ARRESTED DANGER

Arrested danger

Turning into coarse twilight, blunt-featured

My tattoos of caves and crevasses

Mathematical bruises, a lined canvas, dry shades of blue

Dot a flimsy fur coat of open wounds


Penned in a coral seabed, man’s suburban maze

Unruly, untamed, sealed in stasis

A fallen mount fossilised in evening mist

They scaled my faces, if I only woke to strike


Bronze sunset peeking through a stony cloud

Sewn into my hardened funeral shroud

Charging, snarling, braying in the spider’s nest

He’ll break his bonds, they cry, petrified

Swollen yet hollowed, slowly eaten away

A beast born from fire, shorn off and swallowed


I am here, now

Imposing, superimposed

Teeming with cancerous shale

An arrested danger in coarse twilight

Awaiting release from a roadside jail