Fantasia for Linzi McBride


There is a bloke in Manhattan fully clothed no Stetson
telling sad people not to think too much. & you're thinking
Andrew Hartley trawling the veil over his child bride
catching the shoal in her marble cake curls.
A cigarette & lucky strike.
She can never look too surprised, sanding
her eyebrows to sawdust, starting
from scratch; etching them a little
higher than the last when her bit-o-stuff's anecdotes elicit our
aw. . .
only yesterday he opened the dictionary on
diagram /
diamondback moth
to find pressed rose petals. Little X-
File, your kind-of-erotic hair sweep
wilts the pizza in my hand
but I too get enamoured with eccentricities.
Your samizdat treatise on natural selection:
Why are Rabbits Still Going when Rabbits are Shit?
(clearly you've never been bitten by rabbits
                           — ed.)
Let's pretend you coax Excalibur from the grave
open my heart like a fizzbomb beverage,
dustbin escutcheon redundant in the field
surgery crude as a Castleford masterpiece
(scraping my cuticles back into place. The
coroner's verdict on this procedure:
Mickey Mouse). Showing me
a curious but dillIgaf tarantula in the topiary
(all that remains of my mouselike menagerie
are Grammostola moultskins
gathering mould. I grew out of spiders
years ago). Your hairpin trigger emoticon laugh
when told Zach Braff has a fat half-sister who can' arf crack a joke
& the fun sparking up your scaffolded cross-
bite, an off-cut
turned to resemble a Caramac.
Would I have gone as far as to
flatline
had I kept on listening after you hung up?