She did not know
if she had been cut from birth
or if they had done it to her
when she was just a child,
barely old enough to remember, shrouded
her in the stinking, clingy breaths of obedience
until she had learned
to succumb to the robotics, to finally
trash her emotions,
crush them to ashes.

Perfection was hard to maintain.

the world is unjust
unready for you, little one.
just hold on
just one moment — wait,
please.

don’t go yet. wait
for me, my legs are slower
than they used to be.
brittle, you know.
you and i are both

getting older.
wait —
don’t go yet. stay
just one moment.
i’m not ready.

a thousand i miss yous linger
in the sky, stubborn clouds that they
are. but i am not tall enough,
nor can i reach high enough to
bring them down and spill them upon
the floor for you. so they remain
there, unspoken, unrained, unloved.

you were going.
the world did not
fade today; its colours were bright and alive
with the summer’s air, and you said,
‘i’d better stay
just a moment longer.’

a world apart, i stood
where two universes had divided,
where a wall had fallen, crumbled
into dust and ashes of
the men who had attempted

to cross it;
with all their might and desperation
risked their lives so that
their children might one day
see freedom

with their wide wondering eyes
of naïveté and joy.
a world apart i stood,
desperately clinging to their stories:
their martyrdom;

the names i would never know;
the stories that would go
untold with nobody who knew
them, nobody to tell them
anymore.

a world apart i stood
watching the snowfall in
berlin, dampening the streets
where the death strip once
tore life from the innocent

in the name of separation;
the falseness of east and
west.
a world apart i stood,
glad that it was no more.

there was a girl at friedrichstrasse station
she waved
through the barrier
with dainty hands and gentle eyes of kindness
and i smiled at her carefully making sure
nobody noticed my face
the gleam in her eyes doe-like and sweet like she cared
even though she didn’t know me even though
she was supposed to hate me
even though it’s been hours days weeks months

years i still think of her
those shining eyes that smile that changed me
the westerner that i should not have looked at
wanted craved
for so long even while my friends kissed
boys at midnight under the stellar stars
in alexanderplatz
my mind still returned to her loyal
the way a dog returns to its master
forever thinking of the girl at friedrichstrasse station

It all happened
Once Upon A Time, like in the fairy tales, but
it went backwards
and backwards
and
backwards,
opposite and upside down
like he was in Alice in Wonderland

and the wicked stepmother was not a stepmother at all;
with no pointed chin or sharp daggers for eyes.
Instead she looked like a princess
with a gentle face and round, brown eyes
like a mother.

She was good at goodness
at being kind
at loving him in front of everybody’s eyes
and making him think
it wasn’t so bad, after all.

But she was also good at
shouting
and yelling
and hitting and smacking,
at giving him the belt
and the switch
and sometimes the slipper.

And in his fairy tale
there was no kind, gentle father.
There was no father.
“Gone,” she’d say of him, “drunk somewhere.
With a *****.
Dying, hopefully.
If he was here
he’d **** you.”

Sometimes he
wished,
hoped
his father would come back and
live up to his promise
and ****
and ****
and ****
and ****

and ****
until there was nobody left to ****
because they were all dead and destroyed
and dead
and destroyed
and their clothes mopped up their own blood
and when he was sobered enough to realise what he’d done
he’d stand over them,
mournfully,
and weep
over his drunken mistakes
over just who he had
murdered
with his own knife, who he had cut
cut
cut
jagged shapes into their flesh,
torn pieces of them away
like he had drunk away pieces of himself;
an eye for an eye;
an equal pound of their fair flesh,
cut off and taken,
stolen,
like a jewel in the night.

But no father came,
and he stayed dissatisfied and alive
and his mother came
and belted him
whenever she pleased.

He grew up dissatisfied,
lived dissatisfied,
and anger grew in his bloodied heart,
furious,
bleeding with the pain of it
growing to despise his father’s ******
even more than he despised his father
and his mother
and himself.

He learnt all their names:
Nichols
and Chapman
and Stride and Eddowes

and Kelly.
And he stalked the streets,
searching
searching
searching
searching

searching,
for they had lain with his father
and had wronged him
by leaving him
alone with his mother
and the belt
and the switches,
and if they wronged him,
should he not revenge?

a woman like her—
the kind of woman you dream
about on lonely nights,
your hand spread across the cold
side of the bed, missing someone
you never even had, a
woman, dreamlike, you made up,

a pretend fantasy.
you’d have your hands cut off if
you dared to think aloud; hung,
drawn and quartered; burnt on the
pyre for nothing short of treason
if you so much as opened
your mouth, thought too loud. so you

don’t think, don’t speak, don’t
look at her. especially
not like that. because no-one
can ever know how you feel.
not when she’s the queen. but the
secret you both harbour bobs
up and down, weathers the storm,

unsinkable, you
and her, and your child surviving
despite the odds deposited
in front of you by the count’s
lust and manipulation.
his desire for her does
not overpower her honesty,

her integrity,
steadfast. powerful anne. the
queen. and you survive, guilty
but alive, hurting and breathing
with all you have left to breathe.
you turn away, nothing left
to give but your loyalty

to your god, and
the fragile promise that your
son will be safest never
knowing the truth about you,
and you will be safest away
from anne, away from temptation
that could get the two of you

hanged. but your faith
holds out for you — god always
does — and the king dies. the king
dies, and she, crowned and ultimately
powerful, holds her hands out
to you and promises a
world of together. of a

queen, and her minister.

She had meteoroids falling from her mouth
when she spoke, a wish waiting
to be granted, and she murmured
to the young Adonis: forget me not,

and he, bare-faced, beautiful, perhaps
more than she, held her in his arms
as if she were Aphrodite herself
and promised: forget me not.

He always said the planets
aligned when they met, the sun
alight in her laugh and the moon
alive in her smile of darkness;

and he, alabaster, like a work
of Duquesnoy, shattered as the meteor crashed
through his love, terracotta rooftop,
the forget-me-nots burning, his hands stained like merlot.

And the girl with bluebell eyes,
stars on her tongue, teeth like the milky way,
looked to the angel-faced boy and hissed:
forget me not.