Bespoke Toad
Oaken-skulled slink, knot-mouthed, not wet but wood,
flintlock-tongued, thingamajigged, carriage clock-lunged,
the tongue windscreen wiping ripened eyes, glacier-spun;
tilting brass-clad tympanum to hear –
who knows what junk he’s belly-stored to build himself
from, mirror ball-gazed in the brambled chintz.
Sideways Knight
No hip bones to speak of, no wrists – rusted off? –
no head hermit-crabbed or capped
with sea foam circlets to adorn.
Felled reveller, slave to his tipple
(Tiamat swig or tincture),
with deathly brail his trunk
stippled – stone chainmail cascading down a casket
chest. He dusts the coastline with glass
gauntlets, his bus-stop-in-the-dawn
breath. Pin-barrelled abominable.
Gargantuan gone on the lash.
Owl
I scrunch the owl into a tawny ball,
origami’d bones, rumpled tufts,
and see, between the concertinas,
gold-lit streets, skyscraper clusters,
his gelatine eye a sunrise
above the ice encrusted
roads of his own intestinal tract,
his beak an ivory spangled bridge.
With paper architecture’s creak
the struts, the flat-packed vertebrae
unwind, and he is moving back to flight,
to swoop, to sky-hard in a hunter’s breath,
the city closed in his winged flex.
Words by Matthew Haigh: http://matthewhaighpoetry.wordpress.com/
Photos by Caleb Sivyer
