Five Compression Poems
– from special effects
one look at her face | her eyes
her blue tattoos |
she steps onto no man’s land
takes a deep breath & touches the hearts
of last week’s stripped & searched
cosmic-brokers of dreams | she doesn’t budge
to the helmeted head of a childhood
folded back into the earth
*
known figures investigate
the open fields of your rooms
counting their nights in the dark
putting words in mouths
memory serums line your shelves
the space you occupy now
is furnished for a child
*
i survive identities
dig the garden
stab at the birthing holes in plants
& you practise the ovarian experience
of green blood in your streams | your gullies |
in your lexicon of new bones
*
body hungry i stumble about for a mouthful of her absence
i taste a raw consensual acquiescence | an unspoken sentence
is caught | manhandled | as to her whereabouts
is a matter of interpreting calendars
*
he spends days unearthing
horoscopes
adjusting to observations of black cats
mad-eyed owls | a Judas sheep in the backyard
i’m told at night he sleeps with toys
Iain Britton‘s poems have recently been published, or are forthcoming in Molly Bloom, The Interpreter’s House, Long Poem Magazine, Stand, Clinic, Card Alpha, The Curly Mind, M58, The Literateur. Since 2008, Iain has had five collections of poems published, mainly in the UK. A new collection photosynthesis was published by Kilmog Press (NZ), 2014.