#26: original writing masterpost

[jadesprite]

 

there are goldfish in the water pipes
each one worth quarter a wish
magnets in the bath, they
dart between our legs
kiss our knees, bless our thighs
bet on our hearts to win

there are bugs under our bed
crawling out from fantasy
illustrations for carroll
or in the dark of night
you say maybe kafka
(a boy awakes one morning
to find no external change
but the makings of his mind
are another thing entirely)

teen vermin, whats the word?
any message from your mother
any forgiveness from your father
anything to come home for?
keep watching for the postman
i’ll still be right here

you live on left-overs
of food we never made
i order takeaway from
places i never liked
so we draw milk from the roses
let the ivy grow right over us
and we waste away together
and it is good, and
i am glad to have you

= ❤ =


hey, wake up. there’s that girl at the door for you again —- this time she’s got you a little cardboard box full of withered browning poppies from her garden, rain-stained and trembling, she’s got on the sourest of smiles. she’s crowding your room with remains, she’s teaching you self-preservation, she loves you. today she’s knocking on your door with the impatience of a devil; yesterday she’s holding your hand and rolling the pads of her fingers over every bump of your knuckles complimenting your bone structure. “when you die, give your body to science,” she says, and you know she means ‘give it to me’. you have already said yes quite some time ago now. today you’re waking up, you’re wondering the time, you’re opening the door, you’re saying hello i missed you. it’s been fifteen hours. you’re eating your heart out and feeding her the scraps.

she invites herself in, and you see today she’s wearing those gloves you like, the winterberry-red ones — she peels them off her hands and presses them into yours and, entirely shameless, you savour their warmth, you savour their feel. you consider residual skin cells. you consider honest infatuation. neither of them seem to you to be the truth and nothing but. you love anatomy, you love her. save the both of you some trouble and don’t bother trying to choose.

she’s sitting on the edge of your bed and she smells like old perfume that wants to tell you it smells like a summer day. she’s kicking off her shoes, she’s talking about cutting your hair today, where do you keep the scissors? she’ll say she wants to paint your nails too but really she just wants to think about tearing them out. it’s hard to know but you guess you might want that too. everything’s so complicated. you just want to be beside her so that’s where you are. she’s fingering crisp shrunken petals into your mouth. is she? she’s got her nails on your lips either way. you’re tasting nature at its end. you’re just waiting to join it. hey, wake up.

= ❤ =


sick of pearly-pink mouths like water wells – the letter O like an abyss home to your innards, waiting to see them flutter their eyes open and their lashes trembling for each every camera lense of the world – sick of a little glossy gash in your skull leaking garbage thick in every webstring of spit; sick of starless nights and the penguin classics printing of lolita sitting under your bed gathering dust from cover to cover entirely unread, sick of watching magic die within and without. you want to peel back your skin and let all the rot melt away like old snow in the waning spring sun, sheen long lost, dirtied and downtrodden, your winter prince fled to the bed of the Atlantic once more. today time drapes itself in summer languor, a sari sweat-stuck to its shoulders, a shadow wasting away as a starving bird in the sunday sun: isn’t it beautiful? the lakes swell and the sky bursts blue blue blue. under the surface a veritable sleeping beauty stirs but i’m sorry to say your kiss isn’t the one for them. better keep dreaming.

so the ice-sheets of every waterbody crack open but not one ever lets you in, so you age and you lose. the sun’s grown distant and yet your shadow reaches for it still, further away from you and further; sick of seeing the sparkle in snow, sick not of dust but the things that they cover, sick of magic refusing to die. you want, now, only to be alone with naught but your unceasing teenage misery, thinking you had suffered like in all of time nobody else ever had, thinking you this day are lonelier than any other has ever been. persephone shows herself home, frost covering her every track, and it is like you had never been anywhere, anywhere at all.

