TAKING LEAVE


            Kennel the canines.  Engrave VTR.  Programme the light switches.
            O Father Time, the Mother of all ditherers, how you fly
            like a fugitive shade from the russet-mantled dawn.
            Gussets.  Panties-oh.  Have you packed your spare tights?  Your province.
            Maps.  High definition.  To navigate the configuration of your heart.
            To avoid the skein of varicose roads and free-wheel free will.
            My fingers have tiptoed your peaks, ear-marked your lobes,
            lubed your runnels, slipped Heaven’s Gate.
            Fan-belt.  Those rustling bustles.  Offenbach tapes?
            Hustle.  Defrost fridge, delouse dat cabbage-rump.
            Deworm dose dogs.  Anubis be praised.  Done on de first.
            The Earth’s hertz level is speeding up.  But the Earth’s heart?
            Will your heart ever freeze?  Why did the forest petrify?
            Seven thousand terracotta warriors stand alert in stillness,
            luted in loess, buff beneath flaked paint, by chariots unwinged.
Yet the sands of tide wait not for the mighty Qing,
nor my soul, flakey before the vault’s crossbows and mercurial lakes.
How you quiz your eyebrows at monster me first light,
Then chortle at my horned-Viking thatch.
To gel or not to gel.  Time was when brilliantine
Was sheeny green as Oirish sateen, emeralds ten a pfennig.
Stop the papers. No more bayoneting the wombs of mothers
eight months pregnant.  Sever no more feet of bouncing babes.
Why body-bag the best of us?  Don’t cut the last Chechen’s balls
with Russian tripwire.  Don’t sizzle the last Kurd in Iraqui oil.
You couldn’t amputate my hands for stealing time.  Hand me
the handbook of penguin parades, fairy cakes and freshwater springs.
Where are those ruby jubes of yesteryear, those triang slabs of Toblers?
Am I still not loved enough, sweet-talking back to childhood,
taking leave of woofers, budgie, worm farm, even my senses?
How is it that hundreds upon thousands of worms graduate,
whereas mullet-me merely stares at the monk’s third eye?
Yet wherever we sheer off, you give traction to my radials.
Spare tyre.  And you so salmon-sleek and button-bright.
Spare torch.  To glimpse the face of your soul beneath the stars.
To find the treasure beneath the stations of journey’s night.
Why do I struggle to remember my shaver and nitty-gritty,
my nit-picker and mint tooth-pickies?
Only at the edge of vision does my energy dance:
batwings, floating dots, grainy film, blind spots.
Shall I adorn you with sharks teeth at low tide?
Engirdle you with tresses of kelp and whalebone?
Dare I pack my corset?  And Viagra, in case?
Come, let’s spread our gannet wings, not fence bills.
Put out the emotional rubbish and jump on the lid!
Jumper leads.  Jumpers.  Rumpus room:  licked, locked.

                                                                        Michael Small

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