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Sunflower

The burial was easy.

I took it in my hands to thrust the shovel,

turned the earth outside itself—

lime-sticky breeze,

gold-roaring sun.

You asked me, softly,

would the dirt simply crack like a bone

or rise, a dusty mirage?

I shrugged and patted the ruddy soil

dust-sucking the waters away.

Summer burned X on the spot.

It started deep in a pickle-jar,

Frankenstein limb

driving keen from a humbug shell.
Relentless,

it shoved its rude way

through the wormy soil,

a thousand toes

spread in a net of white eels.

Taking root in her belly of glass.

We carried her out to the garden.

This is where we re-buried;

tied her to the stake

like a bad witch,

letting her burn in the sun.

Still, the green bone lengthened,

turning the gutted earth,

wind raging back, the wounded sky

bloated with lavender storms.

It was then, along the xylem spine,

wrists opened their chlorophyll palms

where lastly,
grinning with sticky bees,

her huge head rose in a halo of gold—

her face in the sunflower dark.

School Lane

Smokers’ Lane goes back like a throat

between tonsil-trees and the church.

Branches, slick-black, prod my shadow;

lead them to me like jackals.

Them.

In corridors, they press me like bruises.

Still, they do not know me,
even after four slow years

where my silence and my clever pen

has rocked them senseless with laughter.

They see me and glitter with sovereigns

tight on their nicotine fingers.

Skirt-tugging, creamy thighs

spread on cracking walls—

Look at us!

A-D-U-L-T-S,

collars skewed like dead birds,

cigarettes dripping, chapstick lips,

drunk at nine in the morning.

Uniformed, neat as an angel,

I pass their mucused laughter

and blush at the fall of my name.

Piercings clink on bad teeth.

Counting down—

three o’clock death knell,

the long walk home through the gate.

It's like wading knee-deep in dogshit,

those scathing names—fucking swot—

stinking my clothes out for days.

I carry my words like secret friends

they would trample and burn in the lane. 

Fiction

We have grown out of wanting each other

the way children grow out of stories.

A palimpsest—

my over-keen hands

smear the crease of your spine,

seeking those traces of fiction

that bore us for hours at night

and leave us turning the lights off

to hide in the colour of ink.

Dust-jackets. Blanks.

We have sewn ourselves shut,

hidden the fiction of bodies—

our leaning, secret undressing

a half-hearted attempt

at dedication.

Flat on the rug, you speak volumes

in a lost language.

To fiction.

You bunch my wrists like bouquets.

Quietly, with a sleepy mouth

I blow the dust from your ribcage;

unbearable glittering motes

sailing the Monday sunshine,

your breath drifting out on a breeze.

I watch them rise in dust-clouds,

the fairies who stubbed out the stars.

Pharmacy

Her questions reek like the bottom

of a stale coffee jar.

Is this for yourself?

She meets my eye, yawning,

hair bright as a bowlful of lemons

and tells me to take a seat

with the others, faces blank as planets

and waiting like hungry children,

soothed by candy-bright capsules

that will heal us quicker than Christ.

A handful to settle her nervous tic

and her husband, wrapped at home

in a makeshift deathbed

gorges on daytime TV—

not water to wine

but veins plump with numbing miracles,

big words, serotonin—

his grey and mushroomed brain.

A tear pearls on his nose.

He rattles his pills like a baby,

wails for something to drink.

Rain blisters and bursts on the door.

A name is tossed like a sandwich-crust

as I wait my turn, eye the cool blink

of glass bottles, elixirs,

bored pharmacists

diamond-mining the shelves

for the perfect cure

to rock me to sleep at long blue last

on the train slipping down through my spine.

Medea

I stand in the bedroom, sweatless,

admit to the dagger,

the rage and the kids

who looked like you; had the eye

of the cool Aegean

with Argonaut bravado and your sticky blood

boiling their little black hearts.

My wriggling babies.

I taught them to gnaw on the blade

til their little throats roared

like mad devils, howling, my lullabied young.

Your sins nailed clean through their tongue.

But I was once young,

a charming girl, head over claws

in love with you—

protective, faithful

as any good angel, my Colchis light

bleaching a brother’s bones,

you could say I became obsessed.

I had you possessed

but Corinth tore us apart.

