Contributor: Grant Tarbard

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What's the Earth made of?
A wage of sheep grazing in the azure,
they could be clouds.

Yes, the sky is on the turn,
just filthy water poisoning babes
while scholars yak over their clutched bodies,

spellbound with their pot bellies erupting in lilies,
pearl beards stroking away their deaths.
What am I made of, for I am the Earth?

Brass knuckled, filled with roads,
eating the leafy tree of dawn, I divver over the scent
of sackcloth primroses and the sins of flesh.

In the Earth’s soul pastiche looms
like tainted meat repeating,
belching from my shadow of guts.

Swelling in my misplaced philosophy
is the plastic decadence of the hair-eyed,
raging in the wildness of my tooth.

Endless contours lying in the gutters,
drunk, no dotted lines on the continents,
shedding whimsy, a blood letting.

Monoliths from ages past, elemental as death,
spring up, the altogether nervous stone
when the destructive drill comes,

dipping soil into raw betrayal with a stab of kisses.
every piercing cut was a perfect sonnet.
The Earth’s art is lonely with sleep,

content with dream, vanishing into the steam
where foam tigers are vanquished by dwindling water.
The curved brow of lips is constantly hatching

swallowing greedily a jar of jellied tears,
an earthenware pot of naked torsos
displayed in swathes of white galleries.

O keep my head warm with eyes pecked free
while I recite the Earth’s elegy, my elegy;
out of harmony comes chaos.


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Grant Tarbard is internationally published. His collection As I Was Pulled Under the Earth, published by Lapwing Publications, is available now.