The Bombmaker's Lover

From Cottonmouth last night

The bomb-maker has her hot heart,
shining like a new tomato,
in the cage of his fingertips,
and he is binding it into a trap of wires.
Cruelly casual about the crust of sawdust
it slips, and it skids and
he, [gasp] catches it in his shirt.
Her delicate aorta a mortar
to be handled glass-ishly.

It is small, plum-sized her heart.
Watching her lover red-handed
she considers that it would pump an ocean
if left to its own devices.
The unshelled crab of her heart
would nosedive from the work-bench,
crawl over the linoleum
and seek a Pacific of love.

Her heart swells, when she sees him
leaving the bathroom in the morning
carrying the spine of a bell pepper
that he has eaten in the shower.
But in the twists of the fastenings
it just seems so stunted, such an undernourished organ.

There he says as he slots it back between her ribs
I have reinforced your heart against all known shockwaves,
you are built against many types of modern violence.
At quiet night, inside her body's muscle clicking blood nicking
chorus, she notices that the alloyed heart softly ticks,
like a old record left turning after the song is finished.

The bomb-maker has her teeth,
unusual mineral sharps
out in a line on the mattress
and he is setting in tiny detonators.
He looses a molar, forgets their order
sucks absently on an canine
as if it were a boiled sweet.
Her kiss will list to one side of his face,
the incisors have their claws down.

But she thinks, my teeth will sing,
bleaching the sheets in the sun.
She thinks, they will ring like tuning forks
when I tap them together.
my mouth will be full of song and sparks
my palette will split bright syllables
and my children will be born
with egg-teeth. Like snakes.

Her mouth sizzles with the unstable
electricity of just-woken bones
in the morning.
And when they are lip pressed in that dim hour
she is avoiding the dark dreams that have
fallen into the back of his throat overnight.

Here he says screwing the teeth back into her gums
Each of these is new polished, sequin obscene smile
your laughter will be radioactive, leaving no one un magnetised.
Drinking green tea one morning she burns the
fleshy node between her two front teeth
and discovers diamond-shrapnel hidden there.

The Bombmaker puts helium
in her food, fills her with the noble elements
makes her back crooked with welding
and combs dynamite dust through her hair
in the evenings.
With each small repair she is aware
that he is making her minutely more perfect.
Her fingernails are grenade pins.
Her footsoles are landmines.

All the batteries in the town drain down.
They count bus-stops, they
swim between the sea-mines.
Small nuclear clouds clutter the air
like the pastel ghosts of jellyfish.

And here's what the bombmakers' lover knows:
that clinical strikes and spasm wars,
and sensory deprevation are just other words for us,
And that in love we are all a cluster bomb.

They light a fuse. They blow the lights out.