A taste for riddles that have no answers
At the end
Upside down
The sky sharp as a knife
Dogs let loose on their own recognizance
Prowl the gutters
Rifling sodden wrappers
Break open their skulls
Could be teeth and bone
Could be the rubble of sepulchred Rome
You tell me
As she lies there neither living nor dead
Fabric knotted around thighs and ankles
Winding sheet widdershins
With the warm silver of forceps
Flashing in the dark
You pluck the hairs from her body
From her head
White limbs rigid
Laved in spit
As if a semblance of innocence could engender resurrection
Faceless one
Your hands filthy as history
Splintering boards the grave colour of earth
Gored routed runnelled and worm-eaten
Here the building consumed by cyanic lichen and arsenic moss
A lair for delinquent perversities and slipped blades
Hides the mask
The dark emerges the secret
The permutations of that face
Livid in the umber a puzzle
Bruise mottle
Torn rags
Lipstick a bright discarded jewel
Keys in the red dirt
Over the concrete culvert
Sigils, misgivings, remnants of misadventure
Evidence, detritus where the river ends
Stink of fear
Here was the trail of blood
Left, fled
When my heel split open
When I stepped on an axe
Running away
Right, red
Circling up on toes like a dancer
Wince and hobble
Over the splintered boards
The peppertree filling the air
With a tangerine spice
Pomegranates spilt where they fell
Flies worrying the mingling stains
The creek awash with yellowing leaves
That fall but do not turn the wheel
The mill house wearing moss
Like a comfort
Of years that could waking be cast aside
The nacreous vehicle lumbering sloth-like away
From this cold glade
Past crumbling ochre chimneys
Detritus an alien expanse
A wound opposing the sky
The orphan weeds
The cavernous terraces
Crawling with the black and yellow of poisoners
Smoke and dust taint the blue balm
Into the unyielding horizon
One wheel circling
The moment when
In the dank water
So lost in slimes and sharp reeds
The dragonflies drone as the mud leeks into your ears
Uprooting the leech from this pale limb
Leaves it neither pure nor soiled
A smear of blood is ambivalent
As vast as is the night
Unaffected by your sarcasm
This space is the opposite of infinite
Here, now
The faceless and the masked and the naked still cry
The building lumbers circling
Something a little strange for Halloween, with a picture adapted from a piece by Kouji Tajima.