Darwin Neither Amelia

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Ribbons, long, fragile things, only ribbons

It filled me up, you know, those moments; filled me
With greater things than sawdust, oh, with taffetas and laces, with prints, weaves, wonders, strings of seams, of something –
- jeans, oh, those jeans; paired
Longer, harder, ropes and coils of copper; how was I supposed to hold that
How was I supposed to bear so much metal
I did it, you know, despite it. Despite it all. I hung that stone
And that metal, hooped in trashy circles about my neck and, oh,
I did it.

And in the process, all that wiring made conducting easier:
Calling down from way up, way fucking up,
I guess; zig-zags puncture through thirty thousand tonnes of gas and smoke
Through a hundred thousand birds and thoughts and leaves strung up along the skyline
In hungry, bowling gusts of wind, empty noise, moonless blankness
It would
Spark and jangle across rooftops, lands of slate and plastic gutter-valleys,
The chimneys, one-eyed mouths squirting black semen into the full night, arial fairies and dish-imps thouroughcaining through it all would burst a
Single bolt of light

One-two, one, two, and through and through
The vorpal heat would snicker-snack

And over, over, over, over, relentless,
Same spot, a piston, fucking in rhythm,
Boom,
Boom, fixing nitrogen into the walls – like strings or veins or whitening paintstuff,
Gobs or godspurt, over everything

Woodchip now pregnant and implanted, seeded, would forest up with
A billion tiny plants, all green and new, like grass, like
Streams of grass, rivers,
And flowers, budding, fucking flowers, peonies and chamomile
Fuchsias, honeysuckle, reams and reams of them, covering the walls up and up and over,
Over, over,

Hummingbirds,
skinned with gold and blue, more floating Tutankhamen,
- in brazil they call them beija-flor, rushing
And dragonflies, a cluster burning like tigers, bright and full of day-quick fear,
Fat leaves of waterlilies burst in breasts and dips, rutting up and stinking everything out
With honey and sex and jungle chemicals while
Gorgeous roots push through the fibreboard over the fireplace
Make thick, shaking canopies from all the jewelled nutrients knotted deep in mdf
Snakes and birds and feet and claws and hairy, lazy, loving, slothing, freaking into the carpet, into the shag and the floorboards
Brim with piranha, brim pescao, brim delfim
spidermonkeys and elegant carnivorous plants that snap up the legs of millipedes like london socialites and hidden Indians, rushing, bursting out like tiny heartbeats,
thumping, growing, birthing, dying
all up the walls,
rivers,

strings of beauty, strings and lines and old
creaky cocoons,
over and over; how was I supposed to deal with that
What did you expect?
how was I supposed to live with that?

Ribbons, you said
Just ribbons.





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