Black Holes

Watercolour by Dan Bransfield

thebolditalic.com 

Twinkle, twinkle little mother how I loved you like no other -

shining like a star above and flowing sweet with milky love.

You gave and gave yourself away and laughed to see your children play.
But mother-suns can't burn eternal and so there comes a collapse maternal:

Upon the self they turn and fold, as hearts once warm grow bitter-cold

and offspring whom they once loved true become a source of food anew.

Thus what was a blood relation ends with wilful, dark negation; 

life once given is swallowed back, with malice by the mother-black. 

Stephen Alexander, The Circle of Fragments and Other Selected Verse, 

Blind Cupid Press (2010).    

Floratopia

To stare unblinking into the face of the sun, 

like a daisy, will require a new unfolding in 

human evolution.

Only when we become perfectly soulless

will we become perfectly beautiful and 

perfectly free.

Odysseus

Like all sirens, her love contains the salt-water certainty

of death for those who leave the safety of the shore,

or foolishly scuttle the little boat of their own

happiness.

But who would want to live a life dependent upon 

bees wax and old rope?

With his bourgeois longing for home and his

hatred of the sea, Odysseus ... disappoints!

Negritude

Image from madamenoire.com

I love everything about you -

not least the impossible blackness of your skin

and the way you walk bare-foot 

at the cocktail party

arousing

a mixture of desire and disapproval

in your white host who fantasises

about your 'exotic otherness'

but fears

you might laugh 

at his nakedness.

Breast Relief for a Dying God

Madonna for Dolce and Gabbana (AW 2010)

Look! there's Jesus hanging on a little golden cross,
snuggled obscenely between a warm pair of tits.

What would his mother Mary have made of this;
or she whose embrace he so cruelly refused?

Would it have secretly satisfied them to know
how son and saviour is finally reconciled with
the softness of female flesh?