Poetry

Hydra

I.
Your kind hazel eyes blink once and freeze
a blue hue of contacts kept in evermoist
a constellation of sparkles on unopened bottles of Coke.

Your fingers smelling of pub, the floor sticky
as it leads to the altar of granting dreams
over a sip (was it wine?) turned from water,
or cold water achieving a placebo effect
to cure the disease of belief that you’re alone.

Look around you and see the three legged dog,
the man with his hand down his pants smiling
the old lady repeatedly kissing her pint of Guinness
red stains decorating the rims like curtains.

II.
Oceans of water forming a disk around the dwarf TW Hydra
or a safety ring you are running your finger around  the rim
of the glass and it sings to you - I sing to you

a symphony of faucets and broken pipes and taps
the heads of beasts waiting to pour out nectar
in your pint. And you are Typhon fathering a child.
Chop off his finger, head or the foot of the glass,
it will grow back twice, gravitating around you
the spare limbs of the Sea Serpent constellation.

Blood was rushing to get from fingers to heart
to toes; from toes to heart to fingers through
a blurry vision of trophies hanging on the walls.

III.
And you are far away swimming gracefully around
shadows of people, you have escaped gravity,
but never truly free. Echidna has slithered
in your phone and pockets and Facebook page,
she is churning your words like a windmill of flesh,
and you will have to remember who she is,
when you wake up.

Veronica Fibisan