A battlefield of lovers
I love authority & it loves me: my slippery womb, come
soon with your jovial control – it’s my choice
& even my words seem spoken by my own voice.
I pitch my battle from left to right & get a hot
lunch – a serpent on a plate, eating its own tail.
I love violence, crouched behind the back of time
like a flat moon behind a bridge,
love how it runs its tongue along my inner thigh –
sings me that alchemical soliloquy
in blue light, goes quiet again,
holds me down,
repeats:
you woke up with my name on your lips
Consider Willie Donaldson
“Myself a fictional character as much as anyone else”
W.D
I went through life a sailing ghost never
at a loss for words. Already dead, I was
a pervert at twenty. They gave me head.
I minimised the truth of myself, dug it
under the earth’s surface
with my hen’s teeth. I am unmarked
for the most part, some gentle scarring
on my bones. I cannot end up like this,
I should have said to myself.
Perhaps I did, but my tongue is not my own.
The earth spat me out & the sea sucked me
back down to it: I went with the tide in – out,
in – out.
Now I wait to be reborn. I never died.
Meanwhile, I fuck. I am a notebook for fucking.
(published in New Writing Dundee 7)
Andrew F Giles has poems in various journals and anthologies. He edited arts & poetry journal New Linear Perspectives (2010 – 2014). He currently researches poetry and poetics at the University of Bristol. He recently performed at artist Theaster Gates‘ SANCTUM project.
andotherpoems.com 