Saturday 31 August 2013

Goodnight Indigo is moving!

www.goodnightindigo.wordpress.com

:)

Tuesday 27 August 2013

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.

Saturday 24 August 2013

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. 

Sunday 11 August 2013

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.

Monday 5 August 2013

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.