With plastic meaning, or meaning more than meaning,
she knits malignant pronouns around a pen,
around some ink, around a heart, around a name.
She eyes the paper that frames her ‘I’s
and ties her ogles up in objects dead as doornails.
She locks those bare boned and impenetrable ghosts
inside the moment that cuts the wombed minuet from the hour
and bites at the jaw of time’s immortal carcass.
The dust on her heels bleeds and dies there.
Those unforgiving children of space
eat into the ribcage of shape,
and shape for each insect of her dying
a naked and fragmented shell.
Nothingness needles its maggot
through the shadows of her moving,
exposing the object-eye-on-fire in the worm of her vision.
Her seasick body, beyond blood, flesh and bone,
is stopped in its tracks by tuppenny love in the vein
with all its broken morning
in smithereens across the equator of her heart.
The genesis at her toe makes her more the fool,
goes like the clappers between time and no time at all;
cannot be sculpted from an inkwell nor a cage,
cannot be held on to, nor traced along a page.
