Deft As a Brush

By Alan Ginseng

mélancolie du biscuit

so which biscuit is it

that resolves pain?

does oat under chocolate blanket

surrender ache to grace?

i don’t think there’s much protein

in fifteen hobnobs

nor an entire punnet

of sour cherries

but i absorb anyway

whilst your smug smile hits me like kielbasa

thrown from a passing car window

into my face (it is smoked and authentic)

and more importantly than preserving rivers or trees

or bees,

we dare not talk

about the ennui of honey

manifest sandwich

you ask me:

“with enough washing machine cycles

could a t-shirt turn inside-out and outside-in forever

caught in boundless loop between ready and not?

and if you had one thousand bodies

how many sandwiches could you hold

with all those spaghetti arms?

you’d be the envy of sportsday children and gluten-free

a baker’s event; pigeon friend

the reason Daniel Day-Lewis ran out of milkshake

and became a miller instead

if you had all those arms and I walked beside you

would they trail along like forgotten grains

forcing me to slip on littered sliced bread

or countless cucumber circles?

if beyond form and time we walked together

on soft mud atop rainy hills

below toasted evening sky

where soil melts underfoot like butter

would the noise of your sideways glance

resemble the slap of ham on cheddar?”

you ask all this

but i do not answer

because we are at my work’s Christmas party

and i wish i didn’t invite you

asteroid knuckle

i punched myself in the orbital bone -

satellite fist floating meteoric

crashing into my stupid face

“because with bigger cheekbones”

i say to the nurse

“maybe i could store more food in my mouth”

i ask for morphine

whilst she explains “this is Tesco”

and that she’s not a nurse

i ask anyway and wander into the vegetable aisle

the cigarette-stained blur of my comet smile

dissipating

like sleep into slumber into coma

soft pallet apocalypse rhythmic pitter patter

of bone under skin

calcified grin