men, they spend hours, days, weeks
seeking, searching, running
to the Promised Land.

their bones, cracking from strain
their bodies, weakening
as their humours run dry.

all in the hope of finding roses,
delicate in petal, soft to the touch
this is where they will lay their heads.

but what if Mother Nature were to rear
her wiry head?
leaving weeds, un-ripped from their homes.

i suppose the weaker men would get lost,
unaccustomed to rich thorn,
glorious thickets, never ending forests

our great Mother, she laughs
as they trip and fall,
tears falling, rendering our grass fertile

they’ve made their bed now, she supposes
now they must lie in it.

First, Mother Nature met Diana.

Mother nature, autonomous woman
Place the elixir of life onto my tongue,
Three drops, put your mouth above mine
Let your saliva drip in
Touching the roof of my mouth.

I’ll now tilt my head back,
Choking as it runs down my throat,
A beautiful agony, as always
Into my body,
Down to my stomach,
The tonic of life,
Our life.
Now we shall create.
Amen.

Second of all, with fountains of love, they created a child. They went on to call her Rosina.

let your bees come in,
pollinating, creating life
but only under my terms,
only when i choose
to let them feast upon me

let a small peach form
on the branches of my womb
but let her core be poisonous
hydrogen cyanide,
to keep thieves at bay

if my body is a garden,
let it be ripe,
ever growing, ever flowering
a stretch of soft grass,
for us to lay our heads

mother, mother, daughter
the heavens will sing.

what’s your name again / does it even matter / please don’t follow my social media after this / I don’t want to ever see you again anyway, so why would I / why’s that / what does it even matter / you texted me first remember / let’s not get pedantic / I wasn’t being pedantic / you were / stop talking you’re ruining it / oh I’m ruining it / just take your clothes off / can’t we talk first / no you always ruin it when you talk, i preferred it when you were too scared of me to speak / why did you ask me over then, if you hate me so much / just stop talking
please

instant gratification,
brief euphoria,

taking 23 trips to heaven,
over and over, eyes closed,
forgetting you’re even in the room,
i like it better that way
alone, but you look so pretty like this
please don’t say it. don’t say it. literally, I’m being serious, don’t be that person, keep in it your brain, you’re just high as **** on pheromones (stupid pheromones), none of this is real, i thought you wanted to escape, not to be yourself, oh god, whatever you do, just don’t be yourself

I love you. ****.
Did I just say that out loud?

lie on my lap again,
spinning stories in the daytime
hours pass, doing nothing
except basking in syllables,  
their threads hanging in the air

if you would be so kind,
let me spin them into floss strands,
winding them onto a wooden stick
a snack to save for later,
for when i miss the taste of your thoughts

let me turn the look in your eyes
into Love Hearts,
small enough to hold in my hand
contemplating, just before
rolling it around my tongue,
for when you’ve fallen asleep before me.

can i bottle your brain,
place in into a kilner jar
watch it bubble up,
effervescent, pink lemonade
sweetness cutting through the bitter
something to sip on
for when I’m uninspired, again.

before him,
i had never dived before

i chose to rest my head
on the banks instead
the safety of keeping dry,
the power of never giving
was enough to keep me satisfied.

now, with him

i dive for pearls,
treasure, anemones; red, glowing
dancing by their own living fire,
in the midst of the pale blue sheets.

yet, like all good things
we have come to an end.
bodies emerge from water,
reality is always only a shirt away,
discarded on the floor.

after,

cooling down, sharing mugs of water
mouths reborn, bodies shivering,
ears slowly start to un-pop,
washed up on the shore, once more.

the first girl who ever kissed my neck
had bones in her bedroom.
like taxