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Saturday 31 August 2013
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,
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,
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
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.
Friday 26 July 2013
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.Tuesday 25 June 2013
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
and nothing at all
I will get by on a Hollywood smile
and card games,
cosmetic dentistry
and those crazy catnip nights
in Wonderland.Thursday 16 May 2013
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.
Sunday 28 April 2013
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.
Friday 26 April 2013
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.
Sunday 21 April 2013
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
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.
Tuesday 16 April 2013
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.
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.
Monday 8 April 2013
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.
Sunday 7 April 2013
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.
Thursday 4 April 2013
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.
Thursday 14 March 2013
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.
Monday 4 February 2013
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.
Sunday 3 February 2013
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.
Monday 14 January 2013
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.
Monday 10 December 2012
Mr Writer
Mr Writer, I
have watched you with your blank inch of cigarette
blowing blue
air at the moon, one fluttering streetlamp
lighting you in your crowd of smoking-girls, their slim legs
bending like lilies. You shrug in your coat, suck in nicotine,
tender veins
quiet with chemicals.
Streetlamps
hum between laughter.
The girls
light their umpteenth cigarette, dying for a rhyme
and a kiss, thinking
you a wordsmith, the unbitten man, uninterested.
I drain my
glass and cradle it like a small skull.
Drunk
enough, I could ask it a question
about you or
the meaning of Life.
How the
alcohol reds cling on and on
like the night wrapped around a blue rooftop,
the girls
open-mouthed with laughter, or you being lyrical,
breathing smoke to a huddle of stars.
breathing smoke to a huddle of stars.
Saturday 27 October 2012
Craig Y Nos
You were eight when you got the infection.
All day long, that terrible racket hacked
through the bleached sanatorium
where day after day
mucus slapped the roof of your mouth,
sliding salt-green down the ridge
where your furred tongue was huge
where your furred tongue was huge
and parched for weeks, barely able
to hiss the word dwr.
Your native language sucked away
through a hypodermic needle.
The last time you saw Aileen Morgan,
she was all sore angles beside her bed.
Stripped from the sheets with the fever,
shuddering in her nightdress,
you remarked softly on her pretty red scarf
twisting like blood through the bars.
It was years before you got over the sight
of her drug-shattered face on the pillow,
torso shapeless and white.
The nurses let loose her cold fingers
and tucked the scarf into a box.
and tucked the scarf into a box.
You were wheeled on your beds to the balcony.
In hushed voices, they said
the cool Welsh winds worked miracles
if they did not kill you off. One morning Hywel
raised a sick arm of chicken-flesh, tinder-bone:
please Nurse,
I’m cold in a little voice.
She slapped his face with a gloveless hand.
Every morning before sunrise, she proofed herself
against tuberculosis in folds of starch and cotton,
scrubbed her hands by candlelight.
Scissors in their conical sheath grinned
from her breast-pocket.
Every day some child folded himself into a nautilus,
hacking his rags of lung softly into a pillow.
hacking his rags of lung softly into a pillow.
Turning your face to see children
rise up the wall through the ether,
your sternum became a birdcage; your glockenspiel
ribs drummed by mute little fingers.
ribs drummed by mute little fingers.
It troubled you all those years later,
silver-haired in your bedroom. The shock
of a blotchy photograph slid out of a drawer.
The involuntary memory of accordion-lungs,
balcony talk. Aileen’s skeleton wrapped in a scarf.
silver-haired in your bedroom. The shock
of a blotchy photograph slid out of a drawer.
The involuntary memory of accordion-lungs,
balcony talk. Aileen’s skeleton wrapped in a scarf.
Like a cough, the children of Craig-Y-Nos,
a thought you cannot shake.
Friday 4 May 2012
Short story website...
Gonna be working on this over summer. There's a couple on here to start:
http://www.clockssetbackwards.blogspot.co.uk/
http://www.clockssetbackwards.blogspot.co.uk/
Saturday 5 November 2011
Morning Coffee
Reflected upon it, our story plays out
like a tale thrown across a curled page.
Its smooth curves of china transform our shapes
into wild-armed ravings of ghosts;
me, slippered and absurd with my hair left loose
and bright as a bowl of lemons,
and you, neck grizzled and eyes flat moons,
clamping your palms to your ears.
The caffeine fumes rise from our heads.
It sits there each morning, your white china cup,
as you throw back my words through curling smoke,
your pink thumbs tense little prawns.
Your cigarette glows in its saucer.
Another coffee if you would please,
darling.
You leave before taking a sip.
I watch after the swinging back door,
blood turning cold as your coffee.
I have taken your cup to the sink
where I wash its old throat like religion,
hook my finger through handled bone;
clean bubbles erupting like pearls.
Your fingerprints smear to nothing.
Gleaming and tiny, placed back on the wood,
I carry it close--
my polished whole heart on a saucer.
Twice now you have squeezed it tight
and thumped it down hard on the wood,
yet no chips cut through its bone-skin,
more stubborn, more real than a tooth.
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