A Disgusting Tryst

Many years hence or was it yesterday

I dreamed of giving fellatio which is

never a good dream

and wondered why in the dream

a woman had a penis and I was

hoping by opening my mouth I would

be loved by that woman

there are myths and signs and wonders

even in nightmares

totems to the soul

speaking to our inner darkness

I thought of my chess pieces

how strategizing was never my thing

the mother who hated and was indifferent

the brain damaged father who struck out

in endless anger

and my own yearning for more

more, more, more, more

but when you have no more and that is it

you keep returning to the same place

hoping the outcome has changed

surely the definition of madness

resides very closely in that repetition

no release, release found often

under the pulse of music and movement

dancing away the scathing hurt

or beneath someone I pretended cared

fucking away never worked

it only hurt

more

never good at sharing

gods aren’t male, they’re

created by men for stroking

and controlling like canes can

be weapons or lovers

language shifts like time in grief

now as a grown ass woman

I dream of fellatio as a lesbian

women with penises torturing with

confusing potential

I carry the fetus who didn’t make it

like a scar across my withering chest

and my hormones shout

you haven’t got long left!

Get out there and strut your stuff

before you are truly as invisible

as a ghost

my grandmother if she were living

would tell me to bow to Jesus

because The Old God of the Jews

let us down

and was too angry

and it worked for her

she chain smoked on her way

to saving souls

and chucked the fag butts

out the window

at 80mph

because she knew

her Mormon friends would never

smell the scent of tobacco on her lips

because they didn’t get that close

nor the perfume of vodka

just an essence

I learned to like too much and recognize

drunk women and distant woman

the black and the white queens

chess pieces ravaged by their tendency to torment

as a way to even the odds

cultures eaten by death

I didn’t complete the act

it disgusted me then

as it does in my sleep

step out into a full moon

my other grandmother said

her hands are holding

red books of communism

and when she puts them down

her hands remain red

because she, like the girl in Brothers Grimm

her crime cannot be rinsed

it is found in the pigment of her abetting

the shape of a key burnt into flesh

guilty, guilty, guilty!

I loved her until I knew that

more than you should ever

love anyone

wanting to tell someone how

the ache approximates a bomb

in your heart when it grows large

but the Shrink left her post

abandoned our discussion

she didn’t have the teeth for it anymore

so many people broken

her dance card was full

mine was empty

what a fool I made of myself

for the fiftieth time

lighting candles with my rage

causing shadows to catch with flame

I still burn beans because

I forget I’m cooking when I’m thinking

of all the people who have come and left

now you’re getting married

and I wish you horror

because my bitterness isn’t all used up

the potential for regret is endless

here we waltz to the music of time

made of stars, wrought of cigarettes

and dark bars

I wore black since then because

the shape of knives can be hidden

better in velvet and if you try

to sink it in

I will have the last laugh

one more card to play

violence

dress yourself carefully

pay attention

just so, just so

here we go

One Way

Do I just need fresh air

Will I be better elsewhere

Or is it that

My lungs are diseased

That the problem is in me

That even with a change of scenery

The badness will stay with me

And I’ll be this way wherever I go?

There’s only one way to know

The answer to that:

Leave

And don’t look back

---

Re-posting this poem because I’m in the process of moving to a new flat in a new area i.e. finally leaving and not looking back! I’ll be quiet on WordPress for a couple of weeks while I sort my life out, but I’ll be back soon with some new writing. Hope you’re all staying safe and keeping well ❤

Blister

I will not be your blood blister

I will not be so abused I learn to like it and take it with a mouthful of sack cloth

I will not be your punching bag. Held by Devil for you to take your life’s frustrations out upon.

I am injured and talented at self-loathing but there is still fight left. The fight tells me not to submit to become, that smear of inconsequence you so desperately want.

Light is fading and we walk along rivers edge. You tell me to jump in, hand me the locks and chains, swallow the filagree key and cross your arms.

The river is swollen like an angry mother calling her children home. Trees weep into its corners like penitents and the sky drizzles its damp message through closed mouthed cloud cover.

I have lived 32 years and each one seems too long. The locks that separate parts of the river from each other, are black and painted with some type of waterproofing, I wish for a moment I had been waterproofed, painted shut and able to exist beneath, without air.

The dead watch with empty eye sockets from the other side of the river. They stand in unison, quiet and obedient to their demise. A flickering memory of times when they existed and tried to reach out, never quiet enough.

I am a child being baptized without a crowd.

A whore who has swallowed the semen of the river too many times and risen to the surface despite her tambourine sin.

I am someone’s daughter though they have long forgotten the birth and gone about their life. Wounds that do not exist cannot be licked, or didn’t you know?

I am the cross of a woman who alternately hates me, especially on Monday’s, when in her wrath she pitches me from her sight and turns to the wailing wall, the mumble of her faith, her ever succor.

I am your bit on the side. Eaten crumb by crumb, morsel after taste, tasty between mouthfuls. Always spat out.

I am untouched and lying in long grass in late summer and nobody walks past and nobody kneels down and performs the benediction over my sleeping form, and nobody takes their religion seriously, instead raping me there between the sun and the moon.

I am your mother. You hand me the green dress I wore on the night he beat me blue, and I watch my nipples pop through the thin fabric like expression marks, my long neck ringed in roses of hurt. He says he loves me, he says he wants me, he knows only how to harm. And when we fall, together, I hold you in, I stop breathing, thinking if I can press every muscle against you I will protect you from coming out, a long bloody trail across his perfect white tiles and his parents never knew, for crime is the easiest thing to hide.

I am a patient. My bed is starched and folded. I am broken and belittled. My tongue blistered from licking my own wounds. They said I wouldn’t make it. I hoped they were right. You stood at the doorway and clicked your fingers and something in me knew it wasn’t yet done.

I give birth. The child is still born on wasted sheets that must be burned. In the olden days they buried quiet dead beneath oak trees and they nourished the next generation. I breast feed the silence in my head and they all close in like crows, to shut my screaming mouth.

We lie in each other’s arms and you say; “I’m not like the rest” and I never believe that because I can’t believe anything anymore, but the sound you make when you say it and when I am inside you, stays like a long song in my fevered mind.

We visit the grave site and wild flowers bloom over where your bones lie. I push my hand into the fecund earth and think for a moment, you are there, reaching out.

The edge of love can be a broken glass in your jugular. The sin can be a salvation. We are riding buses to the end of the world and you only know how to paint because you have no time for effort.

How are you today? I am finding ways to end my life. I am counting pills in little bottles. I am watching stretch marks fade from pink to silver, each one a cry from you that was never sounded, across glassy water.

Dennis Hopper has a large gun, Keanu uses his hips, Ione only knows plaid and frigging. Lying beneath a wool blanket watching blow up dolls drown, they use their youth like elixir and it’s easy to believe then, it’s easy to wait and apply Chapstick when your lips feel numb.

I’m by the rivers edge and you are with someone else. I knew it ten years ago, I know it now. Instead of a knife I have a candle. It burns its hot wax on my useless fingers and they curl like paper boats when they hit water.

We start the car, the purr like a cat I once had, cleaning her kittens. I feel your hand pull up my skirt, it’s never smooth now, it’s always wrinkled and my hands look like shrieks against my numb skin. Nobody buys cigarettes from tobacconists anymore. We import our vice by the truck full.

I want someone to claim me, to reach in and save me, to eat me alive and spit me back into myself. I want you to fuck me with love and hope. But ghosts can’t smoke and they can’t perform cunnilingus and I am getting older now.

Too old to be your blood blister. We need to burst it and let it bleed, until I see, a way out.

Statues in the dark

Where do depressed people go

When the entire world suddenly feels as they do?

Back to their room, where one voice says – take them up on their offer

make a phone call

but the other voice knows they will not because

when you feel that down the last thing you can do is talk.

Where do depressed people go

when the entire world suddenly feels as they do?

Outside to empty streets / not reminded of what they fail to achieve

the silence, a balm on fevered emotion

for everyone judges what they cannot see

as others watch Pandemic movies behind closed curtains

the sad roam in search of meaning.

Where do depressed people go

when the entire world suddenly feels as they do?

they’re told it’s a disease as much as a broken arm yet

judgement is always a cudgel just one step away

even lovers rebuke and ask; Why can’t you get out of your head?

Do something helpful for a change, instead of navel gazing?

or worse, say nothing, ignore, over it, worn out

few can handle a season with dysmorphia.

Where do depressed people go

when the entire world suddenly feels they do?

For a quarantined period, it can even feel like fun

nothing of the permanency, nothing of that locked in sensation

pervading senses, shutting down, until all the dreams you had

are dust and ash on floor, you can’t even get out of bed, to brush your hair

or walk the dog, this inertia isn’t laziness, it’s a switching off

of life’s impulse and so the bulb dims eternal.

Where do depressed people go

When the entire world suddenly feels as they do?

This is how it feels every day, you struggle to find a reason, to steady yourself

into faking it, and surely, the falsehood runs its course and you’re back

with naught and nothing comes from nothing we’ve been all taught

self loathing reflects back in the unwashed mirror, a hateful creature

your worst enemy is between your ears, you hear only

the rebuke and chastising of that part of you wishing to be free

break out, break out, crawl, stagger, run get away

from yourself you cannot.

Where do depressed people go

When the entire world suddenly feels as they do?

trapped in a brain that doesn’t sit up and beg when ordered

motivation a distant memory, as much as you want there are

no magic pills or electric impulses powerful enough

to restart what has lain dormant and half alive

we are quarantined by our own demons they

made prisoners of us long before Covid 19

even those who love us, wish we were different

self hate is a woman without rocks in her pocket

yet

she walks to the edge many times each day

her reflection cries even as she no longer does

for tears are wasted after a certain time

fixed in place by broken ways forward

she seeks to drown the madness with one jump

and they sit on their sofas talking about how it will be called

the great epidemic, where we all stayed in place

not realizing for some of us this is

our hell already created and nothing new

we have been here before, we shall again

it is the wordless, grieving place of those

locked down by their minds in situ

watching the world build around them

statues in the dark

to a pandemic long pre-existing

where screams are never heard.

Lifetime

You’re supposed
to make the most
of borrowed time
but I never
asked for mine
I was sold a lie
not a life
and now
after years of wasting time
that I never intended to spend
I have found myself
still alive
out of time
and somehow
deep in debt.

Elizabeth

she looked like a girl I knew
but stranger
a creature
dental-floss hair
ice in her eyes
tattoos on her toes
tequila on the tip of her tongue
where did she come from?
that whole afternoon
we told stories by the pool
about parents and books
and drugs and the moon
and smoked cigarettes on the beach
with the sea up to our knees
and shared hugs and kisses
and promises and secrets
and I told her
that I’d rather be happy and never write again
than feel this sad/bad/mad forever and have poetry in me
and she said no no no
you must love your pain, your sadness is you
and I told her
that I wished more than anything
that I had nothing to write about
that my notebook was empty
that my heart was good and full
that my life was simple and easy
that my brain was quiet and dull
and she said no, no way,
no way, that’s not true
oh Elizabeth,
my darling girl,
you have no fucking clue.

 

Originally published at Treacle Heart.

