Variously unreal, your body
weaves itself from rags, hemming
in what’s possible with
what is not.

And it isn’t this as angels
place eyes upon your spine,
every bit of back strung
with blood for turning
something new from the chaos
that they have never seen.

How heavenly can they be,
these cast-offs? It cannot
be correct – your body
bespoke and heavy stitched
limb-to-limb in fits.
And yet you find your feet
somehow separate from the floor,
the carpet fibres laced
with the smallest scraps of gravity
mere men have ever known.

And extras to you now,
your angels take their wings,
bending from you blood they sew
in strands of light and shade.

And Isaac in his madness
never saw so strange as this:
wombs opened out like rainbows
back-forming prism glass,
choirs of ugly angels singing
their struggles as they dress
their shaking mess of rag and bone
in the shape of human flesh.

 

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