Peter Manson: Four Poems
in cold spell, in snicket
here in the bits the sore repentance dances tralee
angered at the rebuke kindling my downstream load
voluntarily thank god for small shelly fauna
in the heat and mask of night in the rising sundog
hoked on a cone petard no direction inbound words
sorry loss of a half year plan in an ear half cut
from a different cloth to be touched by proxy muse
i could hardly speak your weight for my own blue butter
hypoxic marimba solo for the lads on gas
tortuous rose in my own estimation briefly
cheese beetle chosen bottle don’t spit on the dancefloor
exhaustion of mania lite on life’s free refill
leave a message of condolence and unfollow post
intercranial hypertension
you don’t go away rat of sunshine emboldened days
in my nights i rhyme you off ever more than the last
grateful guilt at your present absence the darkness drowns
with unheard radio goodbyes for company un-
do violent work chosen yell o streaky beacon
merging again at dawn into soft play pipes on words
sanitised aimless self tickling in defeat of sense
tacitly backed the police in their suicide vests
to win or place take from each in their own hour of need
it could be you backlit doorway of my withdrawal
awarded a screaming arsehole pension after death
defective toy road runner anvil inspector pushed
by cinematographers off a visual cliff
maintain wants
in my time at full term as a primate ghost i lay
in impossible earth which i made with my body
in that decade when disastrous men begin to die
noticeably at first leaving a passable corpse
then blending into the ambient unremembered
who rain into our livestock poison the holy well
i shared my thoughts in passing and could not retract them
really guys i’m fine but will the mourning never stop
o it just did like a passion blocked by alcohol
unfriended by medication trolled by mindfulness
a compost of wind and fear in an active waistband
fucking itself in salute to the family drunk
on withholding the gift of someone else’s faeces
demodex folliculorum
as death is my only anus i am torn from life
born of an ingrown follicle as the atoms leave
as the leaves at umbrage sublime mistaking usage
for rosacea read aerospace for borborygmus
arboretums of smut thrown back in the red mange face
hugger of locust flower poop decks lowered by wolves
a wet market with no zoonotic potential
strictly commensal flora heard on the brink of sleep
a fat man developed a fungal infection and
became a lichen tumbling with dry tumbleweed
the dump was a mother she provided everything
to that humble and freely-transmitted widow’s mite
obligate parasite of an endangered species
