WALK HOME FROM SCHOOL 

Creature with skin tight black wrapped

Wings tucked in hard casing thick 

Like six legs crawling across the

Bark of a twig and perching  

To feel the cool breeze

Dressed in a full suit of armour yet

I could squeeze you with my soft 

Flesh, palm crushing glossy 

Chitin fibres til your guts ooze

In yellow pulp through the gaps 

And mandibles twitch with unvoiced  

Agony

THE COMING TEMPEST

Leave the cattle where they are 

Oh great thane leave the monks 

Alone, leave the houses, leave 

The townships and their people

Watch it come rolling down 

The horizon, before your men 

Can leave their posts to say 

Goodbye to each other and pray

Wind rushes in from all sides 

See a dreaded howling of black miasma 

It is neither judgement nor punishment 

It just takes

HOST

Your body is a beating red blanket

Encased in the gastric network

I lay dormant

There is nothing hard here 

Warm dark comfort unending

Pulsing and humming as I 

Am awash in your enzymes

Fed full and fat from your meals

Where you become me 

And I become us

Because one day 

I will outgrow this home 

Stretching until I burst from our confinements

Where you rot, we rot together 

The soil twice as dark, 

Twice as warm, twice as soft.

A BELL TOLLS

Over the village’s charred remains 

Churned fields trampled to a pulp 

That rest thick and heavy with bones

Atop the hill, a church keeps watch

In its crumbling visage:

A deathly silence

They have long since since stopped the burials 

Skeletons tossed into the trenches 

Piled high are man woman and child alike 

Their last moments caught in the whistling wind

Between gaping, empty jaws

When will the bell toll again? 

Clutch the coarse rope

To stir the ghosts once more