Wednesday 10 November 2010

i said that i would write one for you


he is the boy who always
listens when nobody else will

i am the girl who waits until
everybody else has left the
house just so i can let every
syllable that escapes his
lips consume every
corner of my mind

he is the boy who empties
words that he cannot say
to anybody else unto me

i am the girl who feels
the same, nods and
echoes the pain

he is the boy who tells me
that he cannot bring himself
to love his father because his
father refuses to love him

i am the girl who wants the
boy to be loved, because
he loves everything else
in this world so fiercely

he is the boy who dances
under the sun and kisses
under the moon

i am the girl who watches
and smiles and knows
that i will never have
anything quite like
that again

he is the boy who tells me
that not even the people
he could spend hours and
days and weeks with will
ever understand him

i am the girl who will
always understand

he is the boy who is
judged for something he
is not

i am the girl who is judged
for something that i am

he is the boy who will
never refuse to stop loving
even if miles of grey tar mac
stand in the way

i am the girl who will never
be able to behave herself
the way in which he can

he is the boy who loves the
right way

i am the girl who can never
fight drunken desire

he is the boy who tells
me that everything will
be just fine

i am the girl who could
never have asked for words
like these from anybody
else's mouth

he is the boy who listens
to the story that i have
only ever told a few people
and says that i can fight it

i am the girl who will
fight it

he is the boy who will
fight it
too

Tuesday 9 November 2010

letter to my mother

i'm never going to send this; i
don't let you read
anything
because it makes me feel better,
but also worse, like the day i
read those letters you'd
written, hidden away in the dark
somewhere
in a private folder
private
from me
private
from any eyes, but
i still read them
because

i am a bad daughter;
i forgot
about Mother's Day this year
i forgot
to buy you flowers
to take you for a walk
somewhere quiet, where
the brown of the mud on the
bottom of your old walking boots
matched the colour of the leaves
of the oaks and the cedars.
i forgot
to take you out for lunch where
i would pay even though the dessert alone was
six pounds twenty
and i still hadn't found
a job. and this,
this
is all because
i am not a good daughter
like i was back then, if i
ever even was one

because now i have
moved out
and
i'm cooking my own meals,
drinking too much coffee and
hiding within the walls of
myself; i've lost
count of the cigarettes
even though i know that the smell
of them on his shirt collar
makes you sick, you having to sleep
in an ashtray for a bed. but
i love it here. i love being
so far away
and
not having to be home on time
not having to let you use the computer
not having to wipe down the table
load the dishwasher
listen to your arguments
sit at the top of the stairs and
overhear him screaming
at the baby, - she doesn't know any
better, does she?

- but this is not to say that i don't
miss you. i just prefer it when you treat me
like a grown up; talk to me about
politics
and
journalists
and
his mother's terminal cancer
because i do understand, i
really do. i like it when we
lean against the radiator and i
put an arm around you - because
i am so much taller now - and
i lean in and feel your
whisps of grey hair fall against
my cheek, and you read me articles about
cheap red wine
george clooney - your favourite
silver fox - and how expensive clothes
are from the Saturday paper.

please don't ever believe that you are
useless
or
not worth something
because you are, regardless of the
things he says sometimes when
he's full of Jameson's that make me want
to dirty my fists. you are the
cleverest person i know. i wish
to be like you
as strong as you
as ever-dissatisfied as you. you
have been through more shit than
anyone else i know. you are
better
than anyone else i know, and i want
to be able to know what all of these
long words mean when my kids
are reading Milan Kundera
and ask me to be
their dictionary. i want them to
admire me as i have always
admired you,

i hate it when we
break down, because
W E A R E N O T A B R O K E N F A M I L Y;
we just need
T I M E
and
P A T I E N C E
and
E A R S
and
H E A R T S
to calm down and
stop fucking about. i promise
to stop if he stops and she stops too,

so please can we not have
Christmas this year - can we just
learn to love eachother again?

