Poems by Elliot Harley McKenzie

I want to sink warmly & whiplike into a honey-filled estuary,
for the tide to turn and take me out to sea
& for my ex lover to die of dysentery.

I want to sink naked into the aching shape of you
merging our flesh in white hot fury………
a fusion of perfect rage swimming through smoking thickets
grass wilting in our wake

I want to sink always into barbed evolution &
dress my heart
in shrewd, briny restrictions
slowly ticking over
like a computer working on updates

I’m a medusoid fungus, a spiralling
line of siphonophores………
king of the pelagic zone

restless phenotypes betray a wearied mitosis
you kiss my inbox and I swoon like a swan-diving shag………

muscled with tentacular seaweed
wild and earnest
as our predecessors
the scaremongering enormity of
a sex – changing fish………

Like the kobudai wrasse
I battle in buck toothed glory
for my spawning rights………

reeling in the ultraconservative
fuckers and bashing their
heads in with the butt of my knife

I want to float like scum in a tidepool,
infinite, romantic………

splashing bright yellow cleaner in the toilet bowl
I scrub……… & i think of you