Domestic Automata I (June 2011, London)

I recently took part in a project by SSE Space, London, to have writers create texts to match pieces from a photography exhibit by artist Yorgos Loizos.
Below is my contribution, it'll be on exhibition along with the photographs and texts by other writers for the rest of the summer, I can't make the opening, but I may try to go and have a look myself...

Domestic Automata I

When, in our Brutalest moments,
We built these towers
In the wake, and polyglot
Dispatch of empire

So proud

We never once thought
That in their sepulchral bodies,
Alive by dint of in-livers,
We'd trade life for shiny, votive offerings
Flooding the market of the beyond

And remain.

Us and our appliances,
These lonely, bird-like machines,
Carved and not built,
That left no sign or cicatrix,
No sigh nor parting kiss
On the mother ore that bore them.

We and They are a euphony
In the vacuum of escaping days.

Rock Pools (Winter 2009; London)

This is apparently published in some independent poetry magazine in Germany, I really have no idea...

I saw upon looking, and asking to see,

the fountains of home; those old cracking baths.

They smelled of stagnant rock pools from the days

when you and I, Sister, together went

crabbing, and found not more than dried out shells.

We knew then how water yellows and still:

We clambered over rocks until the tide

receded, like our father's hair, like that

of his father; like mine, revealing skin.

Now, your child, Sister, what will he become?

Will he go crabbing in vain, stagnant pools?

Will he escape our dulled metropolis?

Running into the tide at it's apex,

Adding his mass and providing the weight,

Refreshing the pools, hydrating white shells;

Turning calcium, flesh,

filling the fountains

of our old town.

Will his hair

recede?

Like mine,

Like mine,

Will it grow?

Dipthongs (Summer 2009; Varese, Italy)

...because I am fat, and drunk, and when I say your name it sounds like I'm tearing diphthongs apart with yellowing teeth; and you're lovely, and you make worlds and look at them with open eyes, and I want to lick those eyes. Because nobody else could.