Rough-edged like cancers
order in disarray
supermarket trollies
can’t-do attitude
surviving in
aggressively
degenerative
target-driven
environments
four bodies
two bodies
one body –
Onan

Four bodies
two bodies
one body
bacteria
germinating
acrimoniously
don’t underestimate
how destructive
a feeding fungus
can be

The earthworm gestates
the cloud replenishes
its dead tissue
the carcinogens retreat
into clinical waste facilities
on a supermarket gurney
one body
ceremoniously germinates
one body
submits.

Four bodies.
equipped with anonymity of a battery hen
I progressed my feelers to the floor –
shed them in compassion.
lost my friends to the highway,
to the forest floor, the ocean bed,
shed them.
anti-gravity apartheid
gravitational bylaws, taciturn.

flung my feelers to the
bloody forest floor.
a massacre. Twenty-five
stags of the night shot dead
during antler-coitus season.

saw a policeman in a juggernaut
chugging down phonemes.
Two bodies.
Saw my grandmother as a little girl, War Time.
One man, Onan.

Onan the cum-swapping librarian.
Tickle me about the gills with your
humblest radiator
make off with the produce
fuck ’em in the money pouch.

A massacre. Twenty-five
stags of the night out cold
during antler-coitus season.
what a way to run a
railway.

we touched mouthpieces and lifted off
into the stratosphere.
propelling our wounds into each other,
compacting them into one,
calculating the peace.

We were burnt-out into the highway
at odds with the forest –
since the soil itself was a germinating spore
we were
all about the money ‘
then. the beetle relinquished his
inextricable shell.

el hurst ’14