cordyceps

Of course the skies move like blankets:

We require bland metaphors my love,

They're consoling and homely

of course,

Of courses like the movements of the seas,

Or dangerous journeys

Pretty metaphors for life's less salubrious chaos,

Filtered into tidy A-B narratives,

Do you understand?

Maybe framed correctly -

Beyond the optimist's

Innocuous joy delusion

Is the most petty egotistical tragedy

Perhaps this is the greatest abyss

We – yes – we strive to deny

As hopeless as the Mersey

Or New Deal yarbles

And of course we could couch

Far more convenient narratives

Like the joy of double-dropping

On a Bank holiday Sunday

At your elder – no -

Your younger brother's barbecue

(it becomes such, increasingly)

And all his fizzy friends

Meat and candy

Beats all the drugs or honey

They could filter in my last-

-no really my last drink

Of the afternoon

Gravity could beg several questions

So if the graveyards of the lesser cosmso

Are replete with the indispensable of a dozen aegis

- We bloody needed -

Then why are we flagellates

Always the last to say no?

Ah worthies -

Consider no.

In this guttural negative

We have weapon with which we can

Defy emotionally abusive lovers,

Local tyros,

Gender mephistos or

The movements of the heavens.

Just say no, and

Complicity cannot happen

Though we're small

These things cannot permit tyrannies

We have our hue

The nihilistis dagger against good

But yer – ah

Who first called us a tool,

Or a bitch, first?

Remember which sibling, teacher,

Parent?

Lackeys or flunkies,

Brigands of the age

Colluding in the deluding

Of the passive pallid ones

A yes restores power to the factory -

Jutting like a familiar lover's

Familiar southbound fumbles,

I know where that hand will move,

And it's not nice, but I know

In 60 seconds I'll become

Master

And her taunts of no

Will intoxicate the baser side

Of our conjugal pillows.

Sex is poisonous.

Consider Cordyceps funghi

That parasite that possesses

The souls of the most minute creatures

Growing and flowering through the skull of each

In a grotesque homily of bitter life,

Inspire the maps around my bones

To spore anywhere out of this world.