Ted Hughes is reciting his Thought Fox to Lara Croft.
Ted's voice is slightly electronically altered but
still deeper and more liquid than Lara's pixel tomb.
His sound expands like ghosts through some museum.
Lara is listening like her life
depends upon it. Ted's fox raids
the labyrinth of her dark virtual-brain.
Lara's nipples stiffen. And so a reader's joy sticks
to the screen of a page.
Suddenly she jumps away
into shadow. Her throat ejaculates
her huh! of exertion; her utterance.
Lara Croft is tumbling down the tight hole
of a micro-thought as Ted Hughes pours
a real stink into Lara's unreality. Her loins
are moist with electronic exudates Ted's
relentless fox can taste. O, how Lara shakes.
There is a constant background gasp
in the telly's cave. And muffled echoes
of Lara Croft's pretty footsteps're lingering
along a mother-board's corridors as she's pursued
by her own bright red blood through
a puzzling stone-less temple. Strapped
to Lara's leg, in a manly leather holster, is a black
metallic crow with bullets of woe. 'So,
Ted,' she yells her heart out across a final
impassable canyon riddled with dark
sparks of venomous bats, 'who
will have the last word? LAST WORD?' Lara's gaze
is as ravishing as a Goddess's. Ted Hughes
is weeping. He switches off.