Still, I can’t resist revenge,

death knell shaking the house

to its dead foundations,

the children’s gasping surprise;

oh, the look in your eyes

when you found them, coiled

like little white worms;

a gorgon’s pale coiffure perhaps.

She may be princess

but I am a queen,

Medea—

monster maternal,

with blood in my breasts

and a glint in my milkwhite eye.

Revenge is a kick in the womb.

Wonderland

A smile costs nothing, so they say,

so I grin til she gets self-conscious;

                                       like a hot coal

dropping her gaze to a forest floor

mottled with moss and birdshit,

     none of that

sugar and spice malarkey

where even the flowers smell like flesh,

                              strung by their pretty red heads

like pigs on a butcher’s hook.

One hundred watts of dentistry

shatter the pinetree dark, stripes sliding

                                like oil off a duck's back--

slim as ribbons,

tangled varicose veins—

          please stand and behold

the great vanishing act,

this incredible cat

                              in your candy-sucking dozens

wheezing on smoky narcotics,

my odd and neurotic

            spectator is a thousand wriggling legs

too high to do anything else but question

every fucking detail—

                              who are you?—

blaming the fumes

from those dull and knock-kneed bastards

            painting the roses red

for her menopausal majesty.

We’re all mad here. I growl when I’m happy,

wag my tail when I’m pleased;

                                   therefore I’m mad

but still—

I have stopped attending tea parties

          in tasteless hats,

but grinning at everything,

everyone
           and nothing at all

I will get by on a Hollywood smile

and card games,

                     cosmetic dentistry

and those crazy catnip nights

                                   in Wonderland.

Guilt-Lilacs

The guilt-lilacs were a present at the door.

I put them in a Roman vase on the window

where everyone could see what you did

or at least think I’ve lived with a gentleman.

Perhaps you’d propose on the patio, they said,

through a mouthful of crackling champagne.

Pop questions like a cork. The clocks swelter,

wipe their glass eye with flowerless hands.

I ask them: why lilacs?

They smell of her.

Now they die in a wastepaper basket

as I go about my business, pack our belongings

in trunks already too full, write my name

on the labels. A bee zips in through the window

like an awkward word, 

clings to carnation skeletons.

But the lilacs are terribly calm. They go so well

on the reeking bedside

with the poison-lilies, barbed roses—

awkward honeysuckle clambering

the walls as though heaving away

on flowery limbs. The botanic man—

petalled head tied to a stake.

Guilt-lilacs bruise in the sun.

Bastet

He lay face-up, on his back, like a corpse.

He wouldn’t speak so I bit him, trying

after five thousand years to wake him up,

pressed to his side like a cat.

He thought himself a dying dog

so I pawed him, suffered his wet black jaws,

kitten-hunched, bent to his huge skull

and cut him with my claws.

He once said all women were animals;

wore each tail like a bandage—

my sleeping, jewelled Anubis.

Made me his snow-soft Persian

to warm his buried bones

but still he wouldn’t speak

as I tore him, my whimpering king,

underworld and underdog

who holds his dripping tongue.

We could fight in hieroglyphics,

lie flat in the freezing crypts.

But I could match his silence—

sanded claws etching his belly,

writing my rattling name.

Bastet pearled red from his skin.

Ar Lan Y Môr

Ar lan y môr mae rhosys cochion.

In the front seat, his hand a bloodless glove

pressed to the passenger window,

grazing a bard’s palaver of birds with the point

of a stubbed little nail—

charcoal mornings, the bleary light

crumbling art-canvas, open-eyed

seatown galleries spitting oil-skins,

mother-of-pearl tides roll themselves out

like wounded dogs, limping the shores

of all we know

as the crowblack, fishboat-bobbing sea

foaming the ale-coloured glass.

White rose spray on the drowning bar;

the salt-nut crunching crowds.

Some days in a Celtic mood

he will sing the shimmering rain,

roll out his tongue in a London sky

but tasting only ash

remember a hymn in a Swansea voice—

blow every word til the flowering smoke

sheds itself like a rose

in an evening starless and bible-black-- 

suffer the wheeze of city haze

to find the old sea in its lights.

Telegram

In the week the War was over

she leaned over the hedgerow,

cracking gum in the rain.

Dad would be home any minute, she said—

loping through iron gates, drops

spitting on his brow like wet bullets, propped

on a bad leg, arms wide open.

