Sweet Milk

'their heart is that one very long song'

a heart goes cold
enough to shoot someone 
for their love
and the way here
must begin with hunger,
some fatal lack of sugars 
or the earthing weight
of a fed belly
most murder was a 
shiver untended, surely

how to explain
to my child 
they're executing the still-warm
it's just like all the other times
but it also isn't
darling

there is a sweet hum
in the pit of my stomach
a truth swirled
through my curdled terror
that something good gleams
at the centre of the spiral 
of the nothing we learned 
from all the other times

the ancients said before any
third law of motion
that all is well and not well
that god is and isn't 
awfulness

they shot another one, a nurse,
which comes from nutriere: to suckle

his blood is on 
on the village hob
and won't cool, for
no one will intercept this time
because kind, rageful 
witches guard the pot
so it will simmer over 
onto soil, and feed 
when crops can't

my love is a turbaned fairy
he walks the forest first
then the streets
with full religious garb
and there are men with knives 
who'd gut him
call him the violence
in their red palms
but they're only hungry 

for soup
milk
a story
a tether

a pause

a yawn between generations

people want their breath back
it is hung high up 
from money trees
in other words 
nothing real

and death crowns 
at hot evolutionary lips
and every womb is
agonisingly taut
and we watch
the final dregs
of a world being
slurped up
by an amoral god-goblin
lapping wildly the detritus 
of time and land —
our strongest selves who 
can't be ended because
their heart is that one
very long song

and god-goblin doesn't know 
what he eats
only his hunger
and when all is said and done
and we must say and do
we are sweet milk
mown and mauled
like a world already becoming 
another