Mantis 18 (Spring 2020)
The Embodied Mind
Chris Holdaway
None most of all
When the cosmic speaks my skin separates
The world from the deep
Wears my brainwaves away to the races
My skin of meadowflowers
The dirt increasingly blue like oxidised copper
Frozen medicine in the civil war of geology
All-embracing language to forget
The familiar political fog of my own face
The power of machine noise to really annoy me
Heavy rain casting death masks
Outworked by virtually all industry
Perfumed wind—
Plays my open neck
Like a glass bottle with technical spirit.
CHRIS HOLDAWAY is a poet and bookmaker from Aotearoa/ New Zealand. He is the author of HIGH-TENSION/FASHION (Greying Ghost, 2018), and directs Compound Press.