LA BELLE SERPENT
I am us,
in dreaming iterations -
slipping across skirts,
under night, emerging
from tops of pillows,
waking in our same
lambing fields. You’re
round bends, tossing me
in a furrowed dew.
Just counting blossom linens.
But I trip between my eyes
and the rabbit hole, drawn
up to a whitened sky fit
for sailing. So you swim
with the butterflies. ‘Look!
You’ve caught one too!’
With only
an opened hand,
heart in another.
And we whirl like a washing line
gone in the wind. Re-racking
her scattered fabrics. Delicates,
soft touched before each cycle -
milk spilt like lucid skin and
how it sings. Tasting sweet in
the grass from which nursery
rhymes grow. You are that
moment of home to a child.
Always humming
perpetual tunes of
‘Ring-a ring-a roses,
a pocket full of posies
[until...]
we all fall down.
we all fall down.
we all fall down.’
I am us and she
devours herself,
forever
at carcassed feet, distilling -
trying at thawing another
frost, as dying heat drains
into an ongoing hillside.
We are ashes in ashes
come nightmares of her
picking out ventricles
caught up in teeth. It is
simple etching over aorta,
while scrounging veins,
cracking ribs with rocks,
drawing red pooled baths
full of fingerlessness, pointing
to something floating on the
water. Spring deceased -
London’s burning,
pour on water. As
quick as that, fires
feel calm on that
broken day. Days of
tractors ripping up in their
scarification, bees suckling
on Summer’s last pollen and
seeds tattered round an empty
field. Round a dead still scarecrow.
I am us,
in compost and parts -
carrying our dead Rose,
body thin-stemmed
and cold at her uprooted ends:
Will Kerslake, 22, Hertfordshire - UK ✯ BACK TO POETRY: OUROBOROS
“I write shitty little poems that are a big deal to me. No socials unfortunately.”