Sunday 26 September 2010

untitled II ,



i have been thinking about
how recently i have become something new
how i have been packed into boxes and driven away from you
how one hundred miles of tarmac now stand between us
how my body cries out for you in the night and i bite the corners of my duvet and wish that my skin felt as soft as yours
how you used to fill up the empty space in my bed each afternoon
how we could lie in deafening voids of silence
how i could never look in your eyes, and
how everything i have just written is completely irrelevant because
i want only you

Wednesday 25 August 2010

two



you have left a space in my bed
for yourself. lying beside it, fingers
stroking linen, will never be enough.
my delight, at finding a single
golden hair, splayed out on the
pillow; like a stolen thread it
curls with lust. scouring
the bedsheets, in search of your
smell, the shampoo that even
with ten washes will not escape
my senses. lying still, in silence
with one another, drawing your
outline with a single finger.
the way your hairs stand on
end, like hot static, cold palms.
you twitch as though you are
falling from a dream. these
leaving blues i get, this
quiet mourning; daybreak
not even ripping through the
curtains yet

one



you; the deep blue eyes of the ocean
swallowing me with your suction
slow seduction, beyond corruption
my fingertips touching the hairs
below your navel, i'm getting so lost
in this secret dark. but i am the
seabird; harbouring your thoughts,
spilling each morsel of flesh onto you,
your skin warmer than the
brightest day. swallow my lips inside
yours and slide ontop of me and
look up; we are seven years old again.
you are my loss of words. you are
my inability to fall back in love
with russian strangers, out of date
haircuts, blank spaces for hearts.
you; the eyes, aquamarine pools
bury your face into my chest and
whisper; i am not deserving of this

untitled ,



You did not read what I wrote because you were too young, too fragile. You did not read what I wrote because you were too old, too stale. You did not read what I wrote because you were too afraid. And were you too scared to let Jacquelyn read it, thinking that just because she is yet to reach her eleventh birthday, she would be afraid of that part in the second stanza where he extracts a knife from his coat pocket? Children fear
n o t h i n g

Would you not let Michael read it, thinking he would avert his eyes from the naked girl with the black pony?

And Lucy, would she bend her eyes away from the page when she
read the words; he hung with
blood dripping, the
silence swallowing the
night, the night swallowing the moans
, and
be so in terror, that she ran home to mother and was so scared on seeing the midnight rider that she fell and broke her body;
who will find her in the morning ?

You did not show what I wrote to the guests at dinner because of that line in the third stanza where the young girl is crouching in the darkness, - her heart removing itself from her chest with fear - and he approaches from behind and begins to peel skin off her back like a new potato; she screams like a strangled baby. You did not show what I wrote when your parents came down from the North last Christmas because you did not want them to see what I had become in their absence

because I had become something new, something more

just another one about my sister



ten years is an awful' long time for
you to have been gone for, and
now i am older than you were
when you were still alive

but i am not yet clever
responsible
or good at art

the lane outside mother's, with
a football tucked all neat into the
crook of your arm, trying to
strangle me over a school dinner
because i told all of your friends
you played with barbies, getting
lost in a maze of corridors at
grandma's house, never getting to
sail downstream

but i will never be clever
responsible
or good at art
like you were

one, two, three, four, five, six,
seven, eight, nine, ten years
and five or six days is an awful'
long time to not see your face
for, and to know that i never got
the chance to say good bye and
never will

foam beards in the bath, watching
Bambi in the children's ward,
stealing all your Tracy Beaker books,
trying to draw landscapes and
mansions and guinea pigs as well as
you

but i am not clever
responsible
or good at art

i am good at walking for miles and
miles without stopping, good at
making lasagne and doing headstands
and trying to make our parents proud

i remember buying you a white
t shirt with a photograph of an
island with a palm tree on; i
hope that you are there
now



