For once, I would like a ruler.
A really big one, large enough to span all time,
or my time at least – which isn’t too much to ask.
To draw a straight line through life,
and make it all fall in, drill sergeant style.
Free me of all the jumps and bumps,
dancing about the hurdles which
slow me to halts,
as if life were a blob of mashed potatoes;
surfing through its smooth white clouds,
like a true California girl.

For once, can it be a tunnel?
No more mazes of roads and streets,
avenues, crescents, highways and lanes.
To close  my eyes, raise my hands,
and push my bare foot into the pedal,
unafraid of the walls of people.
For it all to be a bowling alley
with the railings up and a ramp to slide down.
To shamelessly ride with pink, bedazzled training wheels
and a lemon learners plaque
to blind all nosy parkers up my ***.

For once, wouldn’t it be nice if it all could line up,
so I could be, for once, entirely happy.

So they say:
I am diseased
because I’m different.
I am disgusting,
for I am distinct.

I am a widow on the wall,
a cockroach in the kitchen.
I am stubbed within the sand,
gouged into the grass.
You hold me in your index,
and huff me out your mouth,
for I, the English cigarette;
am a sickness in your lungs,
and the cancer beneath your feet.

I am black,
I am bubonic,
I am a plague.

They seem to fear my spread,
yet, I am pushed, I am prodded,
I am pummeled down to bone,
for I, the English cigarette;
am extinguished by your touch,
a light, and lifeless ****,
an easy target
caught between your malice
and the cruelty of your words.

I like the waves.
The way their static fizz tickles
the bristles of my ears,
as if they were long brown thistles in beach dunes,
engirding pools of sand between
the wet crevices of my toes.

I’ll lie in the bayside sheets of gold,
where the clouds drift silent,
encompassed by its warm fold,
soaking my horse-haired brush
into sand-speckled jar,
painting my watercolour flowers;
butter daffodils and heavens daisies.

I’ll lie on sun-dried towels
beneath chequered brolly
and scribble my brain
into summer-kissed parchment,
with leaded letters and granite words.

I’ll write in the colour of my soul,
using what’s left of my heart,
as I’m flayed down to the white-skinned bones
that hold me upright:
left thin and pale.
But, for these tapestries,
I find it worth my loves
discounted sale.