drown

I won’t look for the possum with its black ears of mincing, hiding in the rafters waiting to piss on my head
nor the wasp on the leaf, in the left side of my brain or on the daybed where we stayed covered in a veil
nauseous and pocked beyond the size of Uluru

I won’t clutch at that day you handed me the world doing the splits right up the junta
up the arse when the sound
the air
the cloud,
the seahorse curled inside its web of wet seaweed - a poem could be screen printed there
unravelled sequence
phonetics
neoprene

when the change came like your mother’s flushed cheeks and heat crazed kitchen table deliveries, dressed up, dressed down, balancing like a clown
I scanned the list, grease paper and picked pockets full of tulips

ideas happen like a turtle and so do heartbeats
like an August tree
like a finger pointing to one kiss, one second, one year of passion fruit vines, like presents under a forest of tightropes

you did tell me that your words meant something without meaning it

soon, our lips turned scarlet under the rim of a bottle of bourbon
on late afternoons that liquefied into an empty concrete swimming pool
and I became a lantern

drown

that is how it was when we began to drown

I turn your breathless body over
lick your rubber suit
perfect for bouncing