag too. The speed sixty five or so, until they got to
the crooked end and they listened to the plan unfold
from the map.
A girl had gone swimming, in the lake near the
woods, with the island in the middle, a few crumbled
stones half buried.
Tourists drove past for the fish and chips and the
beach walks and the castle piercing into the sea, She
came here to listen to the birds.
“Through their ancestral patterns dance,
And the brute dolphins plunge
Until, in some cliff-sheltered bay
Where wades the choir of love
Proffering its sacred laurel crowns,
They pitch their burdens off.” Says Red.
“We have to break the feedback loop of economic
cybernetics finance.” He says
“Risk management as global consumer, internet
regulations, graph theory, hail St Stillman”

So this girl,
coming up to big school,
going to join the hockey team,
Maybe swimming club,
she goes for a dip when the dragonflies come out,
orange and black butterflies that they say have made
it into the endangered list.
It smells of wild garlic by the water’s edge,
sharp near the dock leaves and the nettles,
the battles of childhood.
lie back and make out the odd dragon in the sky
give it an afternoon,
go home with stinging cheeks,
maybe peeling if you had blue eyes,
that boy in Miss June’s class who had to stay inside in
July with his Nan.
He built a babbage engine emulator in lines of code
for his last project, before he broke it with Bach and
Escher in some sort of old gold issue.
He works for the school now,
setting sets for maths classes.
She curled her toes tight when she steps in, and holds
her fists by her chest, and she shakes it out,
Her feet don’t fit the jellies anymore,
She rushes in after a breath
The mud on the bottom and the strands of algae tickle
her feet and sometimes she sees the flash of a trout if
the sun catches right,
She got her gold swimming badge and has to wait for
her birthday for her honours, but she’s done the
kilometre, the circle badge, and when she does the
honours she’ll get a free pass for the year.
She’s got mirrored goggles for swimming club and a
cap that wrinkles her forehead, pushes her eyebrows
into a frown around the lenses that give her a purple
bandit mask after the two hour session.
Something sparkles in the water when she flicks up
her legs and breatstrokes .
She can get the rubber brick from the deep end, and
do any of the dives now from anywhere in the big
pool, a length underwater, front crawl in twenty three
seconds depending on her dive, tread water in her
pyjamas.
The light turns everything green at the bottom, and
the silt murks around her fingers when she pulls at it,
and she has to go up for breath twice while she
untangles it, pencil diving back down. She does her
special breaths at the surface, and drops down, pike
straight, hands over head and kicks when she gets a
grip, whisks with her feet, those double beaters you
used for cake mix with auntie Dawn, the ones with a
winding handle on the side.
She drags it from the water and drops it in the moss.
She runs her fingers on the specks of rust and tattered
leather, coming away from the handle, how Roman
ones look. She saw them in the museum on a school
trip, handle the same though, sort of hexagon handle.
She dries off and shakes into her tracksuit bottoms
and sweater and her playing out trainers, with the
burst air bubble on the side of the sole. She wraps it
up in her towel and cycles back with it in the straps of
her bag so it sits tight in the small of her back, and
she goes slow and stops three times to shake it back
into balance.
She goes straight upstairs.
“Hi Dad." She says.
She sits on her bed with it lay on her legs, towel wet
on the floor. She presses her finger to the edge, runs it
slow, then quick and it splits flesh.
A man screams and clutches at his cheek and falls to
another stab to the face. It smashed through his teeth,
shatters his pallette.
The sword turns aside an axe and opens up a set of
guts, and a mailed fist smashes into the side of a
helmet. It has the bar of a cross over the nose. He’d
got it that day long ago, before the cuckolding, from a
brother who fell at the first that day, hacked to death,
handsome and pretty before the queen, other men fell
before that though, and his coat had soaked heavy
with their blood and piss and shit, until an axe had
shattered a rib, and his shoulder had dropped and
blades had stung his things and his hands and his
belly and his chest.
They’d said he’d won, the man with the Christ god
helmet, even when he lay by the water, stinking of
piss and shit and his and their blood, even when his
sword hand went cold. His left looked for the
scabbard at his waist while he breathed, cut from him
in the field in the morning, stamped into the mud. The
mist had cleared and shown the slaughter and
blackbirds had sang, one for every Babylonian
betrayal, each of the columns at the temple by the
Sphinxes den.
Another knight held his hand, crouched by his feet.
He let go.
He could hear her singing from the water.
he let go.
They pulled into a paved and gravelled drive.
“Ready.” He said
“Really." She said.
They had a cup of tea in a living room with those cork
coasters, same colour as the jag, and they dunked a
couple of party rings.
“We’d wondered where it had gone, need it for the
stone scene” He said.
“Student budget?”
“Not even.”
Here we go round the prickly pair
Here we go round the prickly pair
Here we go round the prickly pair
at five o’ clock in the morning.
“Told the papers it had come from a film, or maybe
one of those orc things, reenactment kids, hobbits and
that." The man said.
He sipped at his tea and smiled.

Butterfly caught, prayer for england, a matter of sky

that looks from pre dawn eyes, a letter from long ago,
sweat glistens on the flanks of a horse.
Its nostrils snort demon breath into the forest that
grows up around them,
a splash of Elm or Oak at a time,
since they passed the cracked boulder,
that moss had stained and buried before they built the
tower.
He’d followed the old tin road same as the Romans
did, the old salt road. Now men with oxes broke it
with their wagons and left it to lichen and mud.
The air smells of the shit of something that ate berries
and flesh, basilisk country Bertilak had said when
he’d left, looking at his wife, the day after the hunt’s
last night, a day after the feast and lies of potlatch
night.
One step at a steady gait through the iron bound
gates, until the holdfast slipped from his glance,
tight in the shoulders and a gallop until the kingdom
changed from liege to barrow liches begging for
favours.
He had wrapped it around the scabbard that kept his
sword firm and sharp and hot. He sat and diced with
the ghoul king, stinking of rags and white wine
vinegar.
This king under the hill had no dogs neither, nor
knights nor none,
wrong side of the Edge, just a rattling laugh, no sleep
here.
He lost his ring and gained a song
from before the giants crashed into the sea in their last
brutal battle,
against the grandson from a city crushed by summer
propaganda.
In chains she wept, in the wind, on the cliff.
She could smell the smoke and the stink of the men
from the boats,
dragged out onto the beach below
The cook fires burned between the hulls of the ships,
a city of wood, crusted in brine
She could hear the men sometimes
Fighting over bronze, breaking noses and ribs,
They’d hung a fisherman who had hidden his catch
Seagulls fought over scraps of his flesh
The smoke lingered over the armour fights and the
training drills and the grease stank to your clothes and
stuck to the roots of your hair with the brine.
He had a knot in his brow and sharp eyes and a scar
crawled through his beard. A farmer had caught him
with a dagger before bleeding out his shit in the field,
manuring a barren ground.
He sweated and wine had fucked his lips from its
kiss, four cups gone from his thick tongued mumbles
of courage. He dragged her, and thrashed her with the
hairs of his knuckles when she cried, and his fingers
left a pinch on her bicep. His thick tongue flapped
about the wind and the rain that turned the beach to
slurry and never washed away the smell. She flailed
and broke a flask, a gift from a stranger buried in a
strange land by then.
Her knees ache from sobbing on the ground. It got
cold in the night, her saffron robes clung to her with
the water, stained rust and ochre.
Waves rolled below, the overture to the fighting and
drinking and songs the soldiers sang. They wrestled
for goes on the stolen priestess, or the shepherdess, or
water woman, chained to one another from the town
they put to the flame, as practice.
Sacred to the horses, they’d screamed at first and
broke their jaws on ringed fists
and the king of the ocean heard
and smashed the waves
The man pulled her up the path that led up the break
in the cliff and she’d stopped struggling the third or
fourth time his hands took her breath and dropped her
to the scree, where the rock scratched at her thighs
and calves and ankles while he dragged her.
She shivers and cries snot and her breath catches, and
her shoulders and her guts and her chest aches, and
her leg is soaked from the piss and the rain.
The dagger lifts, and a hand twists into her hair,
tearing her hair into spots of blood. Her wrists burn
from the rope that holds her to the tree, her nipples
hard and raw.

