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Blood drops of a castrated god

They are coming for your teeth, your eyes.
They are coming. Twine 's
Slinking round your feet,
Dreaming of the Hesperides.
A lodger in your own home,
You are daughter of betrayal,
Only spewing psalms for a deaf curator:
A daughter of men
With other plans, a daughter
Of gin-soaked sheets, rippling red;
A daughter of a mother of a mother
 
Spread out; create a perimeter.
 
They want to take your teeth:
Plume them out, gouge out your eyes
And should those young poets stay young
And those modernists, those Meliai
Stay young,
Then you shall make up their cots
By sense alone, toast bread, play jailor.
 
There are shadows spreading across the sky
Like ink dripped into a filled glass bowl
Spilling over little black puddles
That will not stay long
Before sliding into the angles of the earth.
 
Remember, before all
This seeing the starlings
In murmuration across the sky
And you too asked why.
Remember perching dead still
(tangled up young god
(in an ash tree
in an apple tree))
As the others all searched,
Smudgy (titan) with lichen
Like war paint,
Half-wanting them to find you,
Half-not, wriggling on the branch,
Wondering what she’d say about
The puffed cheeks, the duff arms.
Remember too the kind, alive eyes,
The knowing smile and the wanting
To ask why.
 
Motherless daughter, with romany bangles
And rings, in a head scarf, hiding
Undyed,
Wool blossom white,
Jeans and prisoner tee
Out in the UV.
And why, you’d say, and why,
Bull eyes streaming black, gummy gaps,
Feet swelling as you fell
Shouting all in all in all in
free.

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