Dyscadia Poetry: Recent Episodes
Dyscadia
A spoken poetry podcast from a gilded notebook with charred pages.
Get in touch: I would love to hear from other broadcasters, poets, writers and artists! If you're interested in collaboration, please send a message to ideas@dyscadia.com
Instagram: @dyscadia
Please be aware that some of my poetry contains sex, kink and profanity.
Pictured a lover lying far away, where the night we share closes the distance.
"Alla Prima"
A bead of ink, a falling star At irresistible velocity Perfumed with an incendiary scent With notes of Heaven's shadow.
The circled incantation Softly beckoning Sweetly glides a rainbow sheen Aurora black to liquid gold.
Your possessed fingertips Ignite the bedroom air Lapped upon your tongue To be kissed back in laughter.
An exultant canvas Panting and painted In unholy oils You lie emblazoned With the sigil of my name.
My night terrors always emerge from beautiful places, where monstrous people lurk.
"Plutophobia"
My fevered, ice pooled, haunted dreams Never curse me from TV horror scenes In nasty woodsheds, murder cellars Creepy crypts with Sarah Michelle Gellar Upstairs in attics with porcelain clowns Or graveyard ghosts in glowing nightgowns Round Camp Crystal Lake with Mr Vorhees All the mere conjurings of suppertime cheese.
My nightmares occur in beautiful rooms The bearers of terror bring doom in ballrooms Down wood panelled halls with leaded stained glass My cavalier killers are the Eton-schooled class.
Running through a city I didn't know, to meet a person I had never met. All a few strokes before midnight. Written for National Poetry Day.
"Minotaur"
As a single bead of wineTrickles across mosaic linesI traverse anfractuous streetsLabyrinthine, exceptTime unravels like golden twineBehooving me to be bullishMy champagne bottle, swingingClublike. It's eleven thirty nine.
My grin in the thought of our sinningCurves to match the hornshaped moon.To the palatial hotel of fine china vasesLavish destruction begins in your room.
Sleep deprivation makes you see the most curious things!
"The Levitating Rodent"
A wild flying rat appeared!
Forswooshing down the road
Impossible yet visible
A Pokémon choosing... me?
As I gawped and marvelled
A doubt emerged and bloomed
If this was a curled up leaf and stalk
Cast upon a mischievous breeze.
Thoughts on meeting a dearly adored friend.
"Present"
After far flung years
Our distance will close
On cathedral steps.
A poem about the moments alone that tell you to get out now.
"Lucid"
Naked
Faucet dry
Not showering.
Standing alone
Words arise
Leave town.
Door opens
"Darling, hurry up. We'll be late"
I button and zip layered silence.
The outro I experienced was a little different to the classic glowing tunnel or pearly gates!
"Coda"
In my visions of the afterlife
I was serenaded sweetly
By three women in tailcoats
Riding a golden triceratops
While an uncoiling catsnake
With black peacock plumage
Held me with a pyrite gaze.
Dying, I declared with defiance
"Not today".
An acrostic for temptation.
"Two Demons"
Deliciously
Energising
Monstrous
Offerings
Nakedly
Dangled,
Enticingly
Malevolent.
Obeying
Nothing.
Remembering an insignificant afternoon heading home, when a stranger pulled out a sword.
"The Robbery"
As Death keeps laughing at me
I'm onto the joke
When my throat was grazed
By the tip of a samurai sword
Death chortled
"Pretend it's a carpet strip"
I playfully pushed it aside
As insanity saved my life.
Whispered words to an otherworldly lover.
"Scorch"
Angel.
Your black heart bleeds gasoline and ignites.
To seraphim radiance.
When stepping through a door changes everything.
"Bathyscaphe"
You gasp
Surface
Amid floating cotton
Gathering swirled garments
A submerged ballerina
Broken in the storm.
Soaked beneath your clothes
You turn the handle
And the room pours away.
The night I was dressed as an art dealer, buying snacks in London before the second sex party of the night.
"Fluorescent"
Ten minutes of reality in a petrol station shop
Whilst deciding on chocolate, a Wispa Gold perhaps
Dressed in thirties foppery. Top hat and ivory tie
Sock suspenders and tails. Beside a friend in her veil
A shredded wedding dress still warmed from the art-themed orgy
Suffused by the weighted scent of an ecstatic languorous multitude
Where I bought heaving sculptures of tangled limbs, with monopoly money
Each to pay the bearer the sum of my mobile number
Except ceci n'est pas une dungeon. The CCTV monitor above the counter flickers
A distorted waveform, like the overheard trills of bliss
The cashier pays no second glance as we step out into the night
Towards a bacchanalia afterparty in the glowing godless hours
To gallivant. Fucktabulously.
A poem for when you simply can't get enough of each other in the godless hours.
"Abate"
Transcendental honeysweet
Flesh punishingly sated
Our wickedly carnivorous kisses
Joyfully tear open the other
With the softest serration.
A poem about a simple wooden handrail that has changed as the years pass by.
