This child is a girl child
wild child, fearful child
noontime werewolf,
burning under her skin
shades billowing in banners
Acroterion
judgement of those
silent parades
dazzling
A stroke in her grimoire
to linger, to dry
to colour
her duty floored kingdom

She has flip-books of cities
she’ll build undersea
and a peppercorn Labrador
aching to race,
in the lemon-tree orchards
she’ll harvest in May
for a pecan pie wedding
with scallop ashtrays

A gate hides a garden
slow gate, wary gate
metered route to
that riotous meadow
Liddell girls in treacle wells
sing out ‘all we know,
is distance’, so
alike, apart,
mesmerised
by wicked little things
braggart antonyms
lily-veined
printed, framed, their hide bound

With his floodlit adventures
and spandrel tattoos
just a foot in Cairparavel
one courtly, true,
he inhabits those moments
of Venus disarmed
savours lanyard Rapunzel’s
cantankerous charms

Flawed pattern in chaos
birth flaw, or wild flaw
growing beauty
from strange iterations,
in fractal geometries
sublime symmetry
An aesthetic
hermeneutic,
that finds truth
in magic accidents
teeth clicking like sin
or dreams where
they meet, but cannot touch