= ❤ =


quiet: i’m going to tell you
what it means to be a bird

it means i don’t have to sit here
any longer listening
to your every determined attempt
at making me miserable

i have wings
just under my skin
—you can’t see them
an unfortunate side effect
of never believing in magic
decrying the emotional manipulation
of ceiling-rafter ghost stories and
fairies at the bottom of your garden

a lonely downside of
thinking you know everything

i have wings and
i am going to use them
goodbye and have a nice life
there on the ground

= ❤ =

1: dreaming about your brother in spirit, brother in arms, you two sides of the one coin, him without his name but in every other way all the same. oh my brother, hiding in a hotel room with no windows, speaking in tongues, speaking in nadsat — dreaming of bowing your head to him, bearing your neck. if it is dissatisfying to you cut it off.

2: here it is perfectly silent. your mouth moves without a single sound and the fish clean away every trace of your blood; their gills tremble, inwards, outwards. scales shine like the moon upon the surface. you are born today into a monstrous world, a better world, and lilith’s womb ends at the shoreline. seaweed entangles itself round your ankles, the last despairing traces of an umbilical cord, sixteen years late. if it is dissatisfying to you cut it off.

3: serpent, sink your teeth into the apple of Adam; his throat wields to your fangs like the tired breath of a lingering lovers mouth. his hands are rough but your skin is rougher. today, Eve laid down asleep under your bones, your heart beats its last. everyone you have loathed is forgiven. everyone you have loved is not. forget theology for a moment. you are dreaming. and now you are waking up, finding the light is all wrong, the skies are another colour; the sun is coming closer, luna is weeping for her family, scattered as ashes over infinity. come home, child. dust to dust & poppies on your grave, peachpits under your bed, lotus leaves in celestial water (shimmering with every star you ever killed); if it dissatisfying to you, let it die.

= ❤ =

imagine you’re nobody. imagine you can
start afresh today, tomorrow
in a cornfield the colour
that you always wanted your hair to be
you can be born again, blinking
in the light, a little lizard
on the cupped palm of the earth
every river a life-line
and your decrepit mother’s home
nesting precariously in
the girdle of venus

just think: by next millennia
oh you could be a footnote
in the history of the universe
tell me the genre you want
your biography to be
and i’ll let it happen

imagine they mark your grave
all black iron bearing
my severed fingers—my arms
embracing you—for gods sake
tell me this is what you want
because it’s all i know how to do for you

= ❤ =

‘i love you’ you cut out
meticulously letter-by-letter
from the obscenest headlines
you can find in your
hoarder of a father’s
writhing pyramid of old newspapers,
history in the embrace of dust

‘i love you’ in
puzzle piece characters
slanting away and against
all at angles with one another
pasted up on your boyfriend’s
northern bedroom wall

he pretends not to notice
(he does not know how to answer;
he does not know how you love)
so you add, under it,
‘im sorry’ in the most
sugar-boned of reds
they do, in dulux

and you dream at night
looking over his shoulder while you shag
that you are a martyr on
the unwilling crucifix
of his bony little body
and the world has written verse
on every inch of your mind
in blood, your own

you wake up alone with the walls
clean and everything a white
that makes you want to stare
til your eyes burn
from under the bed he tells you
he loves you; birds peck holes
through your skin, calling
for you from underneath
you vomit feathers
he holds you til you choke

they eat the remains, your own
i love you, they say to you,
from the edge of the ceiling,
im not sorry

so it is finally leaving you be

you wake up alone
(they lay eggs in your ribcage)

= ❤ =

pictures of your hair, pictures of your teeth, disney films on vhs so cheap i'd buy you them all but my parents are getting suspicious -- you're a con artist, honey, straight from the early 90s and i'm courting you with a single torn & wrinkled fiver to my name -- illegible notes in green-gold gel pen that i hold against my thighs taking inappropriate pictures for you. after my first haircut of the year i picked scraps off the floor and wondered about sending them clipped to letters for you. "youll have to wait for the vial of tears; these things take time". but honey, you make the mouths behind my eyes drool.

