The Story of a Name

A midsummer night’s dream was where she caught me, I was

better off being a donkey’s head, instead of shouldering the phantasmal grey pressure of a planet. Night

creatures would walk around under her skin for three quarters of the year,

dissolving figures, shadows that would offend

evenly across a board of toast men like summer butter,

for no reason other than the careful and terrified audience of a body with a body.

Grief was quite the same, she wrapped her belly in

hessian before saying her next line

in act three,

jotting between each word, picking them up and placing them down like family silver, 

knocking her head against the side of a ship the breadth of my father’s ribcage,

low and easy gutsy moans moo

mooed, grass fed and

nourished, on her knees, in the unfinished set of a sweet meadow

or dry barn.

People will ask me about a tv show in the nineties

quick to

run their hands above the

static of my skin

trusting the two-d character,

underestimating my potential for disappointment. However many

versions I will tell you, 

wait until you hold the

xray image up to the light and pull out

you’re teeth, add them to the seat rows of a child’s coat

zip.

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