Dawn, February 29th I drive all night,following the skylinethrough the treesuntil I reach your side, deer.It's something about the wayyou're lying, mid-leap,as if sleep has taken you unawaresthat stops me there.And it's your eyes that hold me,your unseeing gazethat somehow holds me wholein the haze of the moonlight,on the rim of the world.Like that moon,you have run yourself blind,unfurledas if in a dream.And it seemsyour legs are broken, yetin my headlightsyou rise like heatto the place where nightand day finally meet.
Case History We find youwhere you had fallen:face to the blue,the wall between this worldand the next. You'dslipped, perhaps, lostyour footing and now you flew –webbed fingers outstretched,your kelpie hair strewnbehind you. Your lipsare chapped and blueas if bitten by frost or fishes,the words choked backin your throat as you open outlike an oracle, begin to bloat.Your skin is starting to scale.But you don't notice – in fact, you floatso serene, I wonderif you've always been blindand weightless, like an astronauttethered to the stars.We find youwhere you broke apart –a balloonloosedfrom a ch
By Heart Now that I have your face by heartI look to piece the other partsof you together – less your lips, your eyes,like a knife-thrust, bright as dawn skies,than the shadows gathering in your wake,the bruises left by every heartache.I long to drown in the depths of you,to feel the waves breaking over me, the mooninhaled, exhaled, cancelling out the sun.I want to watch the lettercut light come undonein awe of you, to see the stars run blind and tearthe very fabric of the sky. To hearmy heartbeat breaking on the sameshore as yours, time after time -calling your name,calling you mine.
Girl, Fifteen, To A Lover She'll Never Meet Thursday nights are silver screened.At nine, it's time once again to airthe prelude to a dream.I wait, eyes square, for the immaculatecontours of your face to appear:the features of a lover I'll never meet.It seems strange to say(a kind of admission of defeat),but to be honest I'm OKwith the pause, rewind, replaythat makes up our relationship.You have to admit,knowing I'd never flipchannels or walk out whenyou're in a sceneis a devotion, of sorts.I expect nothing in return.I know you know nothing of me.But I can't help but love you;your close-ups, your scripted smile,the way you lean towards the screen
Wintering It's a canvas of mouthings,of open throats, that wave of grey.Storm clouds pass like sails torn,loosing their limbs to the windwith each stroke of the brush.There's a symphony in the rushof them, howling their wolfcry, O -breathings holes into the fabric,Lethe leaving their lungs. And low,tugging at the hymns that line the sky,the moon, sister of a stone,rises, rises with her hood of bone.
Home Home, again. The dome of nightpresses down like a mighty bell jar.She hides her face to escape the looksof other travellers on the last train.It pains her, their pity. Their staresand their half-smiles that saythat bruise really sets off the blueof your eyes. As if they understood.Instead, she examines her reflectionin the window, fragmented across fieldsand clouds and telephone lines, reaching out.She's a garden of black and blue blooms,a harvest of half-moons and blinkered scars.He says he loves her, needs her.Sometimes, she's not so sure.She's late, again. She imagines him,sitting in the dark, hands before h
Forest, Fathomed Dreamscape, whitewash. Snow on snow.The curvature of love's dumb crybeneath the arclight of the sky.The hillside rises up, up – a shadowhung in the shadow of a heaven,clung to the sides of all it has been,the air gauzed as if in awe of it.The trees are only as solid as they seem,cut-paper casts like the heads of dolls.Fathom-deep, deaf as dark under the maskof sleep: the toll of blackened hearts.Below, the train pulls on through the snowlike a string of beads – all pinprick sparksand needle-eyed stars - a trail stark as the tailof a comet streaming 'cross the hollow of the hill,seeming to fall into the
Maschinenmensch He dreamt of eternity condensed in a fist,the clench of a metal heart – buildinga sister of bone. All shining platesand saucer eyes, a battery-acid born disguise;he anticipates a future struck from stone.She stands, cogs poised, ready for the spark of life- a face to emulate under the surgeon's knife.Wires crossed, bodies lost, minds cleaved - &#
Between The Acts Shuffling in the shadows,they fight in the halflightwith buttons, clasps, the tieson stiff-toed shoes. To the rightthe wardrobe juts out likea branch of stars – all glassbeads and sequins and shardsof coloured fabric, hanginglike the ghosts of people they have been.It's strange, this limbo between faces,this place of neither here nor there.How do you begin to comprehendthe ones undone, dehusked in the dusklight?The dress before it's worn, the buttonbefore it's clasped back into the heartof darkness – torn and shattered like a jewel.Between the scenes, the fits of flight, they are on hold.They have s
Histology The curvature of a thumbprint:each line a fleck of space, time,traversed like a galaxy, a seaof scars. Home-grown: the touchof it an opiate, silk as sedativebut broken. Imperfect,like nail-marks, cut cursiveinto floorboards, where I caughtlight by its ankles and dragged itback to black. Uprooted it to pitchlike the closing of a fist.
