Erect in bed, three in the morning,
but hotted-up cars insomniac on the Brooker.
Crushed-moth-soft sheets clinging to my thighs,
a slash of light cutting a crack between the curtains,
slits of lace flickering on the wall.
Smell the blue metallic fizzing of lead toy cars
we used to tongue when we were young.

Scribbling in the dark,
my eyes rove haphazardly like a blind woman's.
In the close dark, I hug a pillow
and feel its bland stodginess against my face.
Once, we used to dress them in our pyjamas
to make them into shapeless surrogates.
Tonight, my pillow is once again a headless dummy
held against breasts that
now mew like twin voiceless infants
in the ringing silence of my cut-open room.
My womb has expanded to the size
of my whole ignited self.

I would gobble you up,
like ugly Baba Yaga with her chicken-clawed pot
dancing away the lonely hours between sunlights.
I would be afraid, if I were you,
of Life, that devourer, washing through,
like a gushing wave washing through.
Life is voracious-
it will gobble you up like a fat seal pup.

And I wait the way the weir-keeper
waits to open the sluice-gates:
and it is only timing, not patience,
that holds me back while you hesitate.

My sister,
my darling sister/mother/child,
is dying
and she waits for the same terrible wave
to drag back from the hot,
the hot and unbearable sand.
I have a crush! I tell her,
meaning my dumb womb my damn thighs my
dopey breats my fumbling fingertips- that even my
prehensile toes are in the throes of burning up,
engorged and hot with fever...

with desire, desire...Ah, say it!
and, at the beach, I lift in the swell, the fat gloss,
the green and sleazy, greasy silk of the sea,
and all over I'm touched by the harsh,
the caustic salt. It burns my eyes.
I'm alive! I sing to myself,
my legs apart with the sea, the sea,
touching me with delicious and cool detachment.

I'm alive!
Oh God, I'm alive!
and I laugh back at the sea,
and tell my girls
I will re-enact the climactic floundering
in the scene in
"From Here to Eternity",
and I wallow in the shallows,
and every time I try to get up,
a wave pushes me down,
and they laugh.
They laugh gulps of laughter
at life pushing me down
until I think I might drown.