= ❤ =

yet again
night-glow leaves you
fragile, unreal
prayers spilling
out from under
the sheets;
all around you
the darkness
sings

your skin
so faultless
the sun seethes
every breath
above your tongue
taken from the
morning breeze

a thief of
all early
fantasy and
drawn beauty
i suppose i
love you but
more than that
i just want
to devour you

= ❤ =

i dreamt about holding your hand, i dreamt about hating you. i am hansel and gretel sharing halves of a sexless lineless soft young body together sitting in your home waiting with folded hands patiently, quietly, to be devoured. look i am telling you — it’s fine. sink in your teeth, i like the feel of them. today in the trees i saw mary magdalene’s shawl-framed face written in shadows between the branches, today i saw the whore of babylon’s hands at my window and i wept. today you kissed my chest with the mouth of judas, today i am the son of all.

i dreamt i poured you wine from my mouth, i made you bread from my flesh. all i ever did was miss you even when you were right here. you held my hand and later the bones of my fingers; the walls were stainless peach and the sun was setting and filtered through the window the light from behind made your hair glow, your face was so dark i couldn’t see the colour in your eyes. i cried for what you made me feel until you kissed me quiet, your breath warm and my voice lost in it, like outside every starling’s call lost in the wind, and i felt so safe with you then even knowing how this story ended — you drew away and in my mouth from yours had slipped charon’s obol, slipped all down my throat with no resistance. through the suffocation i laughed a little and through the laughter i said to you “yes, that’s right,” only glad that you had remembered.

look i am telling you — i died perfectly happy because i had not died at all. i watched you from the eyes of the birds at your window and i know you burned my body and i know you swallowed the ashes. and still then all you ever did was miss me even when i was right there, right inside of you.

i dreamt of hating you and by the end i only loved you again.

= ❤ =

for five nights now i have been having,
inexplicably, your dreams--i can tell because
i have been in every one

(made sick at the shade of my own blush
intolerant of my hesitant hands
it always takes me some time to realise.)

= ❤ =

starry-night horror stories from round the campfire all about your fluids in the water and your amino acids in the air and your hands in my every directionless & declined jerk-off fantasy; you are a virus, i am infected

(sweetheart lay me down on a sacrificial kitchen counter
kiss me via lip-prints on a cold knife shared
warmest day of the year but your breath
could crystallise every vein in my body
starve a fever, feed a cold
consume a broken heart)

= ❤ =

here’s the strangest thing you ever cried for:
this image in your head of a boy
with the tensest shoulderblades
the sharpest spine
the sun breaking out around his silhoutte
fifty vermillion shards
violently illumating his every flaw
and his every uncertainty

your beige army-chic jacket slipping off his shoulders
flipping through a homemade magazine of
contemporary cut-and-paste erotica
telling him fishnets are so bourgeois
wake up, hurry up
the rain’s coming
your laughter’s waning
the stars are misaligned

if his hand falters as he folds it over yours
you try not to think about it—
this is your dream, after all
surely you should get what you want?
so here’s your happy ending
and here’s your sad one, too

the worst thing you ever cried for:
waking up from a dream
before you got to see it
becoming a nightmare

= ❤ =

every morning when i wake up i check
do i remember your face
do i remember the sound of your voice
that i only heard, once, twice, anyway
and do i remember
the shape of your hands
your pale skin, your panda-eyes
that i only saw
afterimages of, again and again
photos refined, retaken, weeded out
from albums worth of you
that youd never let me see

too many things you left ruined
even knowing you'll be something
like rich come your 18th--a month
some day this week, exact date
unknown (that, at least, i could
put out of my mind)--i still want
to sell every little nothing i own
money raised to meet a closed door

a secret you always forget
a warning you'd never heed
intimacy is at best a means
to emotional manipulation
a highway to abandonment
your attraction is objectification
mine being obsession, of course
of course. your name in my phone
a permanent fixture
your breath spilling out from
the sparkling in-betweens of
all cracked glass, kissing
cuts from my blessed fingers
i can hear you in seashells

and i want to forget your knuckles but
a hand is not a fist and i only
ever wanted the one of them
when i didnt even know it at that
and i want to forget my loving you
but a heart is not a head and besides
i never got the grip of either anyway