Glaciated

There she lies
Beached and birthing
Long hot summer pulled around her
Fetched up, fetched up
Scrabbling at her bump
Slackened in a nightclub alleyway slump
With the blared-out pain in her clapped-out ears
And her heartbeat sparking with her ruptured fears
Of the footsore pains in her scrunched-down skirt
Of the big belly thrum in her scrunched-down skirt
Of the body dry-retching in her scrunched-down skirt
Getting stretched like a watch-spring, poised and curled
Gasped in the gutter as the vacuous world view
Passes on by on another side
Orbits away like another planet
And she closes her eyes
And thinks herself away
Thinks into an ice-world
Frozen from reality
Frozen from reality
Taking her totality
Of burden and bundle
Taking her totality
Of expectation
Out into another land
Taken by the sweating hand
Whisked away
From night to day
To white from grey
Taken to another land
Taken to the limit and taken for a ride
Dragged like a sledge on a black-ice slide
Drenched by the freeze and snogged by the spray
Hacked up by the march of the whip-chill tide
Of ice beneath her crazed power-glide
To a crevasse just a human length away
But stay
But stay
Tripped to a halt
Bone-frozen-stuck
Iced to a stop
To a safety
The precipice denied
Secure
Her calm a sort of echo
There she lies
Unscathed
A stain among the snow dunes
Bleached and bleeding
Bedded down on the ice mass
Scrambled snow beneath her
Her inertia
A muffle of an echo
As the cold eases in
Snow-pebbles pinch
Draw the pain out
She lies
A stain on a stain
Growled by the breath from a polar bear’s mouth
Oblivious
She opens up her eyes
Sees globes of glass-sweat
Bubbled up from her skin
Globules of solid water
Draining her temperature
Tiny frozen flakes of herself
Floating away
Rising to the absent moon
To the hanging clouds
Those torn curtains of skin
That embroider
A scab of lines of shadow on her
But the freeze gives out
And the waters burst
Coalesce to crystalled fragments
Hailstone-ing through her skin
There she blows
Splayed among the polar dunes
Calving on the glacier
Breached and breeding
Torn apart to brood new whelps
Body chunks hurled off
Blood-clot boulders
Sliding away to the world's edge
Slurrying into ocean
Where the seals bob, waiting
Ready to devour
The afterbirth
The afterlife
She lies back
Lessened, eroded
The sweat of exertion
Licked away to smoothness on her face
Licked away to smoothness by a polar bear’s tongue
And she sinks back down through the freezing water
Closes her eyes
And melts through herself
Pauses, drops
Melts through the afterslops
Melts back to long hot summer reality
Loops right back to the gutter to the gutter to the gutter to the gutter to the gutter to the gutter
Where they stoop to pick her up
(Like a sack of old stuffing)
Where they cradle her head
(Like a side of soft-meat)
And they get her in the ambulance
And feel the minor miracle
All fluids still intact
As they brush her off her feet
And they give a furtive signal
And they siren-scream away
And vaporise the hot dust
As they zoom from white to grey
And her pale eyes flicker
Thin lips part
They wait
Expect her time to start
But she stays
Locked hard
Within her distance
Bathed in the sweat-stream
Dripping down from shiny skulls
Sees them miniaturised
Demonised
And downsized
Blocks them all away
And she reaches out and pulls
Her time away from them
Reaches out and pulls
Her time away from them
Reaches out and pulls
The blanket ever tighter ever tighter ever tighter
And I'm so cold, she says
I'm so cold