Dialogue - Code

a serpent is kept in this pillow

a mentor and critic

blue all the day

and at night begins to jade

how can it hope to be

any more than a (it?) can

not a human but a low thing

its seminars languish in failure scribbled

in spidery, spit-spattered achres

long long

drone there, a lovertheif

that must suffer it all

suffer directly and squeeze

and gather up your sheets

and swing and swing and swing

in isolation

quiet please

I am locked in with you

like a fiend from some film

I can’t quite remember

sour and neglected friend

whose old skin became hard

unnamed but now a face

at the window

so let us do death

as I am already in parts

from promising dreams

I cannot deliver

mad and dejected lamp

that has never gone out

just condemned to make shapes

on the ceiling

you don’t fool me now

with a calm demeanour

in this washing of thoughts

I have watched your blood boil

slow now

we’re simply pieces

estranged

a blinking beacon

and boat separated

by some heavy shroud

this skin sticks like a mangled cloth

to be wrung and wrung

and never dry out

press in

feel the passages swim

from a wall of dark eyelids

where memory plays like

old film

of cells

reticulation

unclean, unsure

unclean and elevating

peel from the screen

such paper-thin fingerprint wings

cling and constrict in cellophane twists

so suffocating

the snake is in the nest

to swallow every piece

of recollected guilt

it forces me to keep

the snake is in the nest

it tightens in the night

to keep the meat distressed

and lock me in its sights