Wednesday 11 August 2010

Mondays

okay, so,
here goes;

you're all mine

i'm all yours

you ask

i stutter

'it's been so long'

i say

'i've forgotten what to do'

but you're holding me

and i'm closing my eyes

in your arms

hot skin on

hot skin

and at this point in time

time does not matter

nothing matters

nothing at all

because

i am in love

with

every

inch

of

you

Wednesday 14 July 2010

-

as soon as you've gone mad i can find myself again

untitled ,

and i sat, and i stared, and i thought
‘why is he breaking my heart? why is he breaking my heart?’
and I thought that my pain was bad but my pain was underground; tiny, stupid, irrelevant
you always get hurt, you always get hurt
'you don't deserve it' i say, 'why do you get so fucked around? trampled on, driven over, left alone. you need to try to stop loving them'

she was still and quiet, always clever, a thousand steps ahead of me,

'if you care, i guess everything hurts the same'
she said, and i tried not to cry

but it was as though i was drowning. i can never
fucking
do
it

LOVE

what is
LOVE ?

is there a goal? is there a reason? no
i just want to be on my own; (oh fuck, i am shaking again)

FEAR
FEAR
FEAR

i am quiet isolation
i am desolation
i am all of the silent frustration inside your head

you know what it is, you even know how i feel (i think) - awareness of my mental state.

'LOVE'
in the big grey dictionary, the one my mother gave me;

"1.1. strong feelings of affection"
"2.1. if you LOVE something, you feel that it is important and you want to protect it"
and my favourite, but also my worst;

"4. YOUR LOVE IS THE PERSON THAT YOU LOVE"


i can feel it and then i can't
there and gone faster than sunrise and sunset in fast-motion, rewinding the tape back to the very first second and watching it more carefully; played sowly played in clarity
but i had you for clarity

you were satisfied with so very little, but you deserved so much more:
unfair, like terminal illness


'i could have
no money
no job
no nothing'
you said,


'but with someone i love, i don't need anything else'

Monday 28 June 2010

Motion

And what would happen in a motionless world, where the only exercise for men was masturbation and the groans and squeals of trifling ecstasy were supplemented with filth and beer? I want to live in a world where people move and touch and stretch their senses beyond the unimaginable. I want a world where people grin and bear, instead of reaching out to touch their hair. If vanity were replaced with calm, peace would flow from streetlamp to dirty streetlamp, from parking fine to strip club. There would be no war, no competition, no flashy twats in chrome topped Audis, giggling drunkenly like babies at the wheel of death. No curled moustaches. No girls by the side of the road. No vulnerability. No flames of destruction flattening the villages. No boys with toy guns, plastic knives and re-usable fireworks. I want to walk down the street without being told to change my religion. I do not want your books and preaching; if God wants me he can tell me so himself. I do not want us to fear sleep or death or life. I want to wake up in the morning without my eyes having been glued together by night’s sticky grasps. I want to see the sun, see the day. Lose myself for a short while. Hold on tight to life’s weak grasp. I want to see the clouds from an aeroplane again, to see a baby screaming with glee, a mother not using her fists or her sweaty palms. I want to see a father loving and holding tight. No pleading, no suffocation, no impatience. Only disorder from a broken home, and the foolish grin of a child who is no longer concerned with the matters of the past, and runs with his eyes tight shut towards the polluted tides of the future.

Saturday 19 June 2010

Sobriety ,

Brandishing your cigarette like a flare
You walk so calmly through midnight air
You make it sound all naughty; forbidden
Without explicitly saying what’s hidden
And it’s a big ‘fuck you’ in the face of society
The bullet-hole couple struggling with sobriety
Street disposition; facades, black towers
Crawling the curbs, damp-cheeked for hours
Why such long paces? such sadness and joy?
Belt not a skirt; a magnet for boys
And they’re young and they’re angry (they just want your flesh)
Some brutal and broken (trunks of wire, of mesh)
You inhale the tar into the deepest core
They rip off your knickers and scream out for more
The towers above you, murky eyes staring
You spin on the pavement, broken heels, far past caring
What monsters await you on leather seats?
Twisted minds, gold filled cavities greet
Your Maybelline mouth and he licks you; “undress”
Reveals bony shoulders, nothing left un-caressed
Slides off your coat, its blackness, its velvet,
Its buttons pop open, showing everything private
The soft pink hills spilling over your dress
Burn holes in his eyes, create smooth white mess
And he’s rubbing your arms, so thin like his daughter’s
Each hair standing up, tongue playing explorer
The grease from his fingers, the struggle with zips
Unoccupied stare, now he’s biting your lips
Pushing face down, the sweat and the groans
You see Jack and the baby; visions of home
Symmetrical flowerpots stacked at the door:
Armchair, remote, bedside lamp, dressing gown,
Garden, nappy bin, hot towel - nothing more
But is it for money you slip off your tights?
And let him clamber over you – dizzying heights;
Your body splayed out in the back like a carcass
His face so near you can hardly focus
Sliding his fingers up blue battered thighs
Do you squeeze your eyes, strike out or cry?
The sweat from his brow drips onto your breasts
Crushing the life from your lungs,
Nothing left

