Bacon & Eggs (A revenger’s opera)

I broke two eggs

In that soft, one handed crush

You taught, a thumbnail for a spur

Hooked with the slight compression

That misshapes a world


Put them back together

Admittedly in somewhat different shape

All transparency gone

To a gleam made obtuse

As slippy, opaque destiny 



Butchered to order

The sign read 

(Hand drawn with

a crabbed and aching wrist)

On the corner of Argyle & Ross

The facade poisonous in dermatitis flakes

The dirty lead-white, scabrous underneath

Burst blisters watching, mouthing

How they hunger, how they weep

Cleaver raised, and falling like a curtain


A sizzle

As if the sea insisted

Something missing 

When you turned off

The waxy flame

A dead thickness

In the nose, on the tongue

An old world

Of stones and moss

Where the fat, not quite rendered

Wears a misbegotten smile

The Australian Meat

Could have been lamb
With the rank smell
Of three days out
And lawnmowers, reluctantly choked
Cut to gnurled, embryonic shapes
The diagram, of cross-sectioned bone
With that alien perforation
The enamel still mostly white
Mrs Marsh’s varicose poison blue
Bled out just a little
On the White Christmas rind of fat
A bright pink stamp
Illegible, but with the pellucid
Implication, of a child well behaved
A divided smile
Those big trustful eyes
Still quietly bleating