Not even a sixpence,
she rolls in the gutter like a rotten orange.

The moon was a modest movie star, pliant,
musky but silent. Debutantes fainted
to the sound of pianos.

Along the Champs Elysées – Paris in ostrich,
depressed – she was numinous,

she lost luminous gloves.
Everyone there felt obscurely caressed.

The moon loves frottage.
Her tears stand erect on the dark side
of the tram although her laughs are full of light.

Like one of the elect
she alights with four and twenty blackbirds.
Baked in a pie, they birth themselves

with bloody beaks,
bursting through a flaky pastry sky.

Bulimic? The moon is.
She devours chocolate out of the night
and vomits it into the ocean’s toilet.

She’s a gem.
I have my finger down the moon’s throat.
She has my pulse in her brain stem.

She’s eaten by wolves. Clawed at by owls.
Her howls, melodic, escape from their mouths.

The moon covers mothers in pale sheets.
They hover and fret, humidifying ghosts.
There stands one at the foot of your bed.

I always contemplate the moon at midnight.
Later, I grate her onto breakfast with chives.

She draws all my madness out
like a poultice with two black eyes,
like a magnet wearing a dirty white dress.