Friday 18 June 2010

Black Coffee

You were drowning in the sweat, you were soaking up the dregs
I was on the floor, below your knees, rubbing both your legs
You were crying, back to wall, jumper burning friction
I was reading, I was screaming, you were swallowing my diction
You panted like a tiny dog, black coffee dark as night in fog
With no headlights
With no seatbelts
When we were squealing, wheeling, hard-shoulder dealing
Last summer's troubles, taxed, no feeling
Wiped your dripping face against my collar
Didn't care, didn't care much
For you anyway

Wednesday 16 June 2010

An unfinished story about loving a girl

She was steaming like an air hostess, brown hair all fluttering in the propeller wind and the little men in yellow jackets running backwards and forwards and backwards again as if to keep her happy. But I could see she was not happy. She didn’t need anyone. She had herself, and she didn’t need to open her mouth to let out the anger and the fury because everything she had was locked up inside. The girl was very beautiful. Her eyes were blue and green all at the same time without meaning to be, and her hair crawled down her spine and curled around her shoulders like a python. Her cheeks were warm and brown and a few freckles rested quietly on her chin, a few around her nose. She flared her nostrils restlessly as though she were waiting in the terminal, plastic cup in hand just resting there, all silently against her hip. Her scarf was of cheap satin, pale blue, almost indigo, and had become tangled in her mass of dark hair, her other hand held a grey rucksack, the strap delicately slung between thumb and forefinger. She was not preparing for lift off. She was not even at the airport with me. I had seen her through the window of the car and fallen in love with her. She was waiting for a bus, not a man in a business suit with a black shoulder bag and freshly polished shoes, and her eyes screamed at me through the window of my taxi, as though the entirety of her soul was trying to break free. We had stopped at a set of traffic lights; there were road works up ahead and small men in hard hats ran circles around the plastic bus shelter and prodded the pavement with metal sticks as though an earthquake was about to rip apart the surface of the Earth. And perhaps it was. She stood in a flood of private agony, her perfect face battling the morning breeze and legs all thin and jerky and a mile long at least. Her black coat swung out behind her in the wind like a magicians cloak and she dropped her bag by her feet to pull it back around her and seal herself inside its comforting embrace. I can’t remember exactly, but I think she was wearing thin grey slip-on shoes, and as she knelt to pick up her bag my eyes followed every movement, from pavement, up past shoes and ankles, with traffic darting between my eyes and hers, and her knees, and perfect thighs. Her shorts were denim, frayed at the bottom with a purple bruise shyly revealing itself at the hem. She slung the grey rucksack over her shoulder; it dangled there lifelessly for a second but was buffeted back by the wind. She struggled with the straps as they entwined themselves around her hand whilst wriggling to pull down her shorts to cover the fast approaching darkened flesh cloud. I could feel her struggling deep down inside me somewhere, I don’t know how or why. I wanted to get out of the taxi and pull the bag from her, throw the cup to the floor and hold her in my arms as though we were the last two people standing on a desolate wasteland at the end of the world. God, I could have kissed her. The fire in her eyes burned holes through my skin and I grew hot inside the cab, trying to remove a cardigan from around my shoulders without losing eye contact. Was it me she needed at that moment? Why such fear, such fury when all around her were the daily obstacles of life which, over time, we have all grown used to and can ignore.

Tuesday 30 March 2010

What are we gonna do?

