Robert Minhinnick is editor of the literary journal Poetry Wales,
an environmental campaigner and travel writer. His work appears in
Native Ground, Watching the Fire Eater, Hey Fatman and Selected
Poems (Carcanet).





from The Body in Question



With the Body Piercers

There was nowhere else to sit
So I sat in the darkness with them

And listened to every word of it -
Their 7 pm after work conversation.

And it seemed no different
From all the other conversations

Taking place at 7 pm in the world:
That the job was thankless;

That the public was a conspiracy of fools;
That they were paid much, much too little.

And as my eyes grew used to the darkness
I understood to whom I was listening:

They were the ringed and the chained;
They were the studded and the spiked

They were the curtain hooks in their tongues;
There were amethysts in their mouths;

There were daggers through their breasts;
There were golden serpents that disappeared into their navels;

There were ingots in their ears;
There was astronomy in their noses;

There were padlocks on their eyes;
There were needles through their nipples

Threaded to silver pulleys
That carried heavier and heavier silver hippopotamuses;

There were wedding rings through their foreskins;
There were swastikas in their labia.

When they had all gone
I looked at myself in the mirror:

I saw a man by himself in an empty room
Tapping a pen against his teeth.








Upstairs at The Beast Within Tattoo Studio, Porthcawl

Ah lover,
Bend slowly over:
Look for religion down on your hands and knees;

And feel a mazarine blue butterfly
Extinct in this country for one hundred years
Alight on your right buttock.

Sister,
Over your shoulder
A dolphin will bare
Its knuckleduster teeth:

And sir,
Your torso
Could be more so.
Across those plated pectorals
I’ll commence my Book of Kells.

Who dares
Upstairs
To the scriptorium
Where Leonardo consults the hexagrams, Celtic DNA?

This needleworker
Never slurs a word.
Feel my hypodermic
Sip like a hummingbird.

Soon
Around town
Your children will sport my biographia.
Out of the storybooks will step your young
Like little blue dragons following their dam.








The Penis

Eye to the earth
I’m in disgrace
But pointed at the stars
You’ll count a constellation in my jaws.








The Tooth

In your head I whisper:
A tooth, blue as a cinder.
And I ask: Coward,
Whose pain is it anyway?
Your cells are a blizzard,
Your mind a ragbook, yet
I dream you into growth
Luscious as papaya flesh
Around my black seed.

Why this need to condemn?
I have felt your bones
Gasp in their foundry,
And at night you do not know
But I have heard your blood
Like a bench of silversmiths
Pause at its work.
Then continue

Once I dreamed
You inside a laboratory
When you stared at a kernal
Of phosphorus until it sprouted fire; and thirty years later
Ached in your skull
As you stooped in the shelter
Of Amariya to pick the tooth
Of a child like a ricegrain
From the ash.

We’ve been together
Such a long time now.
And my roots
Go all the way down.