The Writer, Ex

by T. MORGAN

He says his thoughts are tangled like
Thorns
Green thorn,
tangled and torn.

Once it was they meshed like gears,
Tooth to tooth and sound to ear,
The paper was singing
But now he can’t hear.

Oil, drips, somewhere,
Steady.

Sap, forlorn. Dribbling and impotent.

Some dreadful irony,
Iron,
Irony,
Indecision?
(Iron, Irony.)
Cogs are brass; some alloy.
Parchment was flesh once
often a calf. Slaughtered for words.
They ate him – she burst at the seams.

Steam, pistons,
Stars mesh, points clash, biting.
He grabs the air, childish,
clutching
testing if his muscles will move.
Someone threw a spanner
he thinks.
The bastard.

Or not; now he is an ocean, where he was a shore
jetsam, salvage. Now he sees horizons.
Feels asphyxiated. The sky is too blue.

He never liked ballpoints.

The pumps had something human to them,
he thinks,
and the pipes pounding were like a blessed
headache.
Now it’s all electronic.
There’s something wry about the similarity.
His eyeballs ache terribly. Synapses fire, wanton.

He leaks, possibly. Somewhere.
The engine’s given up.
Maybe it was the breath.

An ocean and the conjunction is
rusting and
verdegris was always so much
greener.
Like a thorn.
Hissing crown, machine, thorn, word, thud,
paper sung
the ears mumble but they knock on darkness.

He liked to call them ‘she’.
He forgot why.