Her iron talons strike white noise from
stone:
Breath creaks
And a single note scratches like sand
In an oyster accreting a nacreous sheen.
She speaks of silent seas lost in the frozen regolith;

She speaks of ancient flesh that sleeps
beneath the ice;
She finger-clicks her waltz-time into the
wolf time:
Her voice-like-a-shadow bends moonlight in its gravity.

Her feet fly grace unbound, her hands float
Like moths as she spins a silken thread: she weaves

Strands of forgotten time and stolen  voices
Into a web of lost hearts tangled.
She names the insatiable thirst and hollow
pain,
Her bottomless hunger for love and
whispers,
And white doves that fall from out the icy
air.

In the to and fro of lives that flit past her window

Ghosts chatter and cry with pearly teeth too sharp.
Trills and bat-clicks flutter from her open
lips
And words fly to the carven rafters where
they hang
A hundred grey dreamers moulded from
her clay.

This is the sound of the empty space between
the stars
She raves in the silence hidden in the static’s
roar
Sustained in the ring of church bells shattered
in the frost
Velvet dancer shrieks unearthly desire and
stamps her feet,

“Give me give me the world where void is
all.”

The rise of waves ripple as the stones decline and fall
She polkas to the funeral-beat bone
Hammered on the skin of a second-hand
drum.
The grinding of the wind turns the rocks to
dust
As unholy prayers she drags the noise from
her mouth

And unbinds her long black tongue
“Feed me,” she cries in the voice

All whistled birdsong and whispered
snakesong.
In the attic where swallows lie mummified
There is an absence in her too-empty belly.

She sways to the rhythm of the worms in the
soil
And coils and writhes: a sacred serpent
wrestling
A final note filled with slow creeping of
decay.
She opens frosty-lips and vomits a single
pearl
That slowly rolls imperfect through the
silence.