Hirudin (a Love Poem in Thirty Four Segments)

It lingers in its corner
A footfall out of reach
Hirudo medicinalis
Your own
Your own
Your very own
Your friend
Medicinal
Leech

But when it’s sucked out from your body sucked out from your body what you think about that then what you think about that then diluting your essence stealing the liquid fire that powers your body bite-sucking your essence into a protein twist of body into body of your body into its body?

Outside your flesh but still within you
Layered on your skin
A smooth and pulsing ornament
That started pinprick thin

But this is not a big thing this is no storm no this is not tempest this is no violent exchange this is not a whirling attack by some force of predation too big to contemplate

No, this is slow
This is stealth
A subtlety of brainless waiting
Dumb sophistication
That is tugging at your fate

Try to remember
The things you never knew:
He saw you waiting:
Chosen, captured
Bare feet on the cobbles
Toe-squashing a worm
He singled you
Chose your choosing of him
Saved you
To the pleasing suffocation
Of unfertilised
Destiny

The leech
Waits its damp wait
Tiptoed in the vegetation
Poising one end in the air
Dragging on its long-stored food
A camel of the damp
Curator of the chomped and chewed
Sucking at the residues
Enduring the extremes
Of its own regurgitation

Did you
Wait for him wait for him wait for him wait for him wait for him wait for him wait for him wait
With the patience
Of a leech?

The leech
Its reflexes
Chasing shadows
Sucking at shadows
Hooked onto the shifting smoky images
Of blood-humans
Gauging their arrival
Like a gut in water

And he?
He has bathed
The infested waters
Of your love
Felt your leech-desire
Breathe through his skin.
The two of you
Sucked together
Leech-merged
To a unity
Of waiting

But when its time arrives
It’s ready
When the food arrives
It bites

And it bites
And you don’t feel it
And your blood flows
You don’t feel it

Then it sucks you thin it sucks you thin it wriggle-mouths into your twitching vessels, capillerises twig-like into the thick-branches of your soul-bleed

And you flow and you flow and you flow and you flow because there is no thing present to stop it, no blockage thing, no liquid-to-solid impurifying element
No thickening
No thickening
To thwart your blood’s desire
To flow out to the gutters
To flow out to the sea
You slacken your hold
On all your liquids
Grow too pure
To remain

Three sharp-toothed jaws
Y-shaped mouth claws
Five pairs of eyes

Three way incisions
Star-shaped skin-scars
Redolent of the night
Star-shaped skin-scars
Redolent of ancient sunderings
Ancient cobbles set aside
For people chosen twice
Like you
Until he chose you for a third time

A smooth and pulsing ornamental
Mouth-to-skin emetic
That shoots its load injection of
Saliva anaesthetic

These are the leeched-out sensations of a shared love:
lack of pain
loss of identity
thinning of the spirits
abandonment of self
a sense of mutual brokenness
a reaching out for something of one
Buried in another
Thinning through to the other’s life
Exposed
Let free
Outed
Your closet bled
Of all profaned desire
Your corpuscles
Sterilised

the blood of fishes
blood of birds
the blood of snails
amphibian blood
the blood of mammals
blood of worms
the blood of insect larvae
That’s what little leeches feed on

Among the many agonies
You tried to choke in vain
You have also known the agony
Of feeling lack of pain

That’s what little leeches feed on
When their jaws develop
Until that time
They point their mouths
At easy targets
Thin-skinned morsels
Papery
Plentiful
Frog-fodder
Hopping round the pond
Wafer-thin and edible

And later
As he ages
His flesh flakes
Tears like paper
Tears like frogskin
Breaks across its weaknesses

The odd crossed with the even
Three into five will go
The world is odd
The world will never even out

The dart of a fish
The soar of a bird
The persistence of a snail
Amphibian versatility
The warmth of mammals
The suppleness of worms
The potential of insect larvae
These are the things your lust still craves
These are the things your love will need

Three jaws and five eyes
One pair of ovaries
Many pairs of testicles
Land leech, wet leech
Looping across the land
It and its geometry
Will track you down through time

You two
Have a jawlocked encounter
Painless thinning
Flowing in each other
Coagulant the enemy
A coupling
Of grafted tissues
Reattached appendages
Jawing in
The star-shaped skin-scars
The two of you lie
Outside each other’s flesh but still within
A man and a woman
Bleeding in each other’s lives
A single beast’s
Hermaphroditic
Sterile
Isolation

Leeches swell
Ten times their body size
Encompass the world

So you two
Like torn-up envelopes
Try to wrap each other
In your mutual brokenness
(Scraps flying through air
Like star-shaped skin-scars)

That started pinprick thin but then
Grew gorged with exploitation
Primed and numbered ready for
Your transubstantiation

Two lovers crossed upon the bed
Your back on his stomach
Gazing upwards at the future
Four fifths of a star
Waiting for an unborn child
To make the shape complete

Multi-mouthed for exploration
Multi-mouthed for exploitation
Multi-mouthed for spreading word-pain
Star-shaped skin-scars fanning blight
All across the waiting world zone
Festering its unseen stains

Loveworms, loveworms
Tracking across the bed
Explore their
Trigonometry
To drag their souls to rest

The leech lies fat now
Stuffed for the season
Pulls down the curtain
Rests awhile

And the cobbles are still wet
But empty now
Empty now
Empty now