Gary J. Shipley-

COMING UP ON HEADLESS

The neck’s no cul-de-sac

Frayed bullets tussling 

Up and out open mouths about

Just about speaking, but they’re

Happy most the time

The monkey traps don’t bite

And the voltage is all teeth.

ARTIFICIAL LIMB

forum of the half-invented

hosted by non-donors

followed at distance

back to damp stacks

by their instruments

to percussion of stab heels

spoiling pliable skies in

sting estate of creepers

unique in flaws in echoed

soundscape of corpses

jangling in canning bomb

towers and mirrored parks

imagining ritual blindness

in late-night architecture

clap nerves in the metal

artistry in the tangle

fingers in commentaries

scalpels rocking clean

set tubes scorching out 

gram traces of ceremony

a world’s invisible centres

from a dying machine 

of clunk cut wire flowers

late in the fabricated

spectacle –paralyzed – 

a technical suffocation

fielding an asphyxiate seed

ROT GLUT

All my birthmarks have been erased

Ripped out like people out of senile brains

And yet no trace of espionage

Or fumes of droppings of Goya bats.

Genetic playthings of appetites grinded

Into various mutilations of fatigue

Looking to be bred from the mucus

of nuclear eyes prevented from forming.

The world a scab of particulate violations

Epileptic worms of light in sagging human turf. 

Gary J. Shipley is the author of Theoretical Animals (BlazeVOX). More details can be found here.