Amy De'Ath




			Amy De'Ath

			But This is Your Quota

			But This is Your Quota It’s tricky waking up to a flock of starlings or swarm of wasps outside the window when the period calls for something a little more anodyne. Surely unfair to stand in the shower having to plan the skyways or underground canals to suit the future’s hair colour when it’s raining anyway. Press releases flutter down and they all insist the same thing: if you have the wherewithal to crouch and forage we’ll overlook your previous intent. Changing tack, you think you may be able to gas them out with fluctuations in the tone of your speech pedagogic craters in your speech. Then any scenario you play out is declared a disinvestment, a miserly hymn sung according to the codes installed in your bowels. Bear it exacerbate it, hail & spare your face to skyscape, your tubes and funnels of blood open up bare to the wind & carry up the scrub and the clay. Blow down exasperated, palms spread like Venus wide to wild flocks, your head spins off your shoulders, down a garish green hill into your parents’ bosom. Audaciously you tell them you once lived in a wooden shack once wet your knickers returning to the fire once kissed the whole courtroom in glee always tried it and spat it out. But hard to live and know the earnest love-lily of ‘avant-garde’ was done with before you got to be born, and besides you got to be born overseas. And what got you to the comfort of white-lit emporiums smelling of bread and flocking of babies when all you desired was steaming tap water? Hanging limp, you lip-read to find they already knew of your scintillating, so there’s nothing you would like more now than to press your body on a cold fridge. * (Just in Air) Of all the things that I have done, it Still moves in the shallows, barely submarine but away from the gusts that make shoals, make crumble around. Not smug not nothing though. In earth we find inertia; so what if you and I sprawl usually on the back of someone else’s back: the whole courtroom kissed you back. I thought you knew what ‘moonlit’ I was talking about my tremor but you didn’t, and on a, a cooler day like this Our consonants, soft-pedaled. you are just like me- heart, apple: chest, a woody train; there’s no way to talk about human beings—but wonderful, to count them like sheep and have them never run out—my tremor my stuffed white rabbit droop in the corner of my room, used to droop-look at me, cavernously. Hang limpet. Birds and trees outside so obviously true, so often repeated, trite or wingless. I’m trying to cough up a new excuse while you run the way you crave the frame, the orderliness of the day nicely, but the catcher of your eye calls persistent beats to your temples cause to stumble off-balance onto the platform not knowing any station. * If all this time your boots were clogged in language not belonging to you, and your response is only to notice the rain-tap on the skylight, then who is that. Responsibly contoured, you roll out of a magician’s hat onto a bed of wild orchids, yes you are like a bold white bunny. But there isn’t time to give or take an impression, to make amends or explain your fear or explain that wild orchids also go by ‘glass slippers’. * (Among Pebble) I once was / but now- I see original placating oyster shells, they’re part of your oeuvre, they wash up in rockpools close by you your face is read by cold gales your face is brazen / brazen. Meanwhile I am in the kitchen making quiche or waiting for something. Maybe predictably, for the sofa to be delivered. * (At Sea) My, I am luckily bulwarked. I am wracked and this moment is a She. It reverberates left-handedly and leniently. Our heads are lolling, there’s water lapping gently at our feet. Would you dislike to maintain a more erudite connection to society at large? Wrack. Wrecked. Wrack and Wreck again and Accept cash and Carry me and Market Day and Every day and Every woe and worry dear to me- It was the lone fizzy cola bottle left gelatinously in the box told me I could make it as a secular Jew – after all I’m a girl and you’re a goose and you’re a salvaged item from a tip, a compulsively fraying ribbon insatiably shaking your tails (for our purposes) any item. Still, on the street many suspect darknesses and thuggish bodies at large, but for you, the sides of the ship extending above deck-level. Did the day pass by? Could we have hurled ourselves around its legs and swept it to the ground, by the legs? * Nullifying to wait in a shadow wondering when stretching distances will become a figure when your loved ones will dissipate evicted. The boys’ constant melomania begins to itch, it doesn’t allow you to walk about the room with risen fists asserting your denizenship your denizity. While they stomp through the evening kitchen making noise the planets above are banding round them, sly orbits to ascertain make verdict. In underground canals and skyways at specified times a tube or funnel of blood will forget to blow down to oscillate between you and your loved.


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