Regina

Voice bursting through the speakers like a motorway
Your Norma-Jean-Smirk

Lips the red of speeding buses

I turn towards you like an Einstein,
Hair perfectly mad


Well, a Boris Karloff playing Einstein dressed in a tutu


The cinema with its penetrating darts of silk;
Forces the image of an actor to dance upon your cheek

My eyes smother your face as if it were an epic
You shake off the stare with a shrug

But I am watching you for the very first time

Procession

Before the first frost
When the fruit
Hangs in anticipation

Retracted

Parasites eat deeply into the fat flesh of the tree bark

And an opera of birds

Chatter a chorus

A great, sonorous
Booming
Challenge

It reminded me
Of an olive tree that I saw
In Cyprus

Its ridiculous bough of nipples

Pale, withered

The seeds were the percussion
A black tambourine
Punctuating the silence

Of the cormorant

In the distance

I wished I could have placed my fingers around the pulp
Plucking at the veins
As I did

When I was a suckling

Minor

"A Woman is a beautiful thing
In the same way that a volcano

Is a beautiful thing"

Says the mother
Whilst offering a tramp

A nosegay of violets

Rather than suffer the infamy

Of money

The daughter seemed latent
Behind her charming umbrella

"What is it you want next?"

Obligingly she follows
Umbrella wet between her legs