Meet me at the fairground made of all the things
I couldn’t leave behind. No place is more alive in this town,
no hangout is more alight in my head. See the flambeaux
of fluorescent, toxic candy-floss we children hold aloft, and
the carousel, where we test our gag reflexes
on the bulbous toffee-apple of daddy’s penis. Dodgems,
we got ‘em, we drive ‘em, sounding our horns, laughing
as the lights flash on and off like the methadone-green sign
outside the junk-clinic on the eve of the apocalypse.
The Ferris wheel whorls like a cosmic cog, full of screaming
infants, willing it to up and take off, above the morgue
and the haunted halfway-house of liquored love. Here
I am with a gun at the duck-shoot, pointing the projectile
at my skull, with its pond full of neon child-scrawl, albino
peacocks in sequin gowns, wounded swans and underlings
in silver gimp-masks and molar-gnawed g-strings, wondering
which stuffed toy animal I’ll win if I kill myself.