Stay in the loop and register for email updates about events, competitions and all things poetry.
sign me up
Stay in the loop and register for email updates about events, competitions and all things poetry.
From Pepper Seed (Peepal Tress Press)
I move my lips without really even realising I am doing it
so there is something of him in the red of my mouth, a
vowel or hoo molten and coating. The voiceless ‘h’, exhalation,
reoccurs silently in my mind as if he were breathing over my
tongue. Hunky fusion machine.
Interconnectedness –
his cupid’s bow arching over mine, non-local particles
reacting, orbicularis oris phasing in, out, orbiting – is a kind of
physics. Interdimensional kiss folding in on itself like a star.
Supermassive neutron collapsing in hot gloss bomb colours.
Blood rich lyricism.
He’s been on my mind – live in Hammersmith 1973
pulsating in a cut-off unitard. His limbs are nebula-like; bars of
gaseous red under the gel. Blowing kisses, I catch one fifty
years on. This is for me, he says. By which he means this is
for me, Richard.
Inflections, mantle, his sexiness form a zodiac constellation.
7, 1, 83, Small Magellanic Cloud – of flesh. A piercing through
the red-black flank. Out of my head. I’m h-h-h-high on this
ventriloquism. Erasing. The lyric I is an alien. Pink river
dolphin chirping in syntax.
Jaunty piano sharps,
occasionally pentatonic, lighting up the auditory cortex like a
comet’s tail. Like ionisation. Neon red and lit from within.
His voice, a solar radiation. The tiny bones of my ears. The
belt, the parabelt receiving direct input. Fuzzy centaur.
I cannot adequately translate my mind’s arachnid locomotion
as it reacts to his song. Hibiscus-hued nerve impulses, a
miniature and internal lightning. The redness extinguishing
ambivalence is need. My yearning. A kind of gravitylessness.
Maronite electricity grazes the Kármán Line.
I ask my friend about his song and she says, oh I don’t know –
sexual healing or something. Shards of red howlite melt down,
are recrystalised, within the furnace of his mind. Space-red
rock. Lattice system aching, rebranching, stave-like. I’m often
moved, rarely healed.
I am night. Red night. My fooling mouth deciding on need.
Him, transcendent, guiding us around and around and around.
Together is no excuses. Together is hey, hoo, h-h-h-high.
My mind smiling now. Young and ephemeral amalgamation.
We hang above the lunar occultation of Mars. Strong. Defined.
I listen to Let’s Spend the Night Together
continually for one night so do we spend the night together?
His tongue, my ear disappear into each other completely. An
event horizon. Red luminosity humming itself into me like
quasar light penetrating the singularity. Aperture finally visible.
My imagination is quantum.
I am fragmented by resonances, intention, flowing from his
mouth and the associated Brownian, red, noise. Annunciated
waves that roll like firework theory static. That will not be
stopped on flesh. Fixated glam queering. A futuristic patina
scabs the wound.
Connection to him –
persona, lick of gas giant pink darkening to red – is a ghost
particle, unphysical state. Clavicle. Accretion disk. Red
mouth. Red tongue. Retrograde motion. The red dwarf of his
body satelliting towards me. Red life. It was such a clear
invitation to have sex.
after W. Todd Kaneko and David Bowie
Angie Bowie was the first woman
in interstellar space. When she left
Earth’s orbit, she could be heard to say:
Faith can only take you so far /
Look Zowie, mummy can fly /
I’m never coming back.
Angie once slept for forty days and forty nights.
When she woke, it was 1969
and her first husband was singing this love song
by way of proposal.
On her mother’s side, Angie Bowie
is the great-great-great-granddaughter
of Aphrodite. As such, she has the power
to grant favour in love, though is cursed
to have no control over her own fate.
On her father’s side, she is descended
from electric eels: hence everything else.
Angie Bowie comes from an ancient tribe
of Europeans that doesn’t sleep.
That’s how she had so much
sex in the seventies.
Angie Bowie was born in Cyprus,
spent seven years learning manners
in Switzerland, got kicked out
of a private school for meddling
with another girl. She moved
to Kingston in 1967, and then
she turned into a swan.
In another universe, Angie Bowie is known
for playing Wonder Woman and has the best-selling
DC action figure of all time modelled after her
scandalous waistline. In our universe, they say
casting turned her down because
she refused to wear a bra.
When Angie was born, Mars, Venus and Jupiter
rose in conjunction with the moon,
a once-in-a-millennium celestial bracelet
visible only from Earth. The midwife told
her mother, “Be careful with this one.
She’ll have powers beyond her ken.”
Although more widely known as the Barmaid of
the Deadrockstar, in Bromley she’s known as
the Fairy of the Glades, in Cyprus as George
and Helena’s girl, and in the States
as the Glitter Goddess of the Sunset Strip.
Angie Bowie wrote the book on Bisexuality,
published by Pocket Essentials in 2002.
In it, she details the entire history of the preference,
which was told to her by her great-great-great-
grandmother, an electric eel. Nobody knows
exactly how eels reproduce. The only fact
we know for sure about Angie Bowie is this.
In 2004, scientists discovered a star orbiting Betelgeuse,
which shone fifteen times brighter than our sun. They named it
after Angie, the prettiest star. Astronomers believe it
has already gone supernova, but the light hasn’t reached us yet.
That night, Angie was wearing a pink velvet suit.
That night, a cheetah print all-in-one by Alexander McQueen.
That night, her ex’s leather jacket with DARE ME patched on the back.
Angie spent the final days of the millennium
in the seas around Paphos, trying to grow gills.
“I’m going to breathe water if it’s the death of me,”
she told her girlfriend, who held hands
with the lifeguard nervously on the shore.
After several days, Poseidon rose to say,
“What are you doing here, Angie?
You don’t belong in the water.”
She replied, “Great King Poseidon,
I came from this place. I don’t know
where I belong, but this is where I want to be.”
He said, “But weren’t you the subject of that
song on Aladdin Sane, you know, The Prettiest
Star? My brother Zeus knows people in the sky.
Why don’t you let me call him?” Angie said,
“I really wish you hadn’t brought that up,”
bit Poseidon’s left arm till it bled blue
and swam up to the surface, looking for a place
that didn’t know the lightning man.
Angie Bowie found out about the death of her first husband
when she was on Celebrity Big Brother.
The producers took her off air to deliver the news.
They filmed her reactions in the Diary Room soon after.
She left the show early due to ill health.
Angie Bowie was a finger beckoning.
Then she was a crown, but all the jewels fell out.
Then she was a pine, shedding in the city.
Then she was a snake, whose fangs wouldn’t reach her tail.
Then she was a carpenter who nobody would hire.
Now, she is the bassline in a messed-up love song.
In 1969, Angie Bowie’s first husband proposed
down the phone to her by singing this song.
She later said, “We got married
so I could [get a permit to] work…
I didn’t think it would last
and [he] said, before we got married,
‘I’m not really in love with you,’
and I thought that’s probably a good thing.”
There are many legends about Angie Bowie’s
first husband, too. I think you might know a few
about the warlocks, the spiders. One lesser-known legend
tells of Sunday afternoons of toast and butter and tea,
of singing at the piano while his wife and son
danced around the living room, twinkling.
Facebook
Twitter