Tell my wife before she goes out,

I’ll hoover, then garden.
Vacuuming her dressing table I,

accidentally suck up an earring
and spend most of the day

my finger up the thin hole
of the bag until it drops out,

and I am covered in dust,
empty peanut shells, feathers,

cat fur and damn my OCD.
My wife returns and says

you didn’t do the garden, then?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Straight as a loaded die
beside the ups and downs

in a lopsided house awkwardly
he axes logs in a mismatched

cosmogonic waistcoat and ill fitting trousers tied up with frayed string

nine planets of his hands
swings the sun’s arc

and his adze loses its sharp end
breaks another window into fractals

he’d recently replaced. “Day
can only improve.” He laughs

Sits down between the rimples of a freshly ploughed field, grasps his wooden oars and sculls the plicas. Hopes the turned soil will not capsize because he can’t swim great distances. His broadcast seed fell below the surface of the waves he walked as now his wife and child bob up and down between these dry rucks. His oars are flower petals.

 

Opens his double glazed door to inhale the perfume of the petal that rises before him.
Sun rises and sets over its white curve. An approaching buzz makes him hurry back inside the door of his globule of water as his boiling kettle sounds like the fall of rain yesterday. A bees proboscis sucks up his home as he grasps the stalk that rises like a chimney out of it.

 

Tentatively she examined the hole in her black stocking clocking the eyes of young men who tried to look askance while she remembered grapes needed adding to her shopping list and her mother’s pigeon feet
walking Hadrian’s Wall in the photo she’d sent from The Great Wall in China.

Unusually his two clay pipes fitted her small, delicate feet perfectly. Tobacco smoke swirled around her thighs as she contemplated the pencil describing his face held by the hand so realistically emerging from the front of the postcard addressed to his German aunt in Andalusia.

 

To stop her prying eyes
I draw plastic brick clouds
around me. Biggest planet
in Solar System named

after me, of course. I have
travelled in this space craft
named after my wife. I have
travelled in my wife.

Even as satellite she
parts the bricks of my planet
to peer with her magnifier
upon my fun.

Plastic Galileo Galilei looks on.
Only concerned with
the massive turning world
below us.

I miss earth where I became
a swan, and myriad other things
to spread my divine seed,
until I was passed over for another.

There is little fun up here
in dark silence. Only my wife
with her massive magnifier,
parts my clouds. Spying.

I should smite her

with my plastic lightning bolt!

 

out of the burger box
with fries all about me,

I came upon the collector
who set me up imaginary
battles to fight, who

imagined my words,
the people I would meet,
by whom I would be defeated,
until the next day when

the previous day was forgotten,
and my words and actions
were reimagined. I fought
new foes and even old foes

who had new names or old
names and new powers.
I was renewed each day,
until I was boxed and placed
in the dark, until I was sold,

exhibited or consigned
to this rubbish heap
under the putrid soil.
The heat is so great
my bones have melted together.