the snow weights us with promises
of delightful suicide waiting,
just the right time to slightly die
until there is summer enough
and the sun is faithful to love.
but now the untidy snow on my spade
seems less significant than death,
a tasteless target for puppies to chase
till some summer comes next,
a season i used to resent
like a bitch, like a mistress,
because it smelled like health
the mechanical dance
the mechanical dance of staccato cells
is sex and love a machine gun
neutered night
beauty is pain like dust
touching the face of day
or life
is marble memory tonight
a body a statue spelled truth
right
claws
life has its claws in us to create grooves
for cancer to grow, the living insistence
while the skeleton still is under us
a fleshy cripple
it is a stable repose, a claw hand
of dusty bone and it knows
that we go when time goes
as cancer as surly bone
its happiness grows
orgasmic memory
an orgasm a smelly origami memory
folds back our flesh like insensate
paper a rose a broken nipple
a time to die a life
an orgasm a memory living
a killing the willful flesh
still
sin
i wish sin might exist
so i could commit it,
but their ethics is prophlyaxis
for prostitutes, so insignificant;
and killing children is nothing
beyond some legal penalties,
and the tedium of confinement
when we are already confined
in time, their culture,
their love, just filth
on the sidewalk, their life
a cage made of lies -
the worst of them is time
David McLean is Welsh but has lived in Sweden since 1987. He lives there in a cottage on a hill with a woman, five selfish cats, and a stupid puppy. He has a BA in History from Oxford, and an unconnected MA in philosophy, much later, from Stockholm. Details of his three available full length poetry books, various chapbooks, and almost 850 poems in or forthcoming at 340 places online or in print over the last couple of years, are at his blog, AUTOEROTIC ELEGIES. He never submits by snail mail since he has little money and since he loves, or at least doesn't have anything against, trees. There's a new chapbook of dead snakes at Rain over Bouville, another is coming from Poptritus Press in the summer sometime. A novella Henrietta forgets is forthcoming from Isms Press. Round the beginning of next year a large anthology of his poetry called laughing at funerals from Epic Rites Publications, as well as a 50 poem chapbook called Hellbound which is appearing sooner.
Read more work from David McLean.
