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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.