Serge ♆ Neptune

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Sirensong, or The Effeminate Voice (3)

You’re queer in how you put on a black tube sock,
& squeal, when you find a squid wriggling inside it.

You dissect yourself into lands, the country your dead have left inside you.
Experts could analyse the smell of rain around your body

but the world pulls you in too many directions, so you sit in your chemicals
& stink. You fall asleep for 78 days, wake up & your head is a bowl of vinegar.

Eyes squint like dull American secrets. To come back as yourself
becomes the whole quest, but your hands feel like copper wire bouquets.

Your dead salivate & it sticks to your skin like a teal-coloured film.
Mouths pop all over your body & on the gelid ground & they all sing

about the horse-headed boy that buried the tadpoles caught from the lake
& drew 5 little crosses around the hole with orange chalk

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SERGE ♆ NEPTUNE has been called ‘the little merman of British poetry’. Several of his poems appeared in Propel, The North, The Rialto, Banshee, Magma, and placed in the National Poetry Competition. His new pamphlet, Mother Night, is forthcoming with the Emma Press in June 2024.