Isosceles

You’d look good in anything, you
shaped like that: the isosceles
triangles of your back, your nose, each
of your buttocks

Ramparts, towers, battlements,
network. Can’t
read all that. Pick
out the points where someone you
recognise
might be at the window

Prayer-bowl whing-whirr,
hot in a girl’s hands

A sound cold as lemon,
cold as fish,
as antiseptic,
as white

Purge and bridge of cumin,
the pinchy glitzy deepdragging howl of it.
Yell spice at the ringlipped fish.

But it goes away,
it goes away,
and what’s left?

Vacant foil pillblisters,
beigebrown coffeefoam on a wooden
stick, a doctor’s tonguedepressing
weapon, to measure
your illness, the length of it,
to prescribe
a heavymetal pull,
a sexy text,
a texty sex, a nexus, a flex,
wirecored, insulated, gaffataped
on a stage made of dirty sheets,
lacky bands and string

And the hairs on his stomach and the
smile on his eyes and the
knowledge and the breadth in him

First published in Blast>