Titania:
Those seem mere vintage leavings, jabberers, choirs
Of swallow-broods, degraders of their art,
Who get one chorus, and hide the more,
The Muses' love once gained. But O, my friend,
Search where you will, you'll never find a true
Creative genius, uttering startling things.

Oberon:
Creative? how do you mean?
Who'll dare some novel venturesome conceit,
"Air, Zeus's chamber," or "Time's foot," or this,
"'Twas not my mind that swore: my tongue
committed
A little perjury on its own account."

The chorus bucks and they throw their arms to the

sky.
They stop
Breath hisses from the orchestra, sweat shining their
hair
and sticks it to the backs of their necks
Chests rise and fall
“We believe you if you speak well” They say
A figure steps forwards into a space the others leave
and shuffle from.
The tongue in the centre speaks
“We need to go.”
Out from the fortress into the rain and wind and
butterflies.
In the stores of the museum they have a hundred
million pinned to cork,
Men in jackets with extra pockets
Pinned the dreams and souls
and labelled them in ranks
bitten by a bug for hiding their name
they used the world of the dead to strip the idioms
from their words
ground into powder

Landscapes and crossing into the wilderness,

the weather, the tracks, the trail
shelters and trades with men in bearskins and bells
bounties and unbreakable contracts
Shamans and fire pits along the way, homesteads and
standoffs
They slip into the land of a faerie princess
interlude for the feminine principle
A coming of age, ready with her facts and her tongue
Requests from dying men
The girl from the other story ready to respond?
Excalibur’s finder, the true queen
They need a river to cross
sweating horses where the bridge was broken
curried from the cold and the chill in their bones.

never odd nor even

An ambush to put a kink in the ropes.

She shames him into walking, into taking her with
him

the creatures and the plants that spring from the

foreground,
zooming and panning to the figures crossing the
horizon
the wilderness broadens, the trees collapsing in at the
end of the trail
around the mine shaft and the crypts
all the little creatures
shuffling and creeping and shrieking
and the weeding and winding of the plants in the dry.
did you know moss grows into spirals outside of the
gravity well of the ground?
“This feels rash.” She says

It tasted of smoke and fat and salt and char.

He’d brought salt from the castle, with the burning in
his cheeks.
He’d sent the scene before he’d slept in his cloak,
pulled up to his neck under the detritus of the forest,
dragged in the wet.

She came from the window, she’d stood and watched

the clouds and the grey sheets and the dark of the
fields and the forest, fur pulled to her neck.
“good.” she says.
She held a pinecone she’d brought from the south,
shut too tight for fingers,
the colour of the wet day by the river that ran by the
river. The torches polished it bronze, lapped it in
varnish.
The hunt swept through again, away from the eyes of
the ranks
follies paid in stone from the saline road,
the first one they’d built,
before they'd taken their lives and gods to the pillars
and the centre of the world,
packed between three plates,
from the cataracts to the two rivers and the break in
the river of ocean.
The hunt came even when the chaff of a threshed
house had washed up here and killed the giants.
Grease had stained the fingers that gripped her,
And sooted her dress
Brine dried and shone in her hair,
And the knots in their arms,
And their breath stank of the pine they used to
sweeten the sea dark wine,
And stews of fish and seaweed.
“Time, come” He said.
He faced the waves
Now, fingers tighten around her hair,
And she bites her teeth to stifle,
Her head drops back,
Her guts slacken, wet, slick,
And an eyeful of tears blacken her view.
Tears she won’t let go of,
And the man turns and closer, closer, the sword in his
hand,
Memories snap,
Tight and quick as a bowstring,
The beginning of the competition for a hand,
the slaughter of an unsuitable suitors’ band
Titania: Look, fair husband, shining hair, voice of
brook,
This ragged band through crystal view go
To clear pews of a smoothed down congregation,
Overthrow the archons and free from flags the villains
of all nations.
Look there.

Oberon: My queen, our time settles,

Meddle not in affairs ungentle

Titania: No, but watch, as they steal the march,

On the king in rags
Bags of salt, sword and girdle ready,
Steady hands to stand in front of the dagger,
Falling upon pale virgin throat,
To send black bannered boats

Oberon: Ships.

Titania: And men of swagger,

Skipping across the sea to that plain,

Oberon: They cannot stop the war,

The one eyed Greiai could lend all the helmets and
shields and winged boots,
And still they’d fall,
For that fear of hell and sex and all

Titania: But love, lord of doves,

They went to push the blade aside,
But let the sacrificial lamb slide,
The girl up to furnaces, stars eternal,
For eyes to watch, and wait, and yes,
Forgive,
And unblinded by the wall’s falling stones,
They set her role,
Focus on her form

Oberon: I see,
In place of storm of war,
In place of brawn and boar slayer?

Titania: Chorus of Pucks, you finally fucking got it,

Look.
Something tears a hole, needle thin at first, slashing
through hangnail caught silk.
The hissing backs into the darkness and murmurs
threats and bed pissing from the corners.
The blade swings again, walls fall sweet at svalbard
summer.
“Come.” Meadowfoam says.
She breathes out caked in dirt and tears and torn
fingernails from the rocks, and she looks at the frozen
teeth of the man holding the dagger of her murder,
still as diamond above her.
Red holds out her hand through the gap.
“Scelrotics in the liver love.” She says.
“Best come with us.”
The girl takes it and breathes out.

Rescued by rain crackling off the blade, cold water

splashing from the bottom lip to slow the heart fifteen
percent, or twenty over, a hands on knees pant and a
hangovered taste of mouldering adrenaline,
last night’s cadged fags,
the industrial kind with corkprints and camels.
“fucked good and rough." Meadowfoam says.
“Weeping Cassandra." Red says.
“The pining maidens’ groans growing, blood of men."
Red says.
The claws had closed too soon for the sword without
its cunt to keep it warm,
and safe.
“Speak the chemist, don't look back." She says.
The sword lay on the table, dried from last night’s
exertions, left a knock in the wood where they'd
dropped it, sodden and tight shouldered.
The jag waited round the corner, the twins screaming
murder, shooters and shivs.
One forgot his pills.
The other one talked about plans and over the water
crews and loyalty
The journey back under the mist of rain in headlights
“but when a blast of war. Hold hard the breath."
They say.
Then straighten out into two of ten,
particular paying to the structures underneath
The bones can bend at the joints and twist pretzel
gymnastics
but they still scream, upside down, or hooked
In another sphere a switch turns in a cluster of atoms
and a star begins to burn, strips the probability clouds
from their nuclei.
The star starts her song, looking across a void of
flashing moments of potential, spin and collision. She
watches a body fall on a pale blue dot, a thousand
years ago or more. She watches a city fall, walls
smashed down with the brains of infants and broken
wombs.
She watches a brother murder a mother for the crimes
against her household.

