Person train

I am a person-train with stupid luggage.  

I am an esoteric metaphor chugging through a Swiss field  

while Maria spins and spins and the hills are alive  

with the swelling noise of industrialisation  

and a nuclear winter spreads like a slow grey quilt.  

 

 I am a person-train splashing through a Bavarian ravine—  

massive Cheshire smile on my face, nuclear snowflakes everywhere.  

The passengers huddled in my bowels are resorting to cannibalism  

which acts as a thinly veiled metaphor for the class system  

and saves me the hassle of paying a chef.  

 

I wanted to explain the stupid reality of incessantly chugging forward  

in a world that is inexorably ending—rainforests balding  

like an Amazon CEO’s head; gulls feeding their young bottlecaps.  

But all this poem has done has made me wish very much  

to be in a field with you. A sunlit field, wearing a dirndl,  

 

and watch as the nuclear sky slides closed  

like a quiet eyelid.  

​

A Sheep Cradled By Its Owner, Who Sits On a Sheepskin Rug 

So this is love—you, and the way I taste.  

My skin, the feel of it: the wool-cloud 

hot-cheek bristles, white as sand 

made of mercury. 

 

Dead skin cradles you as you cradle me. 

Pet. Sweetie. Agnus Dei. 

Would you do it yourself? My flesh parting like Styrofoam: 

a knife, a razor, a scythe— 

 

my bleats like the sound of a sheep being flayed. 

 

Mornings I watch the sun rise and break 

into a horizon-sized sun, 

spread out through the morning, 

illuminated flock fog-grazing. 

 

You hold me close, cheek pressed against my face. 

Your skin, too, is soft.