Jack Elliott Cardno

All Conservative Acts Will Fail (2015)

1. Tunnel visions

A soft fearful glee,
Two sets, twisting around trees
Rushing
Joining in a dalliance of helical paths,
through interstices,
momentarily empty.

2. Faecal Tang

A hundred men
All in puffer jackets doubling their bulk.
A struggling hand,
Obscured from the wrist onwards
by a humungous jostling nylon sphincter.

3. A Countryside

Rosy cheeked men jauntily gesticulate with paunchy bulbous women who, in turn, blush and
lay a hand on their brow. They are arrayed, with little concern for a barrier, around a patch of
spotlit scraggy ground.
In the centre is a ram.
A blond dog (bleached almost white in the light) comes from between the dark happy crowd,
circles around and bites the rams swirled left horn.
My implied eyes are right up close: the black wet and red of the gums and the teeth grating
on the curving horn within the swirling jerks and reeling of lamb eyes.

4. The rose bed

A bitten lip bleeds.
Smiles widen the sides of the fissure
And the lip bleeds more

The limits aren’t cared for in the moment.
And the smile,
Ever widening,
Becomes a well.

5. At the nape now

Whisper something into the skin at the nape
With teeth softly grating the skin as the words are said.

All conservative acts will fail,
And destroy what they wished to conserve.

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