sometimes pain seems to be the truest thing there is
it sits behind your eyes like a shivering animal
whose vision is a foil wretched with reflections
even skins are razors luminous with unshed blood
and you understand anew the fragility of all touch
how real and clumsy it is a derailed train in which
corpses curl beneath the shuddering metal and collide
discourteously and the worm wakes in the brainpan
sniffing the stench of tears - it is an excess of course
and thus shrugged and deadened - there is no time
for its midnight pollen drifting through your veins
rooting and flowering into hallucinatory lymphonae
for shuttered lids and tongues tasting of iron for the
impotence of a half formed gesture which gutters out
and leaves a trail of rust inside the stilled hand
for the clarities which ripple in its silence
Alison Croggon
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