Lady M. Act V, Scene I.She's sleepwalking again,white as the sheets she's slipped from.Eyes open, nightblind, she spoors the shadowsof her mind, treads barefoot on the floor."What's done cannot be undone," she says,retracing her steps once more."Like the undead," he murmurs.He watches her from afar –the quiver of her lips, the twitchand falter of her hands. He triesto understand why she lifts her scars,examines them under the light."The dead don't walk, can't talk- "She says this every night.Her whisperings fill the corridors,the secrets she seeps flood the floors.And still she shakes, mumbles -fumb
Mariana And still he doesn't come.She sits and waits, aches a little.The sky has emptied out its eyes –she cannot look. She hates this time,when the day slopes towards darkand the free evening fades to grey.It is a reminder: once more forgotten,once more forlorn. She scratches a nameinto the old wood of the window frame,wonders, fleetingly, if she sees a faceflickering across the glass - the scarof an angel, fallen like the evening star.Old footsteps pace the upper floors,old voices echo down the halls.Her heart haunts and hurts,catches on the barbs of her ribcagewith each and every breath.Still, he doesn't come
The Prosaic Poet I am not beautiful: I never will be.I am not brave, elegiac or tragic,I do not have doe legs or orphan eyes.I could never lie convincingly to myself,and you, you could see right through meif you tried.I shall never be good enough.I wear cardigans, eat takeawaysand watch trashy movies too, you know.I'm an artist only in the sense thatI, too, may bleed or cry on command.My words are nothing but the performanceof integer upon integer: em – teelike flightless birds.But still,there are some things with meaning.A light on the blink, the smug humof the refrigerator. The well-thumbed copiesof Johnny Panic, Nor
Astronaut Once, I stood in a downpourand sought the dark side of the sun.I could feel it in my rib bones, the pullof that something, strong and sorelike gravity, or breath.And that was that: the death of reality.I had teetered over the edge of reasonand into somewhere more glazed,more dazed, and altogethermuch too perfect.I wonder if reeled-up lifeshould ever feel this real,whether six shadows are more than enough,or whether colour should be so luminescent,as intravenous as sound. Can I everbe grounded enough if I hold conversationswith the ceiling above, or if I crouchand look for love behind the radiator?I live on
Girl Glitch I am found wanting.Every day a little more so, with chipsin the paint, creaks in the joints and the hairwearing thin. Like an old rag doll, I swearI've buttons for eyes and a smile of stitches.They call me girl glitch.They write stories about me, scribbledin the margins of their pocketbooks,about how I cried wolf - how I liedabout nothing in particular, and howI've a heart with a hungering.Though what for I am never quite sure.There are too many things to think at once,too many colours, too many sounds, pulsatingto the whir of a car crash hymn:my last coping mechanism.These are the dog days, when the worthof
.Set It is Akhet, the season of sorrow and silt, and Setmust tense his sandbreath against the slick of wetonce more. It's always the same: though he's unsurewho started the game, or whose face he wears,he knows he must prepare for the beginning of the end,the bite of night and all the slippages in the inbetween.And he swore he'd bait their breath,but they'd rather choose death than fear,with their tombstone legs, arms peggedin sockets and their locked ears,burying themselves beneath blocksbuilt to the sun. They outrun him, every time.It's a crime. He remembers what his mother said:do what you're able to keep them faithful
