Alan Halsey

The Frankenstein Franchise

for LM

Sometimes it helps to rename whoever
it is always writes my poems because
subjects rarely change in the long run.
Let’s eat dinner with thieves and thoughts

assistant assassins unsavoury as sugar.
Why believe there is someone who
believes he can trace every reference?
His broken noise is her envoy’s voice

and envy is its name: definition defaults
when locution confuses and confutes
itself with location. If we’d heard the shanty
the cameras sang when they landed

on Titan we wouldn’t need a changing room
to disappear in. To rename is only
sometimes to recall: description
gives nobody such fun as decryption

because as Philodemus said
words are poetry’s mother. The perspective
funders brought Rousseau and tea,
preraphaelite despair, scenes which should

be senses but longevity or gravity
threw in disrepair. Let’s you and I scribble
in the crucible where losers are lizards
all devilled with their endless questions.