AvisWing

summer sweeps through mulberry trees bleeding purple blood as berries crush and skin is stained like bruises in the sun **

gods have bent their lips to the skin of the earth breath echoing a divine kiss hidding their faces in swollen grey veils of cloud shedding tears without salt

red is the colour of love and she wore it like battle armour setting her hair alight in fire and painting her nails in scarlet every word she spoke passed lips as red as war poppies and she breathed cigarette smoke like a vapid dragon high heeled warmonger   she’d take up her sword and slaying cupid her blade would be sunk to the hilt in my chest and i would smear her in cochineal patterns   finger paintings on her cheeks because even as i crumple i reach for her my love in red

i.        green is a bygone colour            of praying mantises            and their mesmeric savagery            watching with eyes that are reverse galaxies              pearlescent sheen dotted in pinpricks of black              swaying pensively ii.        blue never meant much to me            too high to touch in heaven’s curtains            and ever changing            but startling in the wings              of the purple line blue butterflies              like fragile sylphs iii.        brown is a bitter colour            of my eyes and coffee grounds              shit and mud              force-fed fake

my brother has taken to church lone in this family of religious apathy a mimicry of grandfather’s ways to church on Sunday and that house of god caters to him to his youth offering him socialisation he craves for youth come together under pretence to mingle and play while the cross looms just in sight and he keeps bibles in his bookshelf beside starwars and astro boy comics wears a silver cross round his neck and painted on his skateboard religion permeating his life and i often look to him and wonder if he has found a god or simply uses that name

i see around me people and their wolves black dogs on their minds and i look to mine my black dog chasing me and we shrink pale in comparison and i know mine is no wolf but a pup teething   nipping at my ankles still growing its fangs because i am no red riding hood and i have no call to venture into this dark wood i am shallow in comparison naught to their depth of pain yet my sorry pup it grows suckling me of my loneliness like some starved mongrel   and i wonder how long before my black dog runs me down

pastel behemoths rearing perched on the horizon   swallowing the edge of the world in softly swelling insubstantiality benignly divine with their kaleidoscope of colours softened and diffused in grey passive in their dominance of the skies eternally moving, reforming oceanic heavens breath of the gods fogging the air

would you recognise me if i were to show you what i had done to myself if i told you that this is what i have always been that i had lost myself eaten away from the inside out so that all you saw of me was my unbroken surface that if i laughed too wide you would be able to see the torn flesh of my cheeks and the blood on my teeth spittle at the corners of my mouth as i slowly teach myself to curse black and blue as a sailor’s tongue   and that innocence you so worshiped in me was nothing but a charlatan hiding a corpse   because that part of me was slow to die and its a wonder you can still see it in me how would i look t

bush stone banshees curdling the night dressed in smoke and ash like evening wear amber eyed and world weary a cosmos fletched in grey and knobble kneed they kneel unmoving till night seeks them out to call their voices forth like disciples of the lost fabled harbingers of death   screaming lost souls and mothers hold their babies close when curlews cry at night

    I.              i bury baby birds in my backyard                    in boxes and plant pots                    ice-cream containers and plastic terrariums                      digging graves under the bamboo                    pickets and rotten sticks for gravestones    II.             cycling down the road                    i pluck piles of purple plumage off the bitumen                    where idle drivers have collected a moorhen                    in the grill of their car                    and left it speckled and embedded with stones                    broken and stuck in congealed red turned black          

I want to be abstracted Removed from it all To watch like an angel that will never fall I wish to be the reader, and the world my perfect book Not touching, not being touched Not affecting, not being affected Distant from heartbreak and far from hurt Aloof of tenderness and detached from pity Call me cold and heartless For wishing not for love

Stay quiet. Don’t look up. Look occupied. Don’t speak. Perhaps then they will walk straight past. Don’t invite conversation. Keep your shields up. Keep your thoughts to yourself. Don’t open yourself to ridicule. They stop. Don’t look at them. Don’t reply to them. Don’t be rude. Reply to them. Be brief. Don’t promote further conversation. They ask questions. Answer. Don’t be rude. Only speak when spoken to. Keep replies brief. They don’t go away. Stay silent. Don’t bush at the attention. Can’t help it. Don’t show your discomfort. Don’t look at them