Clothes are stacked
in my room, as usual.

I watch them build for years
Then pull apart my teeth
like seams
Peel the Sellotape seal
from my lips,
Un-knit my tongue, explain,
Unfold pressed pain
Tug on hems, snagging
the arrogant cloth’s cross-stitch
Un-buckle my belt,
reveal the stomach-soft flesh curtailed,
embedded with stars.
Pull a needle through hems,
Force them loose
Crinkling the fabric in foiled faces, button-words pop
In ‘O’s’
from the blouse draped curtain of my mouth.

Until I’m hurled
Split material dispersed
with negligence
on a bedroom floor
They come in, turn-take picking me up, sewing me back
But I’m botched,
the colours don’t match.
Stitching askew, textile stained
No resemblance of how I was dressed in the first place.

I always say my summer plans are to rest,
To sleep away until I can ignore The ghosts of the images I keep using,

But the deer will keep showing up at my door no matter how many times I kill it.
Again it will be
My desperate hands in its chest,
Struggling to pull out an angry, hungry heart
With angry, hungry hands

Again I will eat its heart;
And again it will come to my door.

My summer plans are to rest.

Falling out
from gums red-raw:
A tooth, ripped from its core
leaves a gap

you can’t fill.
My tongue feels around,
spans the width of a blood pool that spills
on the lips we kiss with.