Sit in dark rooms, drinking red wine out of mugs, and writing books about the disintegration of human communication, and staring absent mindedly out of dusty windows and spending hours tying shoelaces in perfect bows, and photographing birds on telephone wires, taking long hot baths and cold showers, staying silent in public, and writing all thoughts down on paper

Yellow Bath Water

I searched for images of death for so long, but then I realised that only I could know what death really meant, what death meant to me, and why it was impossible to find a representation within a photograph. Why is it so fucking impossible, and why is it that every time my blind eyes stumble upon a likeness, I must look back to confirm if it is correct - if it is true -, and by this point the likeness is so unbearable that I must confine myself to bed sheets and darkness and cry like a baby. For it is only the taste of tears that I enjoy; the salt, the sad wound that seeps life blood from the circulating system, and pushes the feelings out of the pores into my lap, and when my lap is soaked through with the ocean water, I must change my trousers in the half light and continue. When my father reads the poems, he complains that they always have to end in death;, why don’t you just leave it at that, there’s no need for the moral suicides, but I cannot help myself, it is the undiscovered country, and we all want to know, and we can’t. Perhaps, when someone dies, a star fades out and dies too. Perhaps it drops from the sky in a sombre downwards leap of faith. It is so difficult to describe, and yet I still force myself not to cry in public. Those days which bring nothing but the bland and the ordinary, the conventional everyday doom and gloom whose course we all must follow, and cannot swerve away from, they surround us and pull us down with them, down into those murky black corridors, leading to endless black staircases where blackbirds gather to take their first flight and die from fear of height before they have even left the ground. Those scratched surfaces along which I ran my fingernails, stunted growth, will remind me of that childhood which ended in a forced groan of anger, pushed from dizzying heights into my young freckled face, and made me lie face down on the bathroom floor for hours until the pattern of the lino forced its way onto my left cheek. And it is with some fondness that I recollect those few, jumbled moments of ecstasy, but to be only a child and not remember fully her face, her hair, her voice; it leaves me with such hot red agony in my gut, and however much I bring photographs so close to my face that they blur and make cross shapes, I cannot escape the fact that I never got the chance to say good bye. When you are young you do not understand consequence - the wild, crazy devil runs laps of the running track around your head -, and you care not for the outcome. We could jump off corrugated tin roofs; we could climb rope ladders into the oak tree, whose pinnacle, from the ground looked higher than Everest, but still we were not afraid. But now I must face the ordinary. The inability to move forwards without a limb or two remaining under the wet earth with you grabs me with huge boxing glove hands, pummelling me like a cotton doll, smashing out the eyes, tugging at the stringy hair and the knitted dress. So dark was that afternoon when they told me you had left without anyone being there apart from the white clad nurses and spectacled science boys with clipboards and heavy hearts, wishing that they hadn’t gone to university to learn how to save lives, because when they don’t, it forces their insides through an office paper shredder. Dying alone, is that what we are all so scared of? I would rather die alone. I think that I would inject myself with all of the rare and glutinous substances in glass bottles in the ward, and lock the door, and pop the question; we must all take this route, but will it be the scenic one? and curl up into myself and imagine that I was eight years old again, compressed into a ball in that pile of brown leaves under that same sky.

Thursday 25 March 2010

Little Bodies

i tried to write a haiku, but it spilled over into something else


shrunk into delight
i watch with eyes in mirror,
you comb my wet hair

in city sleepers,
silent cabinets echo
your name: johanna

cold hands and bathtime
towel turban. keep us warm -
soft drips on shoulders

outside the window
night erodes the garden, with
plushy yellow moon

not even the tap
is heard. midnight air chills us
to the very core

of being. damp cheeks
burn with cold; i hear the siren,
the rugged tyres

diesel bomb drops loud;
explodes. squeeze shut the exit.
exit wound, quiet death

Wednesday 10 February 2010

Fuck


The sex was good.

Not 'special', as such, but all molten heat and both pouring out sweat and wild wolf screams; enough to set the morning on fire. A few minutes in, a power cut. It was just getting light outside, I heard a bulb blow downstairs, shards of glass rattling on the laminate. Milk man Recyling van all doing their duties, serving the people; the single mothers, porridge on spoon, the old ladies, fumbling for their eyes as the alarm clock resounds through papery walls, the dog walkers, the selfish reversing lorry siren, the paper boy, the girl he sees through the window and falls in love with.

We lie silent. Breathless. Not a sound and I can see her heart raising up and pushing out the skin towards the ceiling.

Tuesday 2 February 2010

Family Tea

is there not a battle left to win? for all of those girls and for those boys who hate their mummys and daddys and want to throw rocks, smash glass, scream louder louder LOUDER until grandma's best blue vase breaks into four china segments on the kitchen tiles. for all of those babies in baskets which the stork dropped 'cause he got distracted by television, chip shops, the gambling man, the hot weather cloud, society, certain death. such lack of concentration, no ability, petty quarrels and flying plates hit wall hit ceiling. mankind; the adults are squashed - byebyeoxygen - beneath the giant hand of inevitabilty that floods their ears and nostrils while we, so young and free fly up (through the bulldozed brick piles, black sweat tarmac, hot shovels, detritus flakes littering the burned up patio) and burst out into earth like sweet wallflowers, into the warm july breeze to scream back at your taunts, you parents; why the lies? if i eat this carrot my eyes will not become torches, there is not a blackcloakedpaedophile under my bed, if i go cross eyed the wind will not grapple with my pupils until they stay that way. why did you tell us that you were always right? that we we were always wrong? that we should always listen. when i break out of our already broken household - because daddy walked out (said he fell in love with a nice blonde girl) and left mummy on her own with big tears, just some really informative sciencebooks, and nine year old with falling out hair; leukaemia bruises up and down legs - i am so free. i love the night air, the solitude, the gravel and the dirt rolling down my back under my t-shirt, the cigarette breath making smokeclouds and ghost shapes out my mouth, the flickery streetlamp, the empty road, the empty pavement, the no oneness. it is here; in this moment i detest mankind

Monday 1 February 2010

Stuhl des Krieges

and i guess that where the armchair rests, fire on fire, blood on lips of the beholder we shake so silently, watching, the murk and dust that slides into the damp fissures, escalating all quiet and solemn; n o b o d y s i t s h e r e a n y m o r e and i hate it and i scream at my armchair and at my white blank and staringeyes living room walls with the ivy ivy ivy all stuck to the walls with its glue green fingers; God help me i scream, but i do not like the Maker, 'cause he is so wrong wrong wrong and people are dying up and down and in water and dust-on-face malice weapons that crack alive the dry yellow morning sky, why can it not be me with gunshots in my brain and tumorous absyss' - a hole of death for those alive to rot? oh gently - and army coat smothered in mucus and filth and sloppy tears and pain and squeals from the craggy rock edges as the next hit little boy, (only gone to do his daddy proud) is launched like an
elastic thunderbolt
into extinction,
and all i can do is stand and scream FUCK at my red armchair, it's legs all knotted twists of pine, hot brown toastlike coloured, almost edible. why do they get ripped apart at the seams, fucked for following their dreams? brady with the buttoned up/down shirt, pale blue stripe and black plimsolls used to sit on my red armchair on sundays, drink my firehot tea from the mug with the rainbow on but now he is dead in dust all alone and that's all i can say

Monday 18 January 2010

Untitled ,

It was that last summer - so
disgustingly hot and clammy; our
wet hands stuck together - when
you made a commitment.
Were you so insane? Your disobedience
snapped me like a baby twig;
not quite full-grown.

It was that brown autumn - so
dry - with the trees reminiscent of
dripping chocolate, a colour
so distinct in my flattened memories of
you. For how long could you
push me? How long before I was
no longer a girl (to kiss with bruised
knuckles) but
a smear on your rear-view mirror?

It was that drawn, pale winter - so
sad - its white disposition weeping
milky glass tears into
my palms, when you raped me
under the black moonless
night, stripping me of all dignity and
self-respect.

It was that yellow spring – so still and
new – when you hammered
sharpened utensils
into my heart.