The milk tastes off in wartime
Clammy on the tongue
Even when you are so distant
You can hardly hear the metal bend
You make galaktoboureko
So thick the shape returns
Wondering why Easter
Falls in archaic calendars
Each year on new days
As if martyrdom were inexact in its demands
I imagine Medea’s tears
In thick and sweet and distilled stains
When she learned she ate her young
Time Is a wolf, you say
And in one deft hand
Break another egg
The prisoners have butterflies for mouths
Teeth bared like burnt-out buildings
They say exactly what we want
– without undue coercion
Just the slightest quaver
Of the jaw and throat
Where stubble hides the muzzled bruises
We lied, we are wrong
We came to drink your blood
These are eyes not camouflage
In haloes on our wings
Here the children have hands of bone
Bandannas over nose and mouth
In the stench they forgot somehow to sing
The sun is bright in vain
Inviolate on the mountainside
The studio has that flicker scent
Of blitzkrieg and cigars
when you are almost halfway up
Back arched in trapezoid envy
The sky is less steady than it seems
Icarine- the too harsh blue
Of interrupted broadcasts
Looking up, we make new stars
Name them in bravado
See the smithereens
Cascade in new intaglios
On the surface of the eye
Blink the warmth of tears
Gravity has an equivocal grip
When you are almost halfway down
Knuckles raw as dinosaurs
Feet arched in Quetzalcoatl torsions
Sending hubris, sending love
We will solve this war
Like a misheard refrain
That thick comforting savour
Of something on the stove
Notes played and played and played again
Til, despite what we have heard
What we hear is right
What we hear now has
Eternally been right
——
I whistle in rough kin
To a camaraderie of magpies
They return trilled warnings in reply
As if to say you are no one
That we know, a thief of songs
Pied and clumsy
As any bastard’s fledge
We dispute the global south
With that stalagmite part of speech
You say it depends
On which way you uphold the map
I say words
Are the same in any language
Pulling flames like petals from the edge
One for love, two for hate, and on
Til bare husks are left
Black and hard as any rasp
Cracked, with a little salt
Makes a beggarly repast
You say these things are
Almost the same
I say, halfway home
Smoke coiled between my lips
They are almost different