Light and darkness,
islands of darkness,
islands of light.
Angie hurled back
her thick black hair and taught me
about cruelty, nothing
we do for love will be final,
and to kill all my desire
she mixed me the cat's brain
with snippets of letters, and hurled
her thick hair towards me
and impaled me.

The insane were screaming in the cities of Europe,
small hunters dragging off their kills.
Light fell like powder from the moon
and covered the towns.
White
as the noise of language.
Like the hum of the solar system.
Schiele dribbles around shame
with legs we don't love.
Prone, on knees, from behind:
what you love
stays strange.
Particles destroy each other in lightning.

Rodents whispered
in the curves of their corridors.
The tectonic plates scraped,
the mammals hissed as they diversified
before time kicked off:
I listened.
I slept.
Corals build their million cubic metres
of reef, and vanish.
The traces of pillage blur.
Corpses pushed to one side,
the victors appear
as Angie impaled me.

I'm talking
about small and dishonest hands.
How the portal veins throb. About the Colonel
and his guns. Islands grow
from ohms. Storms rampage.
The shallow breath of animal bodies.
The horrific inner lining of women.
When a woman touches
a man's chin to make him look up,
he starts to weep.
A face appears
between the branches and vanishes
for all time.

Islands of darkness.
Islands of light.
Angie glittered on my skin like sherbet powder.
Her thick hair fell.
It's an old story.
And my hands grabbed
at a sound
that tastes like earth,
grabbed at light that sounds
like blood.
For all time.

Translated by Alistair Noon