Horses Cont.

Slab-backed, sweating, all nostrils and steam and teeth like slices of bread, clanking and stamping and champing at the bit, gilded hooves and oil on hot leather, flexing straps and straining buckles and the stirrups, the stirrups, the stirrups and nosebags full of liver and chamfrons stuck with rubies and unblinkered eyes, o lente, lente currite, mossflanked and tangletailed, burrs and fingers in their manes, screaming and screaming and climbing carefully up the stairs.

Hot Lesbian Action

At the top of the back staircase in the east wing of my mind, there is a secret attic where I keep a pretty girl. She lives among the furniture that doesn't fit elsewhere, the rusting wrought iron daybed and the mahogany commode, the elephant's foot umbrella stand and the spavined rocking horse.

I pop up there from time to time to tease the ribbons from her hair, to lie her down on the candlewick covers of her musty single bed. She is the paper ghosts of peonies, a scentless potpourri. We share moth wine and macaroons and kiss like kittens beneath a dusty bust of me. When I am gone she sleeps again, barely breathing on a drift of shredded lace.

The Breakfast Man

He comes on Sunday mornings
To my sleep-syrup bed
With softboiled starling eggs
Cupped in his palms.
He balms my lips
With bacon fat
And spreads me soft
Like butter
As he slides the still-warm eggs inside
And turns to sausage
In my mouth

The Passion of the Posset

My passion died when I was salt, Alice-deep in tears. It was only young but it was warped, grown to the shape of its secret box, its tender bits rubbed to leather. It was wipe-clean and it frequented bars, drank pink drinks through straws and flashed its stocking-tops. It brought me out in a rash but it was hungry and it was strong. Then its batteries went flat and its sequins fell off one by one and clogged the hoover for weeks and it died runtish, bald and exposed. Oh it was cheap and oh it did not fit and it bit and it chafed but it was mine, I made it from things I found in bushes and oh I miss it so.

Now I need to grow a new one, well-fitting as fur, moulded to shape like witches’ wax. I need the taste again, the marzipan toad squatted melting on my tongue, the waves of brine and honey. I’ll have to bury clams at midnight outside the adult bookshop, eat nothing but popping candy and bathe in condensed milk. And then somewhere in the oubliettes inside, a poppet will stir, open its mouth and make a sound like herons.

Move Over Fanny Cradock

I have a new celebrity crush – the Very Reverend Dr William Buckland, the 19th century palaeontologist, zoophagist and general eccentric. He ate the mummified heart of King Louis XIV. That’s the kind of thing that really gets a girl going.