When mercury was first designed,
it was as a lesson. Silver
and undulant like nothing else,
disguised as a solid jewel

Have you ever spilled it? It’s like
letting out a secret, unthought
and feeling the moral landscape
shift and set snare traps in your gut.

It’s fractal ’til it disappears,
like the ramifications of
any action. It rolls across
the surfaces with great interest.

It’s vapours send us mad, and fish
become mercurial in this
disregard they have of our minds.
To be quite fair, who could blame them.

In landfill sites across the world
it falls, year after year, into
the sources of our deepest fear.
Our breath stutters at its slick thought.

‘This is a tricky thing’ they said.
Listing it on the slate of things –
alongside sex, and time, and dreams,
and cave paintings, and tv