CATHEDRAL

Image by Christine Renney

They say that familiarity breeds contempt. I’m not quite there yet but this place has begun to grate a little, to nag and gnaw at me. Feels as if I have conjured it up from out of nowhere and I’m not sure why or how.
A tiny square in a sprawling city, a city that can’t be contained. It is spreading and thriving despite the degradation, all the empty and dilapidated buildings.
I have settled here and I stay until I have the cash, enough for what I need. And in order to get it, I walk elsewhere, a little farther each time. And yet still I keep making my way back.

I awake in the grounds of the Cathedral. Hands in the short and wiry grass, I push myself up and gaze down at the City. I try to pick out the place from which I set out, the one to which I keep on making my way back. But it is so vast, a dense and cubist scrawl. For months now I have been walking further and further from this particular part of the City in order to find an off-licence with an unfamiliar face across the counter. Someone who won’t recognise me as I purchase the bottles and the cans I need. And this time I didn’t turn myself around. I kept on walking for longer than was necessary and eventually I settled down.

Glancing up at the Cathedral I shudder to think that I have slept here in the grass; in this carefully tended, this perfectly and painstakingly manicured graveyard and, that as I did, someone tidied around me, removing the strewn cans, even prizing the almost empty bottle from my hand. Taking it and the last few drops I hadn’t quite managed to drain.

Present and glad

Photo by Sean Patrick on Pexels.com

We talk about the past

I used to like talking about the past

it was a favorite drink warming my hands

when Winter first called

this time what has gone before now feels

sad and heavy like wet wool blanket left to dry

in insufficient heat

it leaches the warmth from my lavender bones

I feel sorrow and weighted down by metal reminder

who was that girl? Who absorbed

grief and laid it on her arms in shapes and symbols

to be read years later by Rune interpreter

did she really? Think she had no worth

so much so the days became years and the pain

soaked so much of her blood she longed to eat

meat

you craved her up and steaming you fed on her

badly wound lassitude

she forgot herself as she pretended

love means forgiving time and time again

she forgot, she was worth something

that girl who didn’t have hands uplifting her from

the clamoring downpour

lost her way in cavorting storm

the spooling moon, a snake wrapped against tattooed branch

this way and that, the even keel of life forgotten

some days it took everything just to stand up

she mislaid the memory, she was not there to be crushed into

tiny pieces of herself and thrown for white breasted sea birds

to swallow whole

love should not force you to your thin knees

it should not destroy the tender parts of you

capable of feeling

fingers playing fiddles with tempura emotion

love is not a white flag of surrender

at times it needs to be a pirate ship

fast on its feet, answerable to nothing but

the truth of vanquished things

torn and shredded in haste

we talk about the past and

I used to like talking about the past

comforting me like a one-night-stand

until I became tired of hearing how I accepted

less and took nothing

raging against the dying light

life is after all

short and painful and full of unexpected turns

do not add to it by self-hate or diminishment

if I could go back in time, this is what I would say

to the girl who got used to having empty pockets

I would take her by the hand and remind her

you may have been broken or forged incompletely

darned with a yarn too coarse for fine needle

you may have been told this was your lot in life, you did not

deserve equality

but just as it seems true, the world will be submerged

when rain comes down pitiless and hard

it is not so

we rise then

we always rise

for one more chance and when it offers itself

hand in your bad habits and leave that moth eaten coat behind

take the tall steps upward

feel the sun on your throat

smile even as you don’t know

what lies around the corner

present and glad

for your very existence

MY ANIMATION

Image by Christine Renney

If I could
I would recreate
a day from my life
for the Big Screen

My ideal film
would be an animation
in carefully selected shades
in carefully chosen tones
all of the colours
muted and dull

It would have to be
an average day
an ordinary day
a non-descript day
a routine day
an almost any day day
a grey day

Watch Me

The moon drags my mood in tides
I am a voyeur of my own demise
Watch me watching me
through eyes that are lined
with the salt of tears uncried
Watch me watching me
take a dip in the Ganges
and come up bleeding
Watch me watching me
slowly commiting
socially acceptable suicide
Watch me watching me
falling
apart