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Andrew W Pye

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Les Fleurs du Mal

Those on the inherited wallpaper have faded -
soon they’ll dead-head themselves into invisibility;
and the copper-painted canes,
around which they once grew,
have, in contact with the sea air,
turned into a green and spreading mould -
a forest of Saints’ walking sticks, grounded and budding.

Dead, bare lightbulb - planted in mid-air -
grows a stem up into the ceiling
and spreads its damp brown petals
in ever paling and increasing circles.

Ham-shank bubbles in a buckled pot,
tendrils of steam grow and die,
blobs of grease surface and bloom into nothing.

Small nuclear war of fungi surrounds
a potted plant that’s no more alive
than the splintered paint-stirrer that is its crutch.

And I lie on the single mattress
whose stains are grown from seed,
propped by a pillow of living culture
beneath which is a hanky starched into a bell,
yellowing where the bee goes in.

Floral curtains are open an inch and the bedsit
is cut in two by a pane of dusty light
that chops me off at the knees.
I light a cigarette and exhale a plume
which becomes a monochrome bud
that blossoms into a hologram;
a shifting cross-section of itself;
a sliver of grey-matter,
growing in size and focus, on a microscope slide;
a living 3D X-ray that matches
the cancerous growth in my remaining lung.

 

Page(s) 38

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