Days I Have Been Sicker

Days I have been sicker
Back spit-bridged, face shattered into cupped hands
Listened to my organs ripping
Terrorised my insides,
Doubled over on the floor
Vomiting bile and tears
Blanched white, agonized, gaunt and afraid
Pain sent me clawing the walls, shaking and spinning, grinding teeth on hard-edged stone
Sweating and cold, tap shivers my skin bumped through my bones and I was burning.

Days I have been sicker
Days I was in bed
Days I took drugs, dazed, prescribed, immune.
I am fully grown now
But I still feel it
Ache.

Yellow peril, foot rot, drunken haze disgraced us.
Mined the young to find a youth,
Lost your mind on trips too familiar.
There have been days when I was ill but of you,
I am much sicker.

At the Docks

There is a ship
And its side has been eaten out
Beside the water
A corrugated giraffe bends its steely neck down
To suck the wound –
Absent-mindedly.
Workers in their zebra suits
Mill by the cavity
At the docks.

At the Seat of God

At the seat of God
There is a faltering breeze
Inconstant
It balances the ancient mausoleums.

Generations here
We celebrate our linear
In concrete and marble.
Gold letters
And dusty portraits
Of gold ancestors
And their dusty counterparts

God sits here
Perched on the edge of mountain
It drops into the sea
Away
I sit on his left side –
The right is always taken.

We admire the view,
The dust
And breathe in the concrete and marble
My blood tethers me
Here on this rock
Floating in the sea
Like pumice
On the left hand of God –
His palm
We sit.