“This woman." He says

“This man." She says

She breathed out a stream of particles to the frozen

rocks that have danced their way around her, that
come to see her face, and fate themselves to her
grave.
They say the Adonis Blues and Dingy Skippers
and the lost Large Coppers
come and came from the last breaths of a severed
chord,

Listen to yourself,
And watch the dead of summer fall with grey iron,
And leave on midwinter’s knight
And a black and white cold hang over a throat
The knight sat down and the corner of his mouth
lifted and laughed and called for more sack and mead
and ale,
And favours he took,
Watched the Basilisk, petrified at St Peter’s Brook,
Shook away the cold in his arms, days before
kneeling,
On St Stephen’s day
He kneels,
From ice to dark and the forest past the keep still
swatched and swathed itself with green
More green.
Tourists snap pictures with their partner smiles in the
light,
In the empty portal hewn from stone,
In the dark one,
One of the two pigeons that nest there pecks at a wet
cigarette end.
Two thrones wide enough for two, pressed together
One in sun
One forgotten
They eat scorpions from a tin, the two kings,
One in the shadow with the rock pigeon,
The other jostled by passing asses
The ships in the white city,
Parade in rails, oar strokes call,
Away, away,
Strong, without pity,
Do not pray,
For gold in the mercy of their means,
Or stop the arms to bloody streams,
Staining their banners, streaming, clear.
And do not ask, to stay the silver of bearded axes,
From necks dressed in hair, flax or black,
When the burning beds of the town cry, quick
Away, away

Things change,
They move feathers and the trophies of the giant stags
the frost birthed
Or the tusks of the boar.
Even now, they evacuate the schools when the wild
pigs snuffle in the yard

“Always a world only for politicians, profiteers,

waiters and pleasure seekers, and not a breath for
else?”
“Nobody knows,
How was Mozart buried, how did he come to an
end?”
“From rock hard cock to soft tight cunt to speaking
mouths,
From bruised thigh to gritted teeth to iron, flashing
eyes,
Say goodbye to murder and the terror that spawns in
crushed masonry and mortar but."
“Always a but.”
“Yes, you know how this has to go." She says.
“Alas, why gnaw you so your nether lip?
Some bloody passion shakes your very frame:
Portents; but yet I hope, I hope,
They do not point.”
“Yes." He says
“None pass through unscathed." He says.

The kings wore the finery of kingdom in this time,

Before gold and velvet
A spear in their hand
A horn of wine,
Overflowing beneath canopies of flowers
Changing with the year.
Even then, the supplicants stayed in the light,
Except for the tallowmaidens that kept the shrine
burning
When the moon came out, none hidden
from the bull king.
But in the day, they left flowers and feathers and the
fattest berries at the feet of the living god.
On the longest they tapped the beer and the young
wines,
Kept a tenth back for barrel tithe, to share with
furious angels with dirty lips.
They filled the shaded corner with flowers and figs
and nectarines they brought on the tin road
And covered the throne with green leaves from fallen
trees and strands of blunted ivy
The king staggered from the queen filled bed,
Red faced and shaking with claw marks on his back
They took him to his throne,
On that night,
Shorter than the rest
By the fire
The spreading fire,
Five flowered
Regicidal,
The queens chose the tainist,
For strength of loin and winning comment alike
So have a care
How your last night might go

Forwards please to follow

Boulders learning to fly.
“Two souls do dwell in my breast”
“Don’t forgot Mephisto, Wagner and the rest,
Break your timid compromise,
Break the barrier between,
Primal mother and father spirit."

“Today a burnt heretic,

Tomorrow a monument." He says
“Tomorrow and on for hanging for ravens courting,
But bare teeth and bear the flaying and the day after
we hang the pretenders,
Hold hard”

This path leads to infamy and the scaffold,

Journey’s end for the immortal,
“Dare you suffer and die these deaths?”
“Well, better strip naked, shut eyes,
Draw the counted breath,
And let's dive right in, one more little death for the
road?”

Light smashes, blasting burst blood vessels

The retching broke them down the windows of the
cafe that the morning workmen use
Cut shards, great gashes thick as the feather
Tracks over the plant pots on the window sill
And hands of lovers walking
raindogs gather under the station sign,
Silence broken by blackbirds and stinking pigeons
Turtle doves drop on longue lipped tongue orchids,
Ladies’ slippers,
Blushing maidens,

Meanwhile in the market, we put flags on last stands

and hand them to bankrupts with state resolve
The world belongs to the system already, but which
do you want?
A soft clicking comes from the lock in the door
Could it be a quiet key
A tip and toe intention
Just the breeze from a stairway window
Nothing more
So keep pressing with your tongue on the canker of
your tension
A woman on the beach
Sifting through sand for baubles
Brown and green
She says blue bends best she said
The process of erosion from the ocean brings down
the rocks into particles and drops them on the beach,
While their weight turns to stone waiting for its next
time
Until the heat of a forge lets in the light

Any blink can take you from hero to villain

Or the other way or slide you side stage,
A role in the chorus at best
Remember the arcs and the cards
Keep to the story
Red looks up from the spread
circles her finger at the arch of his eyebrow
“And what of wanting?”
“and what?” She says
“wet pants and panting heart”
take breath and pull apart the cloak of death,
She went bound, at the first of the kings chaining
hands,
barking their knuckles and rings on her skin for the
wetness of her tears.
Torn from lessons at knee,
born to die for fair wind
“And what of wanting?”
“Well, margaritas, you buy.” He says.
And if dying, one more night in bed.
“We can’t kill them with philosophy, He says
We must have ball in our barrels."
“Neither lead." She says
“But with red ink, margin notes and subtle crossings
in dusty dewey decimal nooks,
Watch how we change the books."

“Take this.” He says

He hands her the sword hilt first and bends knee,

“Not for me that kneeling” She says

“We hanged the last fisher queens, we need not
ermine nor purple,
But rise pauper knight,
Step up that bended knee,
After all, freedom lies in a straight back choice,
And face to face voices.”
“I go.” He says
“No, not yet." She says.
Stay a while,
Shove death from mind,
Zen, or otherwise, wine, and the soft, fine taste of
skin to skin communion,
Drunk” she says.
Shirts drop to the floor, soft as they drop to the bed.
She tugs at his wrist, skin to skin, softest since that
sing, tan lines and the tattoo of a pine branch at the
curve of a hip, the bud of a cone in the cleft by the
bone.
The buttons uncleave one then the rest and the third
hook of her bra catches for a third fumble.
His face will leave a stain in the morning round her
lips and she can feel her panties wet against her.
Her mouth tastes of a cigarette they'd shared and his
cock pressed against his pants and when she’d lifted
the waistband the elastic caught his breath when it
rubbed on the tip where it pulled free from his
foreskin.
She slapped at it and he bit at her breasts and felt her
soak his finger.
The rendezvous of it

“So we got her out the way of that dagger,

War went ahead as planned by the King in Rag’s
cronies
Far darts and all, and stains of blood, spent on sand,
Still a slaughter, fall of the tower
Still this shit hole to get home to,
But without the death of just one daughter,
I thought, get her to the stars, green and pleasant, the
end." He says.

“Call no man happy until death.” Red says.

“Well turns out unbalanced, and that lot have medals

in exploiting imbalances." Vetch says, “Just as I’ve
got them in weaseling and baiting and switching.”
He smiles, nice and reptile slow
He sniffs

“What did you tell them?”

“The truth, you got the blade, cut the page,

And took the girl they used to pay,
The bill for all the dark satanic way it went.”

“Why haven’t we killed you?” He says

“Everyone needs a quadruple agent who forgot how

to lie.” Vetch says.

Three knocks on the chair and a thousand strokes of

the brush before bed
And the goddess sings,
Sings of debts paid with death,
And dark water closing,
And still, the jaws come closer
The king in rags looks down,
Filth drips from his jaws,
“Just come closer.” He says.
Both hands raised
A scratching starts under the skin,
And dark places bark and stink.
“Forgive me master, I have sinned.”
Round the back of the bottle bins, by the steps to the
canal,
Segments clatter
“Let your lips upon these fingers suck”
Rags, rags, rags,
Bag up your eyes
Stagger closer,
We will make you smooth
Smooth, smooth, smooth.
The man kneels in front of his reeking king,
And lets his lips touch the yellow fingers, too many
joints,
They split and boil with sores
And heal herpes smooth,
Smooth smooth smooth
He retches
“What do you desire." The man says.
“Desire?” says the voice of a thousand biting things.
The king spits and the man weeps,
That time with Uncle Phil,
No wait,
No,
Wait,
That time with little nephew Phil,
Please,
And the bruises that grew index the toes of new shoes
on Adam’s Adonis thighs,
And all those lies, and cheating
And red eyed fingers closing,
“Desire?” The king says
“Do not concern with desire, but do, slave.”
Bring me the cocks and cunts and whatever the fuck
they fuck with,
These mosquitos that would pull at my claws,
“Yes my king.”
The man cries and squirts out a bloody wad of semen
into his cassock.
“Go.”
The air stinks of burning and shit and the insane
sucking at the insides of thorn tangled condoms.
A choir sings.

