not soap going cabbage

Self same skin in the interim

To be dreaming lids and not shake,

A shiver of warmth and then wake,

Window bliss stricken to blindness,

The dead dawn chorus we have no grief for.

The differences are intermittent

Flickers in eyelashes

Conquering clock hands,

Make morning work harder,

Break back bones stalling

The threat of quick exit,

The panic harassing

efficiently to deadline.

shestudies.blogspot.com

It was a quick killing. It lacked skill and dignity but made it to the point. Wrapped in linen and scratched tin foil I have poured you into jars where you may ferment and even multiply into even more complex little pocket knives. My mind is a steamed up foggy room of heat and water you conjured over the smooth frigid bathroom walls with muddled and stunted attemps to get clean. Get out. He can ask why the lines are there and why you why I made them. Can of worms eraser, can of worms. Let’s hope we all have someone to drag us over the concrete. I made my murder. I made it in my thirteen year sleep before the jolt. Blooded and bored you are half a night’s sleep and none of the dreams were good. Silent black tapes of empty film scan through you. I love you I love you my dead windowsill creeper clinging with bitten nails and a muddy lower lip longingly wanting the listeners to break their silence. It’s too quiet, it’s TOO quiet, you say. I never had half your intrigue. Oh it would be too mind-altering; you entered my house you walked over the threshold with hands full of dead dried cloth that I don’t even remember seeing after that first bitten kiss that tasted off lime and biscuit beige. You, the beautiful sea creature, thick floundering fins mothering their fresh slip grip on the water life. We should be in the ocean. I am not impossible and there are no new distances likely to put creaks in me. Oh its so easy to lie to you and the world the world and you never quite meeting in the middle. Did i ruin it with all my crashing about? Little red green appleyard, smiling daft heavy plums spurting sugar and light, sweet and drowned, people go this way, looking at beauty and tasting the gap where they are repeating their punctured heroines, the sad saviours leading the way with angst heavy lids and dropped heads. you weren’t reading it right. your head was tilted in the wrong direction and you were pronouncing my name like somebody else’s. And now I am all mission, all hot plans, all highly strung burnt out intrepid explorers hungry for tea but too proud to admit it, happy in failure ecstatic in effort. I wanted to punish you before i got to me. the lies are as long as my arid tongue. the lines are longer still. I cannot have hands tied behind backs. I cannot have you have me. shestudies.blogspot.com

The extent of my control goes along misinterpreted, a poor estimate for the increase I sustain that never manifests itself in anyway. And every day I slip a little more of it inside myself to cover up and that is not control that is the endeavour to avoid that particular vice. Using poetic words, I speak a vulgar tongue, my hands striving at ornate confessions, my dull dark mouth spewing degradation and misinformation. The black stuck flies are dead in my gut. You cannot count you are not a saint it was you who complained. Thirteen to turn a volcano and sit with it writhing impatiently who can we tell? Can we even give words to it? Do the phrases even exist? They came home to my house to my hands In a letter, with toothpaste aroma and stencil ink precision and a commendable effort at empathy. It was everything. More in the sentences printed out than zeros on a cheque could have set doves flying out my heart. The water still will not run However, and there is never continuity, no one red rolled carpet to disappear to a vanishing point with my precious letter at the head. I am a minute and all of my best car crashes and crackling ice sculptures and gas leak bravado are stacked at the back of my wardrobe for now; I carry it strapped to my back. shestudies.blogspot.com

and so

we dragged all the boys out their dark corners.

you were the one with the letters for them

and the snatching ensued

with gritted teeth

and complete disregard for the tablecloth

or the girls sleeping upstairs.

Those try-hard young women had been up for

nearly ten years now

fixing that punctured roof, and their rest

was well deserved

if poorly revered.

They needed the indulgence of dreams

like those boys claimed they had to have darkness.

Instead of an answer

we only got

blinking eyes

and tired footsteps

as they returned

shrugging over the crockery that splintered the lino,

the bastards.

fifth frag

They wear striped sweaters

And suck on cigarettes

And spit pills out from under their tongues.

Nobody sits them down and says

“This is really going to stick.

This will be painfully hard to shake.”

Instead they form rebellions out of a sense of injustice

that nothing is really wrong,

then collapse in amorous surrender

at the notion they should be taken care of.

I dig my heels in to quicksand,

pianissimo.

This is because she is half of my legs

and half of my heart.

You are only half of my head

but it is enough.

It is sometimes too much.

You don’t know where your knees are

do you

my embryo girl-child

growing her bones.

We don’t want to be those women.

Excuse me -

you have half of my heart

under your left shoe

frag 4

No, you’re wrong

In actual fact I don’t have legs.

I don’t even have hands, I don’t have

a muscle in my chest.

I have a dusty brown piano clanking out

misery tunes

and honky-tonk ballads.

I am my own genre now, oui.

But this is insufferable now i’ve lost your last letter

I imagined got written.

Maybe I could call in a technician with a cruel smile and

an electric instep to stamp on my hands

and render me inadequate for the job.

That way I could seal the deal, and get

a new position on the small errors committee.

They’ve got places going all the time

and tearstained application forms.

Sad really, I want to laugh at it.

But I want to be proved wrong even more.

-I’ve been meaning to ask you about this one actually.

—Why

-I was thinking about cutting it down, make an authentic wooden fireplace frame, like the one the McPhersons have.

-What do you think?

—Why?

-Make our living room feel more…homey. i think it would fit in with the rest of the…aesthetic.

—Do what you like. Cut it down. Destroy it irreversibly.

-Be reasonable, there are plenty more trees out here. It would be enhancing our home, I know how to go about it, don’t worry. Just thought I’d put the idea to you.

—Thanks.

-You’ve never liked the one we’ve got at the moment. You said it looked mangley.

—Mangy.

-Exactly. Seems quite fitting, you giving the tree some last attention in its final days.

—Final days?

-Well, of course it’ll do wonders living on as our fire place.

—Living on?

-Yes ! don’t look put out, love, it’s far cheaper than buying timber.

-You think I’m going to make a mess of it don’t you.

—No. no, I know you can do it. You’ll chop it down, stop it growing, but turn it into something else for the good of our domestic aesthetic is that it?

-Anna, it’s a sodding tree.