Laid on white deckchairs
with history between their bones,
Orpheus
and Eurydice
watch a Haitian sea
slide backwards, the radio
singing Otis it used
to do when they nudged
bashful kisses
on each other\'s necks
and the wild smell
of human wine
hadn\'t shrunk to a tasteless word
peeling itself off your lips.
The cruise keeps moving.
Dead couples turn like
slowly dancing planets
and the ocean glitters
so white it hurts to look.
Eurydice just waits
for the song on the radio to change.
Crucified, then crucified again.
Joan of Arc sells petrol
on the M25, her teenage
jaw slacked orange
as she sucks the flavour
from her lips. Exhausts
are forrest-fires
bleeding smoke
into her eyes, her mind
gets thinner
on diesel winds,
plastic Toyotas with red lights
for leaving and white ones
for returning crashing uselessly
through the night.
She keeps on sucking -
polish gets into your mouth
after a while. Then the news
comes through the television.
Deep Blue beats Kasparov
in the final game,
the match is over,
and Joan\'s tongue closes still.
Crucified, then crucified again.
A rainy night in New York city,
Anne Frank falls from the sky.
Her childish lungs are roadkill now,
shrivelled like red balloons
in the light of Times Square,
her white wrists nailed deep
into the peaks of the Macdonald\'s logo.
The ferris wheels keep burning blue
and green, the steam of hot dogs
breathes on the rain, and
even the homeless ignore her.
Even the homeless ignore her.
We should gather around her tiny corpse
and pull the rusted nails
from her hands. We should bathe her
body pink and new, we should weed
the cigarettes out of her eyes,
we should let the taste
of her ovaries wash our saturated mouths
so that one day, together,
we can brush the dead stars out of the sky.