Living

Every day I grow more like a butcher,
From a saw-dust puffed out stage for musical,
Garnering the red cheeks and the wares, he worships them.

Basso celebration of the dried out gammon –
Bloodied fillet caught up in refrain,
Crowned with rashers, lamby sceptre, early rising
Greets him, greets that daily killy tang.

I used to handle stuffs with care
And rank up sausages in style
I never wasted offal then
Each bone told a fair tale.

But the voice grows compulsive
For the red germs at the raw,
A shelf collapsed last Monday –
Ill stacked upon the Sunday –
The shanks now need a saw
Even custom grows repulsive.

He’s slowed down with the commerce and he’s in it for himself,
He sort of takes a bath. Earlier, redder, rise, baptised with ham,
The morning folding out like pudding skin,
A gamey pre-luncheon becomes tartare;
We lurch about through mince skeins and blood pie.
When routine becomes metaphor, it gets
Hard to hold back. He blames the suffragettes.
I think it went back longer, mammothwards,
But mercy for that steak –

It is, when we come down to it, a piece of meat.
It is our friend. Don’t land it woman’s name.

Experiment with Eugene

Is it so shocking in such times to fail
To heal that slashed goodbye with a buy?
When RBS's lunging can't avail
To stem or succour, can bull hearts ride high?
The envelopes I picked up can't conceal
Through friendship this cold thriftiness, this deal;
Now, though the postponed tack embraces paint
Those Stuart faces betray August's taint.
Donne's sermons caught to Spitfire my style
Were all their shelf could proffer, yet too dear.
In all, each time I wrenched my card, too near,
In spite of Scots wool or stationer's aisle,
Your stare was felt unhidden in my hide,
I knew I bought things while crunched from your side.

Experiment with 'Cesco

Those scars, my scourge, have scabbed from jam to whey,
Their flint infection settled, but obscure,
So set for moulding, they could yet seem pure
Enough to point the proper, straightened way.
For all I ever planned, still yet they may:
A gap's slid out for a tongue to abjure,
The quarry should have learnt to hop the lure,
A witness of the portioning of past prey.
But weals fasten something as they sink,
Slivers and thorny specks iterate flesh,
And thought looks to the rigour of the sense.
What use then to so much as think to think,
When such a hurt is only cheap as fresh,
And the least quenching salve's the mere defence?

Symptoms

I see them billow after I half-close
My lashes – sailing scraped out buoyant skins
Of avocado, armaded and stern,
Or smooth or pitted, bannering the sight,
Becoming colder, creamier, but vague,
Possessing stink of wonder and the end
Taking the passage via that throwaway
The starkened mounding, on one way, in fact
To pinnacles. Between plasma and blood
The mind-multching accomplishes enough.

Killing and Raping Mummy

Picture this – I’m gay in December
Picture this – freeze the cold weather
You got clutched in religion, you'd take off the lids
And, oh, your head is beautiful.

I’m in the phone-booth and don’t wanna cross a whore,
Mounting like a fugitive. Your cigarette
Is tentative. A bucket of the ocean, oh,
Like a cabinet of wax, yet, oh
Your head is beautiful.

Nippy

Was not the hounds that wore Actaeon out,
Tubbily biscuit-sated, fondly warm,
Kitchen-scrap merchants cut back for the shoot,
It fell out so.

The earth-born hunter, straying for a mark,
The queen at chaste ease in her ordered park
(Whose order is a forest, eases such
As boars might shun and tigers barely touch);

Actaeon takes the crazy pavementing
Over a root above a cache of snails,
The hoof, the green-gyration, and the trails,
Unknown to Cynthia’s lodge’s casementing –

(Which is of glinty moss and blue-black sedge)
- it is a morning outing, and in light
Vegetable-dappled, is she blotched aright,
So that the lunatrix spreads in hell’s hedge –

She sees him see. Grey eyes gulf out. She smiles in courtesy,
But shivers with such mortal effort, sways half down and coughs,
A bronchial clarion whose sympathy spins him from his firm seat –
“And love?” he says in quiet.

The trigger wording for the bloody batch,
And baying as they ferry on a catch,
Their fast-bred haunches and their slavening jaws.
The nymphs, Actaeon eaten, became whores.