“Bring me joy, bring me joy keep me rancid,

Mute and blind, bound and gagged keep me chained,
Keep me smooth, keep me straight, keep me fitting,
Keep me fitting, keep me blank keep me spayed.”

Imagine.
Stop.
This man
This man goes
He goes into the dark
And the secrets takes him hard and firm
And they crack the marrow from the joints, wet,
hanging, dancing in phosphor
Betrayed by silver and knowing the steps he’d take to
the whetted axe promised from the beginning
The price they’d promised.

At a club on dean street they meet,

and shuffle down shots,
“Any more good ideas?” He says.
Photos on the wall look back at his bloodshotting
eyes,
Diamonds and fat leather gloves, and darlings with
made up black eyes.
“Thought not.” He says.
The landlady had left the keys, and they sit in the
centre of a circle of string,
Half a pint of house brandy between their knees.
Pour me another,
Poor me, poor me,
From the basement, they hear the rain on the pulled
down shutter,
Above a fresh star watches.
She smiles at them,
Of course, they don’t see her back,
But the loom shuttles across the impending.
The cheese from the castle had run out yesterday
under the bough of a tree, listening to the snap and
patter of the chattering rain that fell through the
canopy.
He chewed on a strip of dried meat and hobbled his
horse between him and the mud they called a road.
He wound the garter around his fingers, playing with
the half twist that turned it into forever.
He’d found a rotten stump and hacked at it with his
sword and watched woodlice scatter and roll and then
trashed it to kindling and now he let it warm his back
and steam his travelling cloak.
He looked at his fingers, fat and hard from the cold
and leant over, pulled his gloves from the heat,
leather dried in the flame cracks.
He uncorked a flask they called a boot, over the
water, where crescent cuts cross and he sucked at his
cheeks at the tang and the tannin and the goat taste of
the skin.
He ran a hand around his neck, gripped at the place
where the axe would, where she would have. He
scratched at the beard forming and rubbed at his eyes
and let out a breath. He twisted the pegs of his lute a
crook with his left hand.

“Listen here, I’ll make it country simple." He says,

He has a moustache and mirrored sunglasses and fat
white hands.
This cunt needs blocking, barred from the Western
lands, nice and smooth,
A new opportunity for a notch on the club,
We need him living, but be ready with an elbow or
boot toe, ready, and unforgiving”

The fourth wall,

Of the ceiling, fallen
Brings deboning for the hooked fish,
Take the bait of life and snap,
Flapping on the earth
And drying in the sun on death’s line,
Finest nylon,
Don't shy,
Blink.
A shroud of castle stone grey howls over the world,
And the retale needs a new neck,
For the moment of the drop,
A stropped and gleaming axe,
Swapped for grey iron on the cliff
Yin for yang,
A man for the woman,
Bound in clanging chains,
To flip the coin from heads to tails.
“No option?” He says.
“The he and the she of it.” She says.
“Will I get a star?”
“All over your face.”
“Hold my vigil, back in that bar, in the back room,
bottle of Irish and a marlborough, scotch might do,
scratch the runes on the bark of my skin, and ink them
on the shroud you use to wrap me in. Bring over the
gang, there kisses everyone, for their comrade, gone
to hell.”
Blasted deeps,
To get back of this wrong line,
Bury me at sea,
Where no murdered ghost can haunt me,
If i rock upon the waves
Then no corpse can lie upon me.
Let me go down in the mud where the rivers all run
dry.

“What the fuck? that stinks.”

“Bloody hell." Red says.
“Stink of unwashed blowjobs." Meadowfoam says.
The phone rings.
“Did you know we had one?”
“Shit, go, we need to go,
They come and
By and by we run.”

They stuff their things into bags, rough fingers

grabbing at silk thread and black mirrors and Red
grabs at the three card spread, all the king's but cups
“The candle?”
She lights it and lets the wax drop around the door.
He looks at the window,
“Shit.” He says.
Prowlers park out front, black and bright in the rain.
He has the sword in hand.

When they danced and screamed and cut and tore and
collected the hot liquid in the blaze of her name, they
gave the kings six chances to look at her, and six lots
of warm cunt to take her place under the furs by the
fire, as many as he called for.
Sore and slaked they took him to the mountain drunk
on the ambrosia they made from prickly pears.
Careful how your last night might go.

The chapel broke from elm and oak,

Pricked by ivy,
The leavings of conquerors gone to plague,
Whose rusted swords once shone,
The girdle, seared, a final kiss,
Around his lactic arm,
And he raised his head,
And dragging his feet,
Laid his blade, soundless,
On the stone at the entrance, as if, sweet and blissed
to bed.
An amphibian’s scratch at the back of his throat,
Unbreathing, he took the step,
His boots protesting,
And cold rivers run in shocks from his neck.
Hands clammy and rough and tongue rusted,
Face streaked from the dust of the forest,
And lest we forget,
The knuckles of the barrow king,
Strung from a pouch he fingers,
And he crouches at the altar.

All the little lost ones come and tug

At the shirt of his coat and bridle
As he rides through the jade and the moss
They tell him to go home,
Or back to Bertilak
At least for tonight's feasting and bright fires
See in the new year with three unbroken kisses and a
girdle
And a bucket of sack
He had a sore on his lip, split from the wind on the
moor before the forest and he sucked at it and felt its
roughness with the tip of his tongue.
The lost ones chattered around him priamond,
diamond, triamond and the other.
The paths through the woods parse into tracks now,
wide enough for a pair maybe and once he heard the
sound of goats clanking through a clearing in the
tangle.
The chapel rose from the forest floor after he pushed
his body through a wall of arbutus, still swelling and
fattening and sweet enough for headaches and
swollen guts from the ferment.
Some of them had blacked in the night from sweet
and frost, and the red ones stained his fingertips when
he shook off a glove to taste, before they thudded
onto his surcoat as he forced through,
They’d wattled over gaps in the stones from before
and left the side to sunrise open to collect rainwater
and whistle to wind that loved it.

Gorillas knuckle along the wet stone, boots and visors

slick with drops that reflect the wide eyes and street
light,
“Shit, shit shit.”
He looks away for a lifetime and hands over the black
mirror, his history, and the sword of her once and
future story waiting,
“Blood of shit.” He says.
“You better get gone.” He says.
And alone, he grits his teeth,
waiting to fall, makes pissed pants peace.
In the dance of clubs and fists that thud and fall until
he stops calling, and asleep, slips to the ground.

The man bends his neck to the stump of oak, feels the
garter tight,
It scratches at his cheek, smell of wet,
Muddy hands from a fall,
And most of all,
Most of all,
He tastes the acid in his throat,
Sweating, ready, kneeling in the hall.
He looks at the floor,
Stones and dirt from the wind, swept to eternity by
the boots before him,
Ash green, greyed by the outside and leaf mold,
The standing man’s armour creaks and clatters when
he lifts the axe from view.
Grey iron, old as the slaughter of unsuitables, a room
of princes cut from youth,
Blood after a twenty year trespass,
On the isle of stones and olives and swine.
The standing man’s boots shifted and left dark tones
on the beaten soil of the chapel,
The man kneeling, pressed into the oak, held his
breath and willed his eyes from blinking.

A diver’s alarm rings at too much nitrogen, and she

sings again.
Two creatures flick their assent in purple and black,
four cruciforms turning around each other, sleeping in
half spent coconut shells.

They break his fingers first, hold him strapped to

chair, and pull them back, little one first. Little by
little and then that skin between them stretches tight,
feels to tear. Remember that kid at school said he
could swim better, had webs?

You feel the middle knuckle build its pressure. They

bend further than you’d guess from looking.
The first one snaps. It twists and hangs and twitches.
It feels hot and swollen, burning to the touch of a
torturer’s thumbnail.
They smash the next with a hammer, second phalanx,
broken by iron.

