Serpentine

Your graces fall on deaf ears,
The heat rises, glowing amber from hollow sockets.
The body, the skin, still human at least,
Serves an anchor to the great unleashed.

This also is one of the dark places of the earth,
Serpentine.

Your fire, your blackness, your tendrils upon my throat,
Caress a soul I no longer recognise, smother a girl I do not know.
Crushing wouldn't mind no man's might
With scroll for an empty chalice, simply fill me.

Awakened, a hesitant Chimera now crackles
A ribald mind unravels, ripe fruit,

Ready but for the taking if you would my
Serpentine.

I Remember Me

There are not enough faces. Your own gapes back
at you on someone else, but paler, then the moment
when you see the next one and forget yourself.

It must be the dreams that make us different, must be
private cells inside a common skull.
One has the others look and has another memory.

Despair stares out from tube trains at itself
running on the platform for the closing door. Everyone
you meet is telling wordless barefaced truths.

Sometimes the crowd yields one you put a name to,
snapping fiction into fact. Mostly your lover passes
in the rain and does not know you when you speak.

~Carol Ann Duffy

Hallow

My mind was misty,
clogged.
So I started with the sink,
mismatched bowls and plates in a heap.

But it wasn't really quite enough
and my hands were itching
so I set to work heaving and
piling the furniture
ready for attack
but it didn't suck so I had to
hit it repeatedly and flush the
dead skin and the hair and the
indescribables into the night air.

Then of course the nose starts itching,
it always starts itching and the sneezing soon after
but that can be combated with a slow strip
to the hum of the hoover and another shot of icy vodka.

It will all need mopping and dusting and shining:
the floors, the windows, the doors
nothing will get away, I'll make sure of it
I even polish the cracks in the sill
and the wall, it's grubbiness offends me
but as I squeeze the sponge out
and the water whitens it is more than the grime that is letting go.

And so we must, the entire wall, to make the
change in tone less apparent
but in the dark they shouldn't notice
I contemplate taking the lightbulb out
but think better of it - I can't reach.

I have inhaled enough polish and
drunk enough bleach and it is complete:
cold, clean, unforgiving,
spotless and quite beautiful

Slowing to a murmur
from a whirring escapade
hanging limp,
disheveled and stained