Poem

Fiona Hile

Side by side

A PORTABLE CRUSH

Riding on such instruments as a large aluminium
hemisphere, syndicated falconry of gifts and predilections
propose dilutions of solemn music played through ploughs
of lidding ink and fare renderings of infinite tapping bells.
Tyrranised by the fastidious machinations of the filigreed
demotic, I gurgle ‘blatant hatred’, caterwaul the demonic
logic of wild horses at the mouth of a raging neddy.

But what if love unfolds with the synchronous
cruelty of your lips, the parameters of unlikely
incisions gelded to private property and the right
to that property? What if I see you from the place
from which you see yourself, otherwise lodged,
the fishbone throat raging or striking against
the other turned to shame? Inequality is a mode
of death. Was there ever a woman who felt
herself attached by a generic marker?

The hostility of a loveless assault casts a vegetable
aura across the timpanic register of your filth,
syndicated. Nostalgia hotwires judicious piecemeal
fabrication. All of your thoughts entwined,
the nexus of a single desiring sing of the mandatory
mast enforcing a lifetime of concealed movement,
held in place by the ache of a portable crush,
your orbital, creaking fixations stupefying the apropos.

Given time, obligations repulse me, become plentiful
and take hold. These are your wander-jaehre,
the creak of wooden steers, the hull of the drop-away
safety lever. This immateriality of the living body
conjures the self outside in the world, the illegality of charm,
harm min., an agonised alterity in flight from the apothecary,
the pleasure of which this song has suddenly become.

Wake your fray, the lanolin is leeching from the wood.
If you want to vanish your lover find a use for the whip
of imperfect probabilities. Assign yourself to a class
in Advanced Dream Logic and give me the day each day
from a different bed. Make yourself that conglomeration
of symptoms that only death can cure. Or lead your frothing
team to the edge of Overflow, arrest the giant hills that distend
the swarming sea, unsettle the necks of your live stockings –
And save me a piece of Wedding Cake Island to feed to the
horses when we give them back their heads.