The king in rags dances,

The stink of shagged out, broken arseholes,
Prancing his glee with scorpion ungiven chances,
“Please,
Please don’t,
Please.”
Squeezed necks and needles and breathing flecked
with blood,
Sweats breaking,
And shaking, wrecked hands

He carries a burning torch and they drag him through

the streets, shivering in rags, wet with piss and shit.
His shrivelled cock stirs when a prostitute flashes her
bent over cunt to the laughter of the people pointing
at it while it pulses once or twice.
He reaches plaza Grave De Calvary flanked by men
on horses a scaffold at the top of the hill, grinding
grins same as skulls, same as the end of that other
story.
A man walked over, carrying something as long as his
forearm, a hood shielding his face from even the
gods. He slaps the iron into his free hand and then
stuffs it into the brazier. The room closes and stinks
of pig fat while soldiers tie him to the slab.
The man, the one in rags, on the slab, he pisses again,
but doesn't swear and he grits his teeth at the sight of
the dagger.
He’d lost it when the gorillas had rolled along the
pier.
He could smell the stink of rotten semen .
The knife walked over in the hand of the hooded man
who whispers in insect creaks and places a hand on
his chest.
He ties the dagger in the ragged man’s right hand.
stretched out and bound.
He goes back to the brazier and the tongs glow in the
dark and he comes over and clenches them over the
slabbed man’s chest. He grips and pulls at the flesh
and a thousand screaming foxes fuck and bite through
his skin, through the fibres of his muscle.
He screams, but does not swear.
He burns off the nipples and they stick and he has to
flick them to the ground, to be lost in the muck and
the filth, trampled under the pressed soles.
He takes the pincers and sweats and shakes and
mumbles and grips the right leg by the calf. The air
turns to charnel stink, and mouths water and smack
their lips.
He pulls and pulls at the flesh and the man screams
but it doesn’t tear.
It hangs loose from the bone and he pulls at the
biceps and watches the accused’s cock shrink acorn
small and he laughs.
He pulls and pulls at gobs of flesh, but they still do
not come loose and he walks over to the brazier and
sets an iron bowl atop. He fills it with brimstone and
beeswax and molten plumbing.
Another steps forwards from the watchers.
“This man.” He says.
This man has brought infamy and shame upon the
children of his name.
He holds a bundle for the watchers.
This robe as witness, blooded,
stains blotting out the threads,
bears the horrors which pollute him,
vile words,
vile deeds
vile imaginations
The hunting net of his treachery,
lower than thieves that rob strangers on the road,
those that desecrate the veterans with their lies
“Mr Tyb” He says.
The hooded man steps from his place among the
watchers dancing in the shadows and the fog.
The pincers have come back to glow and they burn
the hair on the accused’s legs as they rip into the flesh
of his calf, and he wrenches and sweats and tears out
quids of flesh.
The man in the hood nods and steps back, the meat in
the mud. His sweat slicks the hairs on his arms where
he rolled his sleeves from his gloves, slicked smooth,
smooth, smooth.
The man on the board, bound down lifts his head to
see the carnage,
He watches the iron spoon go to the brazier and steam
as it lifts,
A man steps forwards in mockery of dance
“No metal goes through untarnished." He says
“No mortal goes through unscourged." He says.
“This man has never waned in evil.”
“I call him misbeliever." Says the man who accuses
“I spit upon his gabardine." Say the watchers
“I call on you as witness to this dog’s atrocity.”
“No, furius hounds, no, the King despises him, snarl
for your revenge, He will have his.”
The man raises his head again as the speaker joins the
watchers and the ladle approaches from the fire, in the
dark.
The hooded man pours the potion over the wounds,
first the left hand, then the limbs and chest, and
finally, finally, over the right, strapped to the dagger.
He steps back into the mist and grey.
The man on the slab screams and does not swear, but
bites through his tongue and slops out.
“Kiss me gentlemen.”
“Turn me over, you have done this side over rare.”
You can hear horses now, screaming and chattering
their hooves on the scene, their breaths coughing
from the rendered fat.

An axe lifts, a body snaps to blackness. Hold your

breath

The axe falls,

They throw him in the water after,

And bloody, sodden, it sinks to black,
Soot belches, from stacks and children’s fingers catch
in looms and break on the racks of work
In sweating, fetid, hateful gloom,
Human flesh renders, for splendid clobber and tarted
up soaps,
For whitewashed plastic faced splendor,
Hope, ended.

Flayed to the ankles

Screaming not to leave him
Screaming not to leave

Pirate king of a landlocked country

A lot of bravery you’re bearding there

See your manhood right through your hair

They shackle demons with downturned lips,

To drag the carts into the earth,
Carrying slaves and cripples and coal burnings,
To the furnaces to break backs against the forge of the
demiurge,
The demons stare with the eyes of abattoir pigs,
That once supervised the people digging for the salt,
With threats for undefined vice,
And they whispered into the ears of princes and
captains,
And stormed at, spat at the bite of a quince, apple,
pomegranate or fig.
The princes and kings bound them in cold iron and
swapped them,
Swapped them for other newer demons,
Newer emanations of the same old same old,
Cold eyes, cold thoughts, cold thighs,
Smooth smooth smooth,
And the king in rags smiles.

Under the ground,

Below the barrow wights and the sleeping king,
Surrounded by horses, knights and dogs,
The giant sweats in nightmare gnosis,
“How do you sleep at night?”
The giant sweats in dreams of roasted flesh,
Starving babies and human dogs and barriers,
“Bloody fucking dirty wogs.”
Stench of ruin, damp, shit soiled knife wounds and
festering bites.
Drowning breath,
Building sharp inside the chest
Double resting heartbeat
Pounding temples
Full throated and tight tongued
And shaking chest
Blurring vision
Gasp
Swell
Float
Still,
Still

They sink to the dark places together,

led by upturned eyes of godlings.
Another gravity increases the pressure
another atmosphere every ten metres or so
enough to press the blood from your veins,
press your kidneys to sausagemeat
another nativity
the dark comes midnight true
Eyes look up at the silhouette floating from the sky.
Nekton come to feed on the disturbed floaters
and eels razor to snatch the silver in the last lees of
the light
A tremendous tangle of seaweed and corbusier, a
sunken city.

And feet did pace the tin lines,

Purging of wolfram,
Step by step with a rigid Aphrodite’s staff.
The last time,
Child’s laughter had planted,
Hands steady then,
Before the seeing of the spear,
At the end of the pained walk along a street of hurt,
Sweat and vinegar and blood,
They’d walked together,
From golden field on rain drenched isle,
King without sceptre,
Seeing the path,
Following the path,
Shiver in the chest the second day, the first felt in feet
and fingers
Stood outside with spiced lips
Sucking on a roll up to dry
And washed clean with a brandy you’d feel before
breakfast.
Stamping a shoe and clapping hands.
Past the man who sleeps in the bushes
Bundled up newspapers wrapped round his legs
Stuffed trousers from the wind
Clash of skin on the metal of door handles
Blue skies and a breeze on chapsticked lips
Oh Tomas of Bedlam, where do you walk?
They climbed in falling day, and watched the sets of
red and white lights swipe past when the sun set into
wine dark sky.
They’d started with a stone and bowl and a bloody
knife .

Throats to stars, they dance, throat to moon, bare,

when she looks upon them, bright as the ore they
bring on the boats, beaten and blue stones.
The old woman has a piece she wears on a thong,
that’s turned black except where she rubs at it with
her fingers. They climb the mountainside from the
settlements around the water, where they fish and
pick wild rosemary and purple berries and chestnuts.
At the top, they have a song, quiet at first, one voice,
her voice, then another, the winter king’s, then the
rest, unclear, as loud as the sound of creation, a birth
cry beyond the words they call.

