driven away.
a culmination of screeching car wheels,
like singing banshees, like sirens, like witches,
who cast spells on father dearest,
until her skin turned green,
and she turned into all that she feared.

house of fragmentation.
ageing wallpaper made ever more brittle by her nails,
scratching, scraping, wishing it was his skin.
maybe then she’d be able to reach in,
throw his organs at the walls, stamping on them,
bleeding some life into their deflated lung,
failing under her smoke.
hellfire, always in the wake
of a woman scorned.

madness.
it makes foundations frail,
unable to be built up once more.
broken, not quite.
fractured beyond repair?
i think the doctor would agree.

now you wonder why,
i speed past road signs without looking back.
now you have the audacity to enquire,
why i cannot play the madonna,
why i chose to run from, escape from,
avoid the question when someone asks about

home.
four letters which belong in pandora’s box,
accompanied by me begging (on my knees, etc)
for you to never ask me to let the contents out.

my antique beauty, my china doll,                                                                          
i remember your snaggle-toothed smile,
your gently crooked nose to match.                                                                      
my wayward, moorish sweetheart,
always, you said, or at least,
until death do him part.

yet still, if he is safe and well  
i still cannot help but wonder,
if you could set this swallow loose from your ribcage,
and let us reside once more in our heart,
once more, the way He intended.

i’ve seen the photographs,
sent in dog-eared envelopes, careless.
when did you become so tightly wound,
nothing like the cloth angel I remember
(your dresses flowing in between your legs,
as you ran up the hills before me).

if only you’d let me build you again,
from scratch, my whittling knife tracing
gently, etching the skin that was once mine.
if only you’d pry the paintbrush from his hands,
please, just place it back into my rightful palms.

for i could paint colour back on your cheeks,
bring what he lost in you back to life
for man always cracks and breaks the rosy flesh,
  when he decides you are a wife.

for now i shall keep you in a glass cabinet in my head,
instead of – for the last twenty years – a casket by my bed.
safe, warm, admired, just for me to see
nothing like the princess locked in this tower,
that he so longs you to be.

but, please, please, write back.

tell me what it would take
for me to say, for me to do,
for you to open those glass eyes again and see
that perhaps this rosenkavalier
that you’ve always longed for, might just be a she?

And as you look to the bedside table, you see a grapefruit. The juices flowing down the sides vulnerably from the soft pale flesh. Ripped apart. Sweet, honeyed liquid; insatiable. How you wished for his teeth to pierce that soft dimpled skin, to bite through the bitterness of the pith and spit the seeds back out.

One by one.

Instead, he lifts the fruit to his mouth and laughs when the juices fall down his face, laughs as the saccharine debris make a mess of him. You pray for him to have the moment of madness that you have been anticipating. For him to become sick to the stomach of your sorry words and finally stuff the fruit in your mouth, to let the bulbous waxy sphere lodge in your throat in the way you deserve. Suffocating. At least then you would be able to breathe your last breath with your fingers interlocked in his, his thumb tracing the sharp knuckle of your thumb in unconscious, weary circles.

Then, at least you would be able to die in your own home.

That was me back then. I sat back, I watched him, lying with one eye to him and one eye to the ceiling. Hoping that, somehow, my eyesight would penetrate the peeling grey ceiling; the sky; the thick clouds that loomed over me.

Whoever told us that clouds were fluffy, soft, aerated and belonging on the fronts of children’s books
The clouds are what keep us on earth. We see them changing colour, shape, forming the outline of a cat or dog the sky which gives us the impression that they’re innocent. They aren’t. They’re what give us a false sense of completion. I was happy, Then. Being trapped on earth with those omnipresent soft grey pillows. But now I’d rather dance on top of them

away, away, away from him, me, myself, this.

I am not the woman I was then. The sweet words that dripped from mouth, he lapped up. But he lapped them up and left me dry. Squeezed senseless, I can’t find it in myself to spill sugar words. I am a shell. I am a corpse. I am free of the soft substance that was easy to swallow. But should I be cast aside? Left to rot? Once the saccharine taste is gone? All that’s left of me is pith, seeds, skin. The bitterness would go past your taste buds, the seeds would sink low, low, low into your stomach.
If only you took a bite.

The skin. Soft to the touch, peachy. Soft to the eye, dimpled. It would leave a bitter taste if your mouth. It would give you a stomach ache for hours, send you vomiting, crying, in pain, ruining the day for you and leaving you with regret.

If only you cared to swallow it, the thing, that fruitful thing, me

Whole.

She wanted to climb inside her ribcage                                                                                            
Make a home in these bones
For these for walls
rattled so violently
In a way that never felt
Like home.  
  
He wanted to be swaddled in love
Because she didn’t love him enough
And maybe if the blankets weren’t so tight  
He could be freed, finally, a dove
But he was always too scared
To take flight.

I come from a place where I wake to the steaming sun and I sleep in heavy darkness
I want to go to the place where I sleep under the lights and wake to grey clouds
I live in a home where the lark-bird sings much too early in the morning
I wish I could set up home where the engines sing, where the factories pollute the noise
Blocking my ears, my thoughts, my tears
Dark and grey, the would be  
maybe then, they would be dark enough
To see.

To everyone you are lily
And you hold that flower within
Yourself, hoping that no one squeezes too tight
And crushes the petals
Broken, they said  

To her you are a rosary without a cross
Wrapped around the necks of those
That care to love you too much
And willing to spill sinful poison
Decaying, she always said  

To yourself you are less than a daisy
Picked at relentlessly
Never fresh in the way that is expected of you
And willing to submit to the picker
Until you’d rather be dead

But you could be a rose
If only you’d indulge
Shamelessly, cross-less
And let it all spill around you
The red.