"The Banister"
Our hands repeat the journey
Swiftly on birthdays
Morning stairs echo with thundersteps
Slowly, tentatively, looking down
A blanket in my arms, blue eyes inside.
Our hands repeat the journey
Tinsel curls around cold wood
A party resonates the timber
Tealights flicker in the straight black shadow
Toys tumble, chased by laughter.
Our hands repeat the journey
Following the scent of porridge and apples
The path of beloved paws and footsteps
I place my palm on the banister
You stand on the top step, smiling.
A poem for the chilling night where my tiny son told me a made up a story about the child who visits him.
"The IKEA Kura"
Outside is the invisible girl
Outside is the invisible girl, he said
Her eyes are pink, she isn't evil
She's somewhere round the bed.
Outside is the invisible girl
Outside is the invisible girl, he said
Her face is like the crying emoji
She's waiting near the bed.
Outside is the invisible girl
Outside is the invisible girl, he said
Her hair is cone shaped, she asks to play
She's standing by the bed.
Outside is the invisible girl
Outside is the invisible girl, he said
Her shark's teeth do not bite
She's behind the curtain now. Night night.
A poem about the stranger I witnessed who ran faster and smelled stronger than anyone I have met for years.
"Boomerang Barfly"
Stepping out of the library, onto grey puddled pavement
I was whiplashed by a whirwind of wine whiffs
Facefirst into a kaliedoscope of 3:00am scents
Rankly blazing from the figure pelting homeward
Graceful as a gazelle galloping across greased glass .
Celebrating when the British Prime Minster wore her favourite sex necklace before, during and after the death of Elizabeth II.
"Trussing Truss"
PM Liz Truss stood in mourning
Dressed as a James Bond baddie
Wearing a day collar, making me ask
Who's the UK's "First Daddy"?
Reflections on the most delicious pause of all.
"Schrödinger’s Permission"
Your lashes, shoulders and throat
Are all drawn back
Waiting for my word
In the third time you've begged
Perhaps a thousand came before
Whilst fucking
Languidly or lost
To be used
To conceive
To blend ourselves
Or with smiling strangers
In bliss and torment
Through lunar eclipse
In the midday sun
Or for the fuck of it
You ask to come
Pleadingly
Pleasingly
Pausing me.
Your desperate blink
Is a question mark
Curved longingly
Around both answers.
For those days when the newspapers, radio, television and online become unbearable.
"British Press"
Pristine cogs and golden gears
Are polished until they gleam
Lubricated by obsequious tears
In the confectionery machine.
A poem of pleasure and detonation.
"Infinite Curvature"
Savouring a moment from last night.
The implosion of bliss
On the pinhead of a single second
When you came like a neutron star.
Experimentation with kink and nectar.
"October Candy"
Twisting the copper lid
Of the juniper green jar
I drizzle honey over my fist
Oozing a syrupy threat
Before, fingers glistening
I cascade my palm
With demerara shards
Scouring you like sweet sand.
Your blissful agony
As I spank you
Is anything
But sugar coated.
Remembering a moment from an orgy where the guests decided to illuminate the sky.
"Lighthouse"
Fatigued, we all luxuriated
Backlit against plate glass
Wearing nothing but uproarious din
A Bacchanalian beacon
Of penthouse whoopla
Casual and brazen fellatio
Alongside vol-au-vents and kir royale.
Across the lumniscent citysea
Where the shoals of black cars dart
Polite partygoers clamoured, agog
Cheerfully waving like startled shipmates
Beached upon so-so soirees
Each group signals the other
Flickering houselights in morse code.
© 2022 Dyscadia. All Rights Reserved.
Back to reality after the Covid nightmare.
"900 Days"
I ironed a white shirt
To return to the office
After nine hundred days
Of near death, breakup, love and kittens.
The era I met my witch from San Diego
One from Geneva, Sheffield and Leeds
My broken body revived
Returning the humdrum days
Although the old twin tree
We sat under, in the lunchtime sun
Now has a trunk split down the middle.
© 2022 Dyscadia. All Rights Reserved.
A moment of closeness when the world stops still. Inspired by the Tarot card Strength.
"Hold"
My biceps at your chest
With a mouthful of mane
Salted by weariness
An acute angle of strength
In this shape you become small Nemean kitten, to a ball.
An exhausted Heracles Becomes Atlas
And sleeps.
© 2022 Dyscadia. All Rights Reserved.
A poem about infusing gin with foraged fruit, the colour like a scene from Dante's Inferno.
"Infusion"
The sealed jar gleams with alchemical lustre.
A loose ziggurat of blackberries tumble drunkenly inside.
Clear liquid that can surge the mind or ignite from a spark.
Swirling hues of change turn sugar crystals to tipsy gemstones.
© 2022 Dyscadia. All Rights Reserved.
A poem that was composed on the pebbled shores of Fishguard harbour for my beloved.
"Anniversary"
Our last twelve months together
Ought to be The Year of The Starfish
Of regeneration from unkind and stormy fortunes
Of unexpected delights found between rocks and hard places
Of arms endlessly entwined for our close embrace is home.
© 2022 Dyscadia. All Rights Reserved.