When the song builds into the waves,

From below they call for her,
Scream at her face,
Hands in the air, feet planted, rooted in rock of the
mountain,
Their fingers stretch wide, into stars that pierce the
black her glory leaves,
the black the brightness of her face leaves.
“Let’s get inside.” She says.
They built it before the big war and panelled it with
wood they got off ships and weighted names rubbed
in gold.
It swivels in grease on coasters, a minute, second at a
time.
It stops and you get a fistful to look through the lens
at the top of a ladder, ground special over the
snowline from here.
“Can you see?” She says.

We need to settle the giant,

She says.
We paid the debt for the murdered daughter,
Death for death,
Crushed the breath of a man who wouldn’t dream of
kingly crowns,
Honourable say them all, unbrutish,
The anti Iskender,
Anti Arthur,
He heavy foots to green chapel,
To pay the price for the unthinking smooth faced
cattle,
Born to hustle roses in the avenues of the dead,
An axe and crushed lungs for enough roughness,
But still,
Settle the giant,
Dear old angry Albion,
Manifesting in its wet dreams, rabid,
Jizzom of rage, murder,
Waging war, page, after page, after page.
Sing for peace,
Stagehands change the scene.

Her face has been battered for as long as people have

looked at her, since before they noticed, but she stays
still about it and people still slack jaw at her, when
the light shines right, spend a night or two, alone with
her in the dark, and the tracks still show on her face.

It sank from the air,

It shadowed from the moon broken by the water and
she watched.
Scales flashed to test it,
Flicking into bubbles running away.
She rose enough to outline herself and then fell with
the shape, coiling around it.
She reached her hand, touched, whipped it away, and
soft, reached again,
Caught at the shroud, and pulled it to a resting place,
Where the currents did not beat so loud,
There among the weeds,
There among the crabs,
There among the uplooking alien eyes.
She tidies the sinkings from above, weighs them
down with sand where she’d hatched a nursery of
kraken kin, godlings down here in a collection of
sunbleached milk cartons.
She watches the body wash clean in the current,
Cleans away the soot, the crusts of blood,
And keeps away the hunters that would feed on its
flesh.
At the end of the first day she begins to sing
She got it from the pods that tend the great waves, the
great ways,
They meet in thousands on thunderstorm days,
To swap the news of warm and cold,
And discuss the benefits of this or that taste of salt.
The manes of ancient grazers, vast, trail behind.
The song changes through the turns of the spawnings,
Or when the breath of Ocean brings up changes in the
chemistry of the floating things.
She sings to Papa Kraken, and to the sea grass that
circles the circle sea,
From Goth to Aphrodite’s crowning.
In the depths of a crushing blackness,
Things listen, whiskered things, glistening shells,
Have listened, did and will,
And face new ways of listening,
From this dark sunken devil of an Eden,
And one by one,
Escape.

The houses gone under the sea

The dancers gone under the hill
They all go into the dark
Again in spite of that, we call this Friday good.
At Clarus, near Colophon, the seer drinks the water of
a secret well and oracles in verse

He stands and leans on a staff of quince,

At the bough of last time’s ash,
He chews a fig sent and dried on receipt of the wine,
Bull headed and thick,
Swallows and wood pigeons eat the insects and seeds
and fallen fruit from feastday carts,
Over in the desert three women carry the myrrh and
blood from place to place,
Planting vines and pomegranate trees
He smiles.

He’d washed the body that day,

Poured sweet water from hair, still scabbed from its
hollow crown,
To the smallest places,
Feet and hands,
He’d brought linen and fragrant woods and resins.
He burns the wood and grinds the resin with oil.
He massages it into the throat, the crown, wrists,
elbows, shoulders, chest, gut, groin and root
That body he had seen grow and rush to blood when
lost and sore at others,
Laughter and looks and petty thefts waiting for a lash,
Seen it slay, dragons and serpents and shame and
pride.
Watched them say, “they all say.”
He washed the body and left,
Until soft feet went to oak,
With his staff of quince and the taste of fig,
Along the salt road to tin

She pulled her feet inside the bundled duvet, and

tucked her hands into paws by her neck. Blue light
slunk into the room with teh draughts through the
crack in the curtains.
She shut her eyes and drifted

She opened her eyes and the light had shifted to

yellow on the door of her wardrobe, where she’d
hung her swimming medal.
Blackbirds sang outside and she slipped her feet into
the socks her dad had bought her with the grips on the
bottom. She padded to the window.
She had a jumper she wore on sick days. It had fat
buttons made of knots up to the neck and hole in the
front and she shrugged through and peaked through
the gap in the cloth of the curtain. She could feel the
cold through the glass on her face,
A secret of black and white birds strutted in the grass,
three months’ untrim.
She’d bagged up the blades with Dad, used a rusted
rake that caught in the sod when she pressed.
She’d dreamed of song that day, songs and stones that
skipped nineteen times on the clear water, and she’d
dreamed of dance and muddy footprints in great halls,
and she woke up laughing and light grinned.

Once, they’d rung bells for him, clothed him in

flowers that come out in the last of the summer,
wine from across the sea,
grown in the flint that looks over Little Demon
Forest.

White patchouli and the wind that brings the smell of

an end of month debauch.
Cider and black sticks feet to floors
And a black and white covenant
For the skewed skeletons tainted by loving kisses
He touches the broke with late night feet
send a two step stampede at the lights
Today piss proud and swollen and sore
untouched by fingers and lips
The window left open.

Along a row of shade,

Ancient stone slabs,
Patched with bricks
Guilders bloody in the street over that one.
Oak trees run the route or so.
When they stop,
Break into vineyard,
Palace gardens in the sun,
Yellow at the edges the same way,
Atmospheric interference,
Blue bends best.

At night the stones glow pink against the sky,

Warming the feet of outside slippers
A warrior alone on a hill
Bellowing triumph to thirsty gods,
A dynasty from the gate of time,
Bloody and wild,
Before they killed all the beasts,
Lightning struck blasted mountain,
Bold nights and bears in the heather.
They look back from floating baubles,
Chlorophyll cities,
Spoires drifting through no fly zones,
They get the cheat code to the source of the universe
from some travellers around spaceship earth,
flickered into existence round a cold fusion rig on
Ararat,
Reseeded the region with it,
Rained a december and a half more or less,
Had to ferry out the people who lived there,
Danger of flooding.
The still live on the mountain,
Some of them,
Manning the gossamers that shift purple from gone
west oil to the other,
Everything comes through Arat.
Now the palace gleams and three kinds of pigeons
pick at crumbs and the tiny things
They find to peck at.
With parakeets and the sort of blackbirds that bake.
“More green.” Says the chief architect.
“More green in general.”
So the treasurer and chief usurer stretches his face
and creases his forehead and coughs
“Green cunts.” He says.
The place bulbs into crystal domes and walkways into
the biome
A fungal network round to the last stop before stellar
for wall wanderers.
The rat hole they call it.
The cure for your ills, whatever
Its symptoms.
Comes from a shelf or case at the Rat hole
Lily the Pink had owned it longer than anyone cared,
They say it came from family
Or blood diamonds
Vetch sits down at a table in the shade of a palm burst
from terracotta, a stone hermes with a bronze helmet
poses in the rubble and soil.
Mint tea from the garden and malt whiskey from the
barrels out back tinkled into glasses.
Light dappled the other man’s face,
Patches of skin, half an eye, shellacked hair, blue
chin.
“So, arts of life?” Vetch says.
The man sips at the glass of tea.
Vetch leans over the table and moves his head, and he
slips down the whiskey with a flick from his hunched
posture.
He shuffles his arm once or twice to get the bag’s grip
right and he shuffles offstage for now.
You can’t see the other man anymore, joined the
chorus dancers down front maybe,
And overhead,
The reality hacked spores collect and drift, swords
sleep in hands
Under barrows,
And sparrows fly
And clouds unfold

Red drags in the stones in the dark, They shift

underfoot and she stumbles and dredges the bundle
from the water’s edge.
She watches the bundle turn and spit and vomit the
ocean.
She’d pulled the jag close enough to drag him, sack
of bone and catch him before falling.
“Shit and sod it.”
She bundles him in the back,
Big enough for a brace of blasters and dogs for
chasing and property, proper tea, milk after, splash no
sugar, over by the Heath.
“Still not got rid of the stink of Rothman’s?”
“Call no man happy til he’s died.”
“Amateur” Says Meadowfoam.
“How did we do?”
The head of John the Baptist chatters from the radio,
She opens the box after they leave. Inside stars gleam
around the pitted and rusted iron tang.