Poppies licking his fingers.

Fields of red, so she said, as though

she were speaking of fairies—

whole meadows, masses

splashed in the wild, curtseying

in their little red skirts ‘til the grasses
spat out the crouching-men, smoked,
found peace in flowers.
Later, wood crosses

pushed from the earth like bones,

calcium gifts, the rise of an old friend's rib.

From a crying gate, she frowned

at the thought of him sailing to Britain—

the apple-bobbing hills of gold;

roar of a slaughterhouse gun.

The late sky cramped with thunder

and Mother died making tea.

A letter, curled white on the milk-jug.

Telegrams told of the rain.

Candles

The sudden shock of the dark

turns us both into strangers.

I feel its weight upon me

in the hand unwrapping my thigh

like a soft gift. Somewhere

the clouds have howled shut,

trapped a whole moon between them

like these smoke-haloes, wax rings

bound to my body from memory.

Ghost-candles burn you to verse.

It is like this, remembering

blank inches of cigarette trapped

between laughter, blowing blue words

on wet pavements,  rain-mizzle;

a drunk chandelier of stars

where later the sick-swinging glow

of a lightbulb shatters,

melting our shapes. It is like this,

remembering—

the sweltering wax of two candles
tipping, our glittering stalactite limbs
a knot of Pompeian stone.

The flickering breath of monoxides.

When the dark staggers in I will kill it—

remember with struck little matches.

Smoke-stalks and shadows like inkwells.

The candles crack open like blooms.

In Time

My lovers jut out of photographs

like broken bones. In time, I will shrug them off

coolly, pack them off like bad children

running away from home. In time

they will not hurt me.

My twenty-year old lover on a keyring

has a smile like a shattered plate.

I liked his crooked ways, his broken lips

were a masterpiece put back together.

I feel his mouth out of photographs

blowing my perfumed neck,

sucking my petalled ear;

my ivory skin was a china doll’s

his grandmother kept by the bed.

I pressed to his light like a flower.

He hardened to pockets of rubies.

My boy from the glittering seashore

gleams like mother-of-pearl,

the water forever rolling

over his hairless chest, smooth

and brown as an almond. His feet grow

upwards from sand-dunes, his body

a spreading tree. I pluck at the dangling fruit;

remember the taste of sin

as it clung to my mouth like lemons.

I wore the same china doll dress,

only this time he called me a siren.

Thrilled with my dangerous legs.

Stupid girl—

in years I will find them in sepia,

discover an old dress

like pulled seaweed, drained of the girl

who has outgrown the full-length mirrors

but waltzes forever in frames.

In time I will haunt his old body,

find it stooped like a reed.

Despite myself, count all my fingers

searching the tomb of his mouth.

My watch ticks on, medicinal.

In time I will slip on old ballgowns,

pick at a pearly old wound.

Dialling Tone

After the tone, there is only a gap

I can try to pack with words.

It is like singing a serenade into the eye

of an utterly useless skull,

its dusty smile locked in the bones.

I press my nose to the mouthpiece,

draw out the foul odours

of small talk. We were always shouting

down telephones from separate rooms,

coughing goodbyes in hotel beds.

Room service charged us the earth.

The white walls shrank to a telephone box

so I always kept change on the bedside.

Those were the best times to call—

3am. I could shock you into greeting,

listen to you wake and turn furious.

Now I must leave you a message,

a small skeleton of words

you will shoulder to your ear whilst you dress.

I hesitate, hold the phone like a breadknife.

Make the first terrible cut. Hello.

My heart jumps like a punched number.

On and on it flatlines—

dialling tone.

The Conqueror

You wore your new accent

like a souvenir. You returned to bed

in your hometown one last evening

with an emperor’s walk

and laurels in your hair, picking out

my olive face

from a photograph on the stairs

as though you were walking the groves.

Under a graphite sky

Venus spat on your shadow

as you passed. Your mouth found me out

before I could speak—

persistent as ever, there was something

Roman now in the boldness of your hands,

heavy with your tongue;

a marble god, unearthing me

like a Phoenican.

You believed in women too,

claimed to have fistfuls of goddess hair

on classical evenings,

tasted ambrosial blood, the dull whirr

and hum of electric lights,

the cheap hostel nights with Artemis

and the wars you lost

in her stockinged summer nights.

