Proud Flesh: "Overgrown flesh arising from excessive granulation upon, or around the edges of, a healing wound." (SOED)
She assimilates all comparison into her like
no-one can seize for a limb; & the milky
way of the colonies has to turn far short
& seep in the nimbus of blue & deteriorating
photo-cells, that starve for the limited
blush of time a comparison would carry
What choice remains for us then but amputate
the nimbus, the diseased limb, how else
our sugars were to imagine or to repine
after the battered torso we'd long conceived
recombinant; pig-ignorant we fly to work
to fail before her, fleet & sound of limb
incorporating music while her ears are waxed
against a suitor's leaning rock we cleave
from clouds of so like her, the fontanel
we could neither hear nor watch nor mutilate
Fatigued by this we dabble in chance
over the foil, scraping free the pounce
disguising ranks of symbols of such aridness
they seem lush, choking earth with eager
compacts for renewal, grist for gangrene:
the readier we are the more we seek the same
atonement, suitable when the shorthand
of the admonished things, these our pranks
frequent her like witnesses, o intense inane
they jostle, even the stars are like stops
that shearing a torso out of fierce love
colonize its phantom limbs to prove her body
- John Wilkinson, Proud Flesh [Salt, 2005] pp. 76-77
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