God is a talented anatomist
and has laid bare the thoughts of our hearts—

my chambers and ventricles pinned and stretched like lepidoptery
sins scratched square-nibbed on my skin-wet vellum
	like a neolithic tattoo:

SELFISH / INTERRUPTS / READS YAOI / DOESN’T TEXT BACK

God is the tipsy aunt at the family gathering who says
hm sounds like your career has really stagnated this year
	(but she also buys you a corvette.)

After the party she takes you for a test drive.
Roof down; grin glittering; her whole universe
	prickling around you.

You feel your heart burning.
You look in your wing mirror and see
	SELFISH
	sizzling in the dual fires of her tyre tracks
	like roadkill.

You look like if Bear Grylls were swaddled in 1000+ pounds
	of clingfilm and ham.
Below the blood blisters of your eyes, your tusks
	seem to wobble like a baby tooth
revealing a network of nerves and muscle.

A triumphant, sweeping drone shot: you on a cliff top,
	your unwieldy mass perched
like an elephant pirouetting on a powerline.

But David Attenborough has a point to make.

The first shot of you falling is your eyes as you slip to the edge
	twin red blisters widening as you slide
your impossible gravity tipping you away from the lip tusk-first.

For a brief second, frozen in Netflix pause, you
	are a rounded angel
	a shining oval poised in perfect balance
your little frayed flippers spread as though to fly.

The first rock you hit on the way down is angled like a canine.
	The next is jagged.

Then you are in the air again / then you are back on the ground.
	The air / the ground.

On the beach again you seem to be as solid as before
but inside, your bones are shattered and sharp

your red eyes blink and your flippers move a little at your sides
	recalling flight.

Now David Attenborough shows us some tree frogs
	in the Congo Basin
funny birds of paradise doing complex mating dances!

We have left you on the beach but we have not left you alone.
From the corners of the screen, polar bears approach.
	They are so hungry
	and they will appreciate you.

Corner of Princes and Rattray streets
rain a black slick on the concrete
silver rain-doilies all over the air

and among them, like a soggy prophet,
a businessman—shirt transparent on fish-white skin
head bent to phone like a neon Gospel.

The scooter is his orange stallion
tamed beneath his Three Wise Men heels
the leather coruscating like two shining miracles.

He is like a Western filmed in Atlantis
briefcase a dashing saddlebag on his hip.
He kicks off like a hydro-cowboy.

His Hallensteins jodhpurs cling to his flanks
he is Charlton Heston in Postie+ socks
Viggo Mortensen wrangled into an LLB.

He rides into the grey midday sun
a black-and-white Western
with a flash of orange as the credits roll.

which the priest tells us before evensong 
his cope glittering like a green diamond 
and the blue glow of Facebook frozen buttercup-light 
	under his chin. 
 
It’s like waking up in your house 
and doing watercolours and petting your cat 
while firemen shout at you from the cupboards 
	about a gas leak 
 
like you hear them and then the postman 
chucks a Molotov cocktail through your mailbox 
	and your house is engulfed in flames 
	and your watercolours and your cat, too. 
 
If I try to carry the weight of the world’s grief 
I will buckle like a three-legged table 
Risk boardgame sliding off me 
	and all the world leaders ending up 
	in a hyena dogpile. 
 
	A man hisses at me on the bus 
and my partner kisses me 
while the lights of Dunedin glitter  
like dissected Hannukah candles. 
 
God is a pinwheel 
spitting beautiful bright spikes over the ground 
while mountains melt like wax and ash 
	falls like snow. 
 

Lord, now lettest thou thy servant 
	depart in peace 
or strike down the postman 
	or at least
	save the cat.

Lights of Dunedin through silver-grey fog gauze 
	the car’s engine purring 
	a mammalian bead of light 
 
and white condensation-windows, 
	like I’m Rose and you’re Jack 
except there’s no disaster, just Cohen on the radio 
 
his brassy declarations of love 
	making shapes in the car-light 
and my head bending to the curve of your side. 
 
	Your face is impossibly well-shaped 
you are evidence against the dysteleological argument. 
 
