Shedding Verdigris
Skin of the gully
From sea fret
Or foaming conscience
Winds out the fog,
A ghost the world gave itself.
Husky, diaphanous,
Rich in the golds of muscle;
Gentle curls of invisible mass
Steeping in sea brine
Disentangle from their honey.
Reptilian somnolence,
The last of its composure
Abandoned.
Pale mist clarifies around you,
Lucid incisions derelict.
An aria of flecked,
Overlapping keratin shivers
Rhythmically in rippled locomotion,
Anthem to the coiled temple
Of perfume unmooring it;
Enough to sleep myths.
It is in your dark now,
Ripping up the light–
Forgetting it.
In one moment
Your view drools.
Only new facts matter.
This Snake God
Ate the radio waves,
Felled airships.
It bled out every satellite,
Each of the parody constellations
With brattish, thorned venom.
It has sailed:
A world around you now,
A world serpent reaching
Over the crenels of grand,
Cerebral fortresses like
A foreign artery.
You are but an island,
Raw on the motion
Of its cast-iron sea.
It was earmarking you
For fare, already fossilising
The hallucination of your guise
In the lidless pipeline of its eyes.
From the forked tongue of its aerosphere
Flecks of sand seemingly fall away,
Beige carpets of beach
Muting without detail.
Reeds thinly collapse.
You freeze on the wingspan
Of imperceptible teeth.
Empty.
Empty,
Like post-mortem eyes
Changing, vacuums and
Ever-death and saints pleading,
Curdled in the porcelain
Of a howling whisper.
Stars collapse.
Tides recede.
Sleek fish mock the
Boats that heel them.
Ophidian wonder;
Return again.