And let us, cyphers to this great account, pour years

into the halves of the hourglass, battles rendered in
music,
under a veil of the wild, contemplate well.

Thoughts finger their way from France and Russia, of

thrice presented crowns, fit for kings, refused and
melted for welfare checks and lobster Thermidor.
First Brothers and Lord Protector that turn and clap
hands for uncrowned flags and the sufferings on the
shoulders of state slaughterers.
A show that trials the baptism of a sinful and the
people trapped in skinfulls.
“Have you ever wondered how it the utilitarian
objects of one period become objects of aesthetic
value to the succeeding ones? This thing, constructed
purely to keep armies at bay, to shatter men and
horses, to guard a pass. How do we find it more
beautiful than the Maginot Line? Does time itself
confer something on relics and ruins not inherent in
the design of the builder?”

“The time for memories has ended.” She says.

“come, we have a war to fight.”
“come siblings.” She says.

Let’s doll up in our apocalipstick,

Stick the blades through our belts,
Time to go,
Time for war dogs in hell gates,
Cut the chord of hatred,
Now,
Lights,
Action,
Do not catch in false web waiting,
Leave bait untaken
Through the curtain, throw caution to new uncertain
tales
“We've chosen the ending” He says.
And winding, we go
Our paths went wrong first showing,
Unstalling, calling forth,
Thunder gods to participate in the precipitation of the
fall,
Rain comes.

“Shit.” He says.

Forged by the furnaces of six exploding suns, she

holds the swords above her head
dull in the light except where it catches, the flashing
of a first piece of time that first spring day.

The first rode on a chestnut, a baggage train from a

peninsula where the trees grow fragrant.
Another from over an ocean, where the snake king
hissed,
and the final rode sable. He’d whispered to the dog
heads of troglodytes and come back with shining
sheets.
White clawed and sticky fingered with the resin of the
moon cow, horned and leaking with her bellyful of
veal.
They followed the old post road to Susa,
the centre of an Iskendered civilisation,
past the shattered chariots and bone meal churned to
soil
bursting its green beneath the rivers.
Meanwhile the forest stirs and a woman bloody and
torn on the barbs of white stags steps through the
forest.

They sing from torn throats in a a cathedral of cages,

Uniformed and formed up in little soldiers’ ranks,
Gelded blocks of their gods’ soldiery
Parade ground infantry for their screaming infant of a
king,
And chant for a queen, a brood mare for his leaking,
weeping cock,
As rigid and unfeeling as rust,
They sing for him and his lists of rows and numbers
dressed in columns
Numbered between the ears,
Numbered between the legs
Tagged smooth, smooth, smooth,

Jubilation, everybody,
Fill the halls with songs of rage,
Bow before his leaking member
Bend the knee to insect plague

The air hot and dog shit thick cries at the pressure of
the King in Rags’ jaws, waiting for the sacrifice.
The choir shuffle their defiled feet through the dust of
a thousand thousand death camps,
Rows and rows of their mechanised world,
Each numbered and smooth,
Cleared from the words that question of sooth
And make a soul.
They pinned their wings to cork long enough ago to
the question
“What do these do?
“Why bother?”
And they kneel, this chorus chained in the filth of
charnel dark.

The black sun blocks itself, eclipsed by whispers of

extermination.

“My lord” says the man in the cassock

“My king.” He whispers
He drops a wad of blood and spunk from the travesty
between his legs and pisses how dogs piss at a strong
word, and cowers and looks for the praise of the
euthanizing razor.
The time comes
The slab waits.
The black grail leaks its filth to stain the stillborn
earth,
Over and over
And over
Over
Over
Over

Forever we will march for the blood and oil that

brings it
We lick your boots and horror O master.

The doors burst open,

And hand in hand and up the aisle they come,
Heads turn and insect screech of eunuch choirboys
“You.” Red says.
“Rolled in a lie mate” She says.
“King hereafter” She says
And she laughs, clear as svalbard summer,
she laughs.
“Vetch chipped you a sawdust dinner with that bit of
scry.” She says.
Missed the clues in the kiss she said, and focused on
the favour.

If we write the world,

What scribbling?
Better a shopping list?
Or tall tellings and grand narratives or small?
So drop your drawers and get into that fiction suit,
See how it fits?
A fold here and darted in at the waist and focus shifts
from rotten breath of slurry
To the roses that grow where it leaks into the soil

His lips cracked even through the stain of the wine

that crossed the tin and the silt.
The crows feet in the clay told them to come, to
follow, towards the garden by the hill of skulls.
The forest cracks in the cold, cackles in the rain and
the berries smash underfoot,
the first flowers in a new shiver or so,
white bells counting the days from South to North.
He brings the meat to the feast of the long night.
Firelight and honey and barrels ready to burst.
They’d pickled themselves that night, on the turn,
watched the old men shamble in the skins, watched
them dance and clatter the sun.
The desert took another mule, they say stubborn, no
voice for whining
they canter for the free hand whippers and sugar
slippers.
A mule to the dust and one to the feathers stuck from
its flank, riders with black flags and crushed idols

They’d turfed them out from the last place at risk of

making a mess,
but the straw in the back of the workman’s shed could
do the job and she rested out of the way of the stink
of the cow below.
It bellowed out at the men who tied their horses to
posts staked out front.

The door opened and the smell of bacon breakfasts

watered their mouths and she smiled into the sunlight
with a chip on her eyetooth from a hockey stick.
“Come in” she said.
Fractions lay open on the table in front of the sofa and
four boys danced in silence between astronauts and
pointed out the need
to love looking through the glass, at their mosaics
they had for hair
“Dad’s gone out to the shops.”
Red smiles and undoes the drawstring from the bag,
one of the straps snapped at the shoulder.
A pen had cracked and stained a corner and the lining
had torn itself on broken seashells.
She has a box, long and thin as the ruler she’d use in
design tech, the metal ones that drew blood on
knuckles in wars for buttons and tennis balls behind
teacher's back.
“Swap for salt and vinegar?” They’d say.
“Go on then.”
Her smile would kiss away the hurt and she’d look at
the leaves and they would gather in the gutters for
mulch.
“Here.” Says Red, “Yours”
She stands and skips through the door at the sound of
a click and comes back with a tray of tea and
bourbons,
“Pretend we’ve got hobnobs” She says
“Royalty” She says
She laughs and her heiress hair twirls around her face.

exhale
and a line of blood as long as a minute drains from his
neck to the ground
“Stand” She says
and the axe falls, ungripped from Bertilak as the hero
stands.

Watch how glory comes,

spitting and bursting
and laughing at the false sin history,
let those two feet flit and pass
past injuries and infamies
choose a different path
on the road to a pleasant green infinity,
a different symphony.

The rain stuck their clothes tight to their bodies, and

he laughed when he dragged at her shirt, and it fell to
the floor, collecting the soil of the forest.
Her lips parted for the first tonguing taste
And she felt his heart beating in his kiss.