	In fact you are so lovely  
that the world ending would be okay 
and we could watch it together from here, 
 
black bowl of night around the car windows 
	an endless absence of sunlight 
slowly concealed by white breath. 

Sally, smiling with her subcutaneous-white teeth,
            looks very thin now.
She wears a red viscose top from Farmers
            and bares SmileDirect teeth
like in a desert full of yellow bones
Sally is a spine bleached by the sun.

Beautiful Sally.
I heard we evolved from apes to homosapiens
because we started taking magic mushrooms
            and found God.

My brain, your brain, Sally’s brain,
all grey wet walnuts driving our meat machines
as we shrink and grow and shrink and grow
            and waste our time counting almonds
            and halving stock cubes and slicing cucumbers
            and pretending they taste like chips.

Just eat some chips, Sally.
You and your magic brain and desert teeth—
hair a golden helmet, plate held like a god’s attribute,
            like hungry Minerva

like an ancient statue slowly shrinking as the desert winds
of seashells and low-cal rice cakes
            blow all about you.
Sally—the lone and level sands
stretch far away. Across the distance you watch me
like the Mona Lisa, like a predator or a carnivore—

like something hungry.

Charles Darwin stepped off the HMS Beagle
and said you will soon go extinct, little wolf.

You are too trusting
and you have not learned how to be afraid.

And you skink-plaited between his legs
and ate from his evolutionist hands—

licked at his scientist fingers.
Learn from ours, said Darwin. Our wolves

bristle like a thousand thousand razors
            in the shape of a predator.

They know what to fear. Here
you eat from the one hand while the other

holds a knife.
All the better to kill you with.

Now glass where there should be eyes.
Teeth with no bite. I want you
            to come back to life

because I am alone too, and have also learned
how to be afraid. I would never kill you.

Come and sit on my lap, your warmth
rising taxidermy dust around us

like a cloud made of skin.
Come and eat from my hand.

It is scientifically controversial to say
that birds are born with the innate knowledge
            of how to build a nest.

Apparently it is trial and error
nesting and nesting in wrong places
with wrong materials until some arrangement
            makes a home.

An imperative. Like other things.
There are the other things
that are imperatives too.

I have hit my head on the walls of lifts
and on drawer handles. I have used scalpels,
pencil sharpeners, pinking shears, vodka.

Unfortunately I have to.
Like settling in the crook of a branch,
not knowing what you’re making,

your wings fluted like gills, calamus
spread open like a hand made of spines.
These things we can’t explain or stop.

Skin opens up like the neck of a prickling cat.
Options everywhere—moss, scissors,
sticks, glass, needles, leaves.

I have only ever wanted
a home. I have only ever wanted
to know what to do.

Ahead, leaving you behind,
the Israelites glow like birthstone scales,
rippling on black flesh-wings.
Blind creatures twist in your periphery,
inverted like a nervous system.

Your chariots tangle seaweed.
Your torch-bearers blaze azure fire
through anemone fields.
You are gold wasps or black-sea scarabs;
jewels crystal-trawling the deepest deep.

You and your glittering brothers,
here until the end of days—beyond that—
until you become black-red shrines
to strange, watery gods.
Extinct pilgrims will find you

and bless you.

In the amber, rain-dappled cube of traffic lights
you tell me what tattoos you want. You tell me

your favourite colour. You say chartreuse and viridian
should be the other way around, and I agree.

I enjoy seeing you in a crowd of people I don’t know.
It’s like going to an alien planet

and amidst the extra-terrestrial architectural preferences
of a tripedal species, seeing a mossy parish church.

It’s like translating an ancient Aramaic scroll
and finding the lyrics to the ‘Friends’ theme song,

or deep-sea diving for oysters, prying one-off black rock,
and opening it to the mood ring you lost
when you were ten.

I never know what I’m trying to tell you. Maybe that I wish
I had omnipotence, omniscience, omni-benevolence—

so everyone could know you are favoured,
God-chosen; I would turn rivers to honey, spell it out
with hummingbirds.

You would turn your friend-shaped face
to the bird-filled sky and wonder who this was
that God so loves.