//The exorcist leaves our solar system

 

Called by their kindness, some, and

cursed to serve, others, but

I am just hungry, from room

to room nick-nacking

 

He sets the oven doors ajar

and moves the pictures all awry:

the house is breathing on the shore,

the house is angled at the sky.

 

He puts fresh knives in amongst

the forks and spoons, throws

away the good chicken,

turns away the television

 

telling against

“the license of metals”, works

that smart, their tickless hearts

and stomachs – incensed

 

we cast the old botherer out

to warm daisies, knowing ourselves

shapeless, supple &

(by this explain that

 

we are in, you are out

to make plots possible

in god’s plotholes

between the frames of the

 

risen pasture, silver

tomatoes on a sunned bone.

Here is where the roundel, revolution,

vulva and aorta are contracted

 

to a thumbstruck pretty blue pea.

Welcome, begone.

We don’t see you and can

never go home.)

 

 

 

 

//The mage is AFK

 

Her gift once was upon a time

to comprehend the least and most,

what can be left unsaid,

what sung, what interspersed

to make a bomb. Slowly to work

over the grieving bully-boys, draw god

from them like a bee sting.

Surely to make spears and guns

into sticks, wrongfoot the river, prodding

gouts into square water – little

places for mirth. She worked weekends

to double our portions, but one day,

in the larder of her labour, a frightful jingle:

all she knew had turned and grew

as metal will, its lines of contest

and report, busier than bees,

so she stopped for good

in her flesh, a hot pink bulb.

 

 

 

 

//The fluffer has forgotten his line

 

A flashcut assures openings

for up-and-comers, but how to light

the match, is everybody’s question.

Friction, all too handy, slackens

for want of breath or flanking actions.

 

Routers in cots in cul-de-sacs, shriek

pop doggerel and wisdom: the place,

the pace, how long and how much force,

which welts are sweetest, what suns

best burnish undersides of beds.

 

Take your heart into your hands.

Add up motes of daring, subtract

roads plied by litter-pickers, those

of unfixable abode. Undo

sirens of strawberry and gold.

 

 

 

 

 

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell is a poet and doctoral student at Royal Holloway, University of London, previously published in Antiphon, SPR Annual, Agenda, Zoomorphic and Brittle Star. His projects include a verse response to NASA’s Voyager 1 and the Golden Record.