Home now, the hero,

my knight in shining pinstripe

while somewhere in a whitewashed house

your cigarettes smoke to a ceiling of stars

in her conquering, iron lips.

Monument

You believed in ghosts no more than love’s

laughing stars on the ceiling, your whole arm

a glittering chandelier, miles of spine

snaking the twisting girls, bare-legged

and asking you to dance.

Outside, a haggard god sucks on a cigarette,

sobering, returning to earth

on his naked foot like the Arabian dervish—

longs for their heat like a baby

under mizzling clouds. The moon is nowhere

to be seen, my pale-faced friend;

the polished pearl

of her swinging eye unable to bear

the hinged door crying them into a lock

of skin and breath, the damp meeting of flesh

that undresses itself

in the perfumed hours.

Alone I will think of your floating hands

and the dancing-girls, your ghost possessive,

skull obsessive

until even my hip is a monument

raised in the memory

of your dirty hardening stone.

The Black Dog

“I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.” 

-JOHN KEATS

I heard Churchill had called it canine.

It woke me just this morning, soft nose pushed

to my sleepy cheek, breath shuttling down

my cool neck: my faithful black dog.

His tail clubbed me all shades of violet.

The sun disc-sawed me in half.

He follows me to the kitchen.

Here he comes, his wolfish shape

gleaming like polished jet. I stoop over

my coffee, hiss at him to shoo.

My voice is thick as seafoam

and the silly dog is deaf;

his dumb tongue a huge slab of mauve,

searching my hand like a rodent.

When milk won’t do, he loves the salt of rivers.

His rough tongue batters my eye.

Wherever I go, he follows.

At office desks, restaurant booths,

hunched in the seat of a taxi,

my faithful dog sniffs out my bones.

When lovers come, he turns possessive.

I wriggle free from their fingers,

stop them kissing the sides of my jaw.

They leave when I talk to the papered wall

and tell them the guard dog is snarling.

I grieve when their footsteps have died.

I go to bed at odd hours

to watch the small pulse of blue time.

When sleep stands me up for the zero moon,

the dog strikes me down with his paw. 

The Female Nude

I have done it. I have done it in this room

in broad daylight: unravelled myself to the human shape,

shown them the flush of my cheek. I shoulder away

my silk scarf, seize a whole breast in my hand.

The lamp gawps. Under the glass eye

my boot tips, a leather confession.

The guitar cools beneath my rib.

Your camera swallows the music—

the muted flats; greyscales its shocking blues.

This is the shape of the female nude,

her bald toes ten revelations.

 

I have scattered my wallflower fetters.

They crumple in heaps of blue silk, gold rings,

the virginal white cotton blouse.

Shutters whir and snap, the black eyelid.

This is the hand I raise to my hair,

the palm that has cut me from mirrors.

Skin cells, not pixels. Resolution of flesh.

This is the body of woman.

Attic

Every room felt like a crime scene.

Our outlined shapes in chalk on the bed

from those nights when we half-bothered

to arrange ourselves like lovers

and not two friends with over-familiar bodies.

Some nights the crease of your hip was unbearable,

the warm nut of your nipple tedious.

Some nights we cheated with sleep.

After years, the attic opened and you pushed your head up

like some rude violet, tipping boxes, searching for proof

that we had been living in love for years. You called me

as soon as you found it: a shabby album. On page number one

there we were,  wild-eyed and young,

our brown limbs tangled on British sands in the years

when summer still burned, shuddering

over Cornish cream teas, towelled and matted with salt.

I remembered your kiss: the spark of a cold wet flint.

Sepia haze, me swollen like some female god

with my hair streaming over your lap. There you are closed around me:

wrapping me like a small bee. Your warm fingers

teased my huge belly. We rolled names in our mouths

like sweet berries, guessed the sex over bites of crisp apple.

We would sing to the baban in Welsh.

Further back, our crackled smiles from when we were drunk

and still young, pale and freize-faced

through a film-reel of teenage parties.

Grinning in wood-panelled restaurants, glutting ourselves

on feasts we couldn’t afford. I was hot and restless

with my hands, dropping my knife, stroking bottles

with painted nails. I had to show you my bloodied nails

and later set them clawing all along your spine

into the small naked hours.

In years, the meetings took over.

The other girls glowed out of pictures.