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Grace Nottingham Feb 2014
Cut
Cut, cut, cut.
This is true.

There is no other
Way through—

Feel my head.
It is heavier than God’s,

An Iberian sculpture
Jam-packed with *****.

Misery blackens it.
Sweet Lady,

I want a Picasso smile.
No one comprehends!

I am all alone,
A Buddhist bud

Rising, falling, rising
Choking on its

Indelible, sick scents.
Those silver hooks

Cast nastiness,
Smirking

“We got her again”.
O heart,

You fill me with irony:
I cannot adore someone

Unless they adore me.
You never do me good.

I’d throw you out
If I could,

Sitting around
Bored as a Leopard,

Syncopating Satan :
You amuse me to death.

Pretty boy,
Dumb girl,

Beaten mother,
Hateful Father,

Make me numb.
My skin is a sky

Of Samurais.
That is that, that is that.

**** me.
I won’t come back.
About cutting/self harm and whatever comes along with it
Grace Nottingham Feb 2014
Babushka doll, you're an acid vase
Empty as church mornings
Devoid of all feelings;

You unravel your sullen smiles,
Ill-bred and unclean.
You are not complete.

You lost your babies.
Now you're alone.
Darling, darling, darling, how does it feel?

To feel the root of brute in the stubby heel,
Your silly scarves lost in the wheel.
Just peel off the cabbage roses

Petal by Petal,
Dismember yourself.
What a laugh!

The air has asthma,
The sun gives it T.B.
Oh dearie me!

It wheezes kisses heavier than a lecher.
Saboteur of my days,
Why must you hurt what you can?

Because you hate me, hate me.
You are an acid vase full of hate.
I can see your ruddy heart like an X-ray.

Unstick yourself from me.
I don't want you,
Your scarlet lips

Lake Baikal eyes,
or Eastern European knits.
The rings shed their gold.

Knock knock,
Dead at 30.
The last twist of the knife.
Grace Nottingham Feb 2014
"New Plymouth"  

I
I, as a young woman, stand still
Like a ghost column in a Mausoleum  
Adjacent to the New Plymouth spit.  

I breathe in the invisible sugars of salt
And the stubborn incoherences
Of the sea washing green over layette white.  

The rocks are blunt teeth,
Fat and round like an old Frisco seal,
A Cerberus jaw barring me off

From fatal self-destruction.
What a laugh!
These flippants, these peacekeepers  

Have no idea, nor do
The gargantuan ships,
Walking on water like Jesus' feet.  

The sky is so pure and clean  
it's sectile, no clouds  
nor disturbances to be inhaled.  

II  
  

I hang like a death wish on the hotel's lintel;  
Outside copse's foliage joggle
And I think cold.  
  

The air is sullen and austere,
It knows what it's doing to me.
The air that kills, kills, kills.  
  

The radio stubbornly blubbers
More sheepish than a baby,
Confabulating the local rugby.  
  

I collapse like a sack of black potatoes.
I feel weirder than Pluto.  

I am an alien, an alien to the bulbous women
  
And silver lined suited men.  
The grand annunciation
"I hope you enjoy your stay"  
  
Makes my organs twist and puffer.  
It hurts, it hurts, it hurts!
This place cries for my demise.  
  
III
It's a rural community.  
Mothers in ghastly flannel and baby spew
swallow gossip like Communion tablets.  

The precious circulate the carousel,
Scoffing hot dogs like prepubescent piglets,
Sausages sliding like fat worms

And burning like hearts in an oven.  
The sizzling steam disintegrates
Like clouds of Statismospores

Spreading positively into ether.  
The sun beats like a muscle
Burning, burning, burning

My laundry-washed white.
I’m vulnerable.  
I was once pure and sweet like an Aryan,  

Now I am dying, dying, dying
From fat smiles curled like a snail
With grey fatty hooks under my eyes.  




IV  


Tiny bluestocking girls like me  
All congregate in the Library .
At last I am by myself.  

I still don’t feel at peace.  
My thoughts are frightening
When I am at my writing.  

They are even worse,
In fact deathly,
If I do not write.  

This climate of strange spacemen,  
This culture of monstrous noses
Has driven many women mad,  

Not excluding a woman like me.  
I’m bored to death, literally.
Now, now, I say,  

Carrying my golden bags of poetry,
“I love what will destroy me,
And hate what will heal me”.  


October 5th 2013
Grace Nottingham Feb 2014
Among the pale Elm trees, many things appease,
Like the glorious song of the Hummingbird.
I sit admiring the birds as I please.  

The Evening’s blue fog wheels in Elm’s mystic leaves,
Hooting owl’s decibels sing loud and absurd.
Among the pale Elm trees, many things appease.  

To feed sugars to the Bluebirds and the Bees,  
I ravaged the branches and made lemon curd.  
I sit admiring the birds as I please.  

My ****** structure is sets of flattened lees,
Defying the winds, the winds, the winds that heard.  
Among the pale Elm trees, many things appease.  

In colonnades of wavering Ulmus trees,  
I watch men’s mesh catching a baby Bluebird.  
I sit admiring the birds as I please.  

Up and come ****-tree mushrooms, all life forms seize  
To fierce, teeth-tusks of ivory, undeterred.
Among the pale Elm trees, many things appease,
I sit admiring the birds as I please.
Grace Nottingham Feb 2014
It's September; cold in the copses,
Feverish in the kitchen.
The sink clinks and exorcises
The china like an Italian sonata.
My lips merge into ether
At the sky, a periwinkle parallax
With the pork lard carbon monoxide
Clouds, at drive with suicide.  
My Buddha hisses at the window,
Ripping the tentacles off weedy carrots.

The knives are clever & precise
Hiding in their handled shoals
Like luminescent Jackanapes
Out for the thrill of the ****;
The **** of the stake of steak,
A 'Cow'ardly act.
I wrap the red & dead
Into a Beef Wellington.
It is not pretty at all;
But neither am I.

I'll drink tea to keep my peace,
Swallow my spirituality like a pain killer.
The teabag sags its straggled string,
Scolding me.
The pillbox is dead on the edge
Of the ornamented kitchen sill
A lot like me; sullen and teasing.
I wanted to roast my head like a potato
If the pudding *** over boiled,
A cauldron of sugar and cream
Fattening me ugly and crazy.


The weather is miserable; I mustn't lie,
It's enough to make any young woman want to die.
Stirring my thoughts with the dishes,
Trashing potato peels like my wishes.
And the stacks and stacks of ****-me pills
Surround like troops in their barricade cupboards.
I have no allies,
Everyone is asleep;
I curl up like a fat snail and weep
Blackening the words of the miracle-working Priest.
Grace Nottingham Feb 2014
This pond  is where I will die,
Squandering in owl hours to ****.
Still, the Ducks swim by.

The blue moon is a Julia Dragonfly
Haunted by a lethal, green dream thrill.
This pond is where I will die.

Threadbare Marauder Rooks squawk a cry,
The stickleback flakes its dithering gill.
Still, the Ducks swim by.

Importunate possums chase ducks to comply,
How could my moon mother be so ill?
This pond is where I will die.

Bluebirds deflate their keels with a sigh,
I gravitate towards their beauty, I am still.
Still, the Ducks swim by.

Aureole Sirius tip toes the sky,
Nimbus withers, Kamikaze men shrill.
This pond is where I will die.
Still, the Ducks swim by.

— The End —