THE ONE AND THE OTHER
after Natural Bust Enlargement with Total Power: How to Increase the other 90% of Your Mind to Increase the Size of Your Breasts, winner of the Diagram Prize 1985
First, know that your breasts must be overthrown.
They have their own dominion: the rivet and rust bloom of nipple and areola
are nerve centre, the rest curtilage,
a whole apparatus enjoined in continuous dreaming.
They hate to be called ‘the twins’,
thinking themselves more akin to Janus,
your put-upon lookouts, symbolically blinded,
their rivals your body’s other blots of darkness:
pupils, mouth, sphincter, vulva.
When they itch, they wish to remind you of your duty to them:
to not just present them as a gift for sucking
but to know and honour the limits of their roundness,
their exact apportionment of red pigment.
It will not do, it will not do. You, your body’s own tyrant,
have not come so far to fall with fondness
on these weltering baskets. They’re yours for the taking,
and just as you grilled your skin, wrenched your hair, made a golem
of your complexion, you must put your thumb to their quicksilver
dreams, pin them to your heartsickness,
make them do as they’re commanded.
True, their littleness is heinous.
Tell them you would have them fatten, make great gains
in girth and buoyancy, bulge until they are looming,
Zeppelin-like, over your knot of stomach, bursting your décolletage.
Now have them giddily tombola,
now crush them every time they cause you pain.
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JON STONE was born in Derby and currently lives in London, where he co-runs multi-medium collaborative book publishers Sidekick Books (www.drfulminare.com) with Kirsten Irving. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2012 and his collection, School of Forgery (Salt, 2012) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Last year he co-edited Coin Opera II: Fulminare’s Revenge, a book of computer game poems by young British and American poets. He keeps multiple blogs on various themes through www.gojonstonego.com.
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Read more by Jon Stone:
Translation in B O D Y
One poem in The White Review
One poem in The Harlequin
Another poem