Her nipples pucker in the rain, and she takes his

hands, and looks.
She drags him from his shirt, sleeves inside out for
the ground,
And he helps her with his belt and big button,
Cock pressed into trouser leg,
The first drips on his thigh and she gets him out
And bites her lip and he bites hers and they press
against the trunk of a pine tree
Shining eyes.
Oh god
Her hands curl around him, summoning the hardness
from the roots
He pulls off her pants and kneels,
And buries his face in the stink of her
A groan, animal,
And he breathes again and she pushes herself into the
first touch of his tongue,
Such heat, such longing,
Soft for his first tip.
A moan, mammal and long
And he stands and his cock presses into the wetness
building on her thighs.
Lightning flashes and her hair sticks to their necks
and faces,
Sodden in the gaps between their bodies,
Electricity strikes between their lips and eyes,
He takes her breasts and runs his thumb over the
rosebuds of her nipples.
She takes a step back, a separation to smile at his
twitching sex.
The forest roars and they take the loam to daub the
signs on their naked bodies,
Listening to the branches whisper the words of the
gods.
They move closer again and she feels the bark of the
pine cracking under her back
And she opens her legs.
He runs a rune of mud from navel to the opening of
the universe, the rain trickling it to her thigh.
Her lips move,
The words come out soft in the noise of the rioting
angels,
Holding the sky,
Heralding his sighing breath.
The words speak older than the first ones,
Once spoken they burst the spheres of heaven
Seven planets,
Seven sheets of lapiz,
Hidden lazuli beneath the lazarus sky.
Each sphere uncrowns a king,
And she pulls his cock and tilts her hips to guide him,
opening wider,
And he stops for a breath between the words.
He says something,
Stag to doe,
And he grinds into her,
Just so,
Smudging the sigils as his cock strains harder inside
the heat of her.
Harder harder, oh god
Antlers spread from his skull,
And her body clothes them in wings and she bites his
neck while he speaks.
The words come from the gap in the rain,
The spark that drags the lightning from the sky.
Their eyes widen,
At their insides growing to burst,
Inside, around, through,
A supernova, the heat,
Her cunt grabbing at his pulsing cock,
He sucks at her nipples as she starts to speak the
words,
Buries his face in her, and he slides out for a breath,
and in,
In, deeper, deeper, so tight so sweet,
Their hands cleaned by the rain,
The tension builds in her clit, the walls of her, ready
to fall,
And he looks at her eyes and calls.
She rubs herself tight against him, grinding on him
when they lower to the leaves and the soil, soaking
around them,
His eyes burning,
Her thighs gripping
As she rides,
The words come slow from his mouth now,
From a place far from finding,
She grunts between the words, her breasts in his
hands, she watches his face tighten,
Face red, eyes brighten,
He bites at her lips.
She pushes her cunt onto him, around him, pulls him
inside,
Slick and wet and sliding on the thick hair that grows
around him,
Her wings have grown,
So vast, filling the world,
Breaking the sky from sight,
And the rain choruses,
Perfect key and inside,
The growing supernova explodes,
Bursting hot from inside him,
Inside her,
Over the angels singing, over and over,
And they call out the words together,
In the silence between their breaths,
The listen to the voices older than heaven,
And the voices speak

The next morning tasted of old cigarettes and the

sweating bread taste of yesterday’s beer. Red sat at a
card table, one of those folding ones and traced her
fingers through coffee silt on the cover of a fashion
magazine.
“Here.” She said.
She poured a cup from a teapot with a filter paper
balanced in the opening.
“The stones went missing.” He said.
He dried his chest off with a towel in the doorway
and rearranged the inside of his damp boxer shorts.
He disappeared and called through the open door.
What kind of something can take ten two tonne slabs
of rock in the middle of the night, who would want
to?
“Weishaupt’s gang put them there in memory of John
Dillinger’s penis.” Red said.
All that maximum population stuff, that came from
the seventeen seventy six lot, secret masters, or
maybe it was the other gang, false flagging it.
“Forget about the putters.” He said.
He came in, dressed by now and she poured another
coffee and he stands over it, hands cupped at the
smell.
“Blood of Earth.” She said.
“I bless Ra, the sun disk burning bright.” He said.
He breathes from his gut and blows out over the
surface of the liquid, takes a sip.
“Fire of heaven." She said.
“I bless Luna, Isis in the night.” He said.
“I bless the air, Horus, hawk.”
“I bless the Earth, on which we walk.”
“Fuck, I needed that.” He said.
He walked over to the window and pushed it open
with his elbow while he fiddled in his pocket with his
other hand. He lay the coffee on the sill, in the slash
of sunlight.
“Spicy one?”
He twisted his head from his prone position through
the window.
“Poster on order." The sign on the back of the door
said.

She watched High Climber sit and watch the insects

buzz and zip in the air around the tree stump.
Lightning had shattered it and the middle had fallen
into the floor of the forest with the rain and the heat,
to the beetles and worms and mushrooms.
HIgh climber saw the insects fade. The tree grew,
grey and brown and green and the colour of bone
where the bark had flaked away.
His eyes ached and his muscles twitched at his
stillness, and he breathed.
She watched High Climber sit and watch the tree, the
air getting stiller, heavier.
He breathed, snorted and began to scream, howl,
scream, rock and bellow, he slapped the ground, and
grabbed at one of the rocks the hunters brought to the
place around the tree stumps.
He bunched himself up, crouching with the rock,
screaming and lept, and smashed the rock into the
smooth part of the tree. Thunder struck the forest.
Dust and bark fell, and his feet kicked soil into the air
as he landed and trotted off to the forest.
Smiler and Broke Tooth went with him, running and
leaping around the roots and into the canopy.

Broke Tooth twisted his head around, sniffing and

then pointed with his chin, jerked it at broken twigs
and crushed ferns. They crouched and crawled along
the trail. Broke Tooth pointed at droppings, still warm
and they split, Smiler towards the sound of the river,
Broke Tooth away and High Climber along the trail.

Broke Tooth stopped, bent low, curled legs, hands on

the ground in front, breathing and tight.
The creature lay in the roots of a tree, shape bruken in
the leaves and the stripes of colour from the gaps in
heaven.
The creature raised its head and flapped its tail at the
insects that worried it and then lay flat.
The forest exploded. Smiler burst from the trail
throwing two rocks the size of skulls.
Smiler screamed, bellowed,
“mishe mishe!”
The creature flew, and High Climber caught it with
the broken branch he swung . It squealed a wet squeal
and span, darted away. Broke Tooth snapped another
rock at it, gripping it tight in fist, a rock sharp from
the river, and the creature fell, stumbling to its feet,
but Smiler beat at it with his fists, knocking it to the
ground and then Broke Tooth’s rock crashed into its
legs and skull and ribs, and it screamed, then bleated,
wailed, bleated and still.
They dragged it through the forest in clouds of
buzzing, through the brush to the clearing where the
young ones rolled and chewed and picked at fleas.
She, grey chinned Dry Tits, she padded her way to a
flowering brush. It smelt alive and hot and she
crouched and knelt and dropped the peel of a fragrant
fruit, a feather the colour of the sky over the river,
and a shining stone. She pushed them under the
lowest leaves in the cool earth. She looked at the
flowers, they had opened before the last blood of the
new mother and had never fallen. Her mouth watered
at the meat in the clearing. She dropped her head and
sang and the wasps and the butterflies listened
Shatter the blackened mills that blacked up the moths,
in the shackles of the name of the shackled god,
impossible escher angles between the chords of the
harps of angels
singing Bach, forwards and upside,
stacked keys and unfinished sympathies
for sake of curiosity, what next our bold adventurer?
Twist sacrificial slaughter to self pleasure
by advice from Arthur’s cousin’s slip of lace at
Lady’s leisure.
In place of a a life shortened daughter for wind,
on the wine dark,
sparking a ten year war for defamation,
look at how different it sounds,
even in the names of the cities and villages and towns
Milton,
Morton,
Eden,
Moss Side,
Biglands,
Loveclough
Goodshaw
Whitewell
New Haven
The Common
The refusal of the crown,
by maiden, mother, crone and foaming meadow,
for an end to those savage links,
and sink estates
and high stake knives, on frigid cliffs,
bringing war and fire.
Let his head bow, for the blade of absolution,
unbound,
for the orphans that walked that day,
in the tang of salt,
A halt.
A stop to start something harder
And the man came for the tin, where trees thicked the
ground,
bright, bustling and sweet,
starlings and sparrows and hawks and thrushes,
singing from dark places,
where they make their nests in bushes.