.Isis In the sands of silence, the living ones split, endlessly.They're waterborne, broken and torn, limbs flooding forthuntil the river runs red again. A tug of blood in the undertowas the fevered arms and distress alarms rise from below,grasping for their sisters, their wives, their lives - for the daughter of the overarching skies.Caught in the water, Isis knows the cries of the orphan,the widow spider. She can reconstruct the faces of the deadas they suck and well round her feet like collapsible gods.It is said that when the rains come, she sweeps the grainto the brute mouths of the deepworld, the bowelsclamouring between
Brackish After the wet season, beforethe midsummer night's drought,I flight for the floodplains, wherethe northern downpour bleeds outand sweeps its love to the mouthof my lungs. I sleep in the cruxof an oxbow, let my dreams fluxand flow fractured, deltaic. For thisis the way I piece myself apart,a resolution, my absolutionin a new avulsion.During the day, I move southtowards the river mouth, pickingpebbles, coral fangs from the riverbed.A loose tooth is a common truthin these parts. Bones are febrile,eyelashes are made of chalk, salt.Tears turn brackish. They cakeand crack on the flats of my hands.This is my Pang
Feels Blind The first thing I remember was the hunger.Waking up and thinking is this natural? -the way you fit your hands round my waistand hold me like a doll, or toxic wastefrom a post-nuclear family. - At arm's length.You said the greed was my fault,something to do with the biological seedof what makes me woman. Makes me wrong.I was told I don't belong here.I was out of my depth, treading waterwith all the other daughters who daredto speak before they were spoken to;those who woke and refusedto have the words choked out of them.You said I was ugly, held down and half-drowned.That I look best behind glass, or better still,
Stargrazing On nights like thesewe like to call ourselves stargrazers,deep sky tourists.We head up to the headland,where heaven grafts itself to earth,stitching the breeze betweenour cheekbones, our fingertips.Below, the sea stretches outwith an endless hush. You tell mewe'll sit in the riftof the tide's smile to keep in touchwith the muchness of beingand believing. But seeingbeyond that pale of blacklightis another matter. You have a map,so you take the back of my handand paint a picture in mimeand synaesthesiac rhyme: Our sky is like cats' eyes kaleidoscopin
Surgery Something most people don't realiseis that coral splints, painted brown,screwed into the skull and mountedlike a crown allow for a preternaturalreconstruction. A rebirth; to break freeand shed skin like tears. A kind of shipwrecksurgery that makes a child look like a deer.
In The Dialect Of Insects I hide in cupboardsand under the stairs,underjoyed, black-eyedand fossilised, over-awareof the bitemarks formingalong my arms, my fingernails.And thereby hangs a tale oftreacheries and transparencies.I can't deny: I am gutterspined,my own bone-laced anathema,my own dead, buried faceto the ground. Lulledand dumbfound by the clicksand spit of this insect language,I find safety in the rhymesand rhythms of the cockroach waltz,watching the flick and swishof clockwork in motion.Time, passing. The metaphorslatching their claws into my chest.I'm running out of words to staveoff this drought. And all I know is
Camisado In a double dream, I must spell out the storm:how the half moon spoke in reamsof folk lore, pipe dreams that torethe sky in two. How the wallsbegan to blister and you, sister,took your place beneath my skin.We met stargrazing, your eyes electric,lacing your lies, your intricacies,like a cat's cradle. And I, stumbling, stutteringon in a maze of scars. My modern morphia,sister scarecrow, I'd follow you to the depthsof my chest: to the mumblings and fumblingsof my heart in the dark. To deceit and defeatand the great empty longings beyond.For this, this is howthe camisado begins: with broken peopleunder a broken st
Sta.sh
