Code - Dialogue

a serpent is kept in this pillow
a mentor and critic
blue all the day
and at night begins to jade
how can it hope to be
any more than a(it?) can
not a human but a low thing
its seminars languish in failure scribbled
in spidery, spit-spattered achres
long long
drone there, a lovertheif
that must suffer it all
suffer directly and squeeze
and gather up your sheets
and swing and swing and swing
in isolation

quiet please
I am locked in with you
like a fiend from some film
I can't quite remember
sour and neglected friend
whose old skin became hard
unnamed but now a face
at the window
so let us do death
as I am already in parts
from promising dreams
I cannot deliver
mad and dejected lamp
that has never gone out
just condemned to make shapes
on the ceiling

you don't fool me now with a calm demeanour
in this washing of thoughts
I have watched your blood boil
slow now
we're simply pieces
estranged
a blinking beacon
and boat separated
by some heavy shroud
this skin sticks like a mangled cloth
to be wrung and wrung
and never dry out

press in
feel the passages swim
from a wall of dark eyelids
where memory plays like
old film
of cells
reticulation
unclean, unsure
unclean and elevating
peel from the screen
such paper-thin fingerprint wings
cling and constrict in cellophane twists
so suffocating
the snake is in the nest
to swallow every piece
of recollected guilt
it forces me to keep
the snake is in the nest
it tightens in the night
to keep the meat distressed
and lock me in its sights