how language becomes a skull suit
into which you soon grow.
Language is alien jewellery,
oiled as aniseed baubles.
Jellied-dark detrusor muscle, weeping.
In this antiseptic September, I vow
not to burn days siphoning real from fake.
I’ll reclaim
analogue as phosphate will reclaim the flesh,
rainbow-facet crystallise it.
I am the artist’s gutted house
filled with boiling copper, from which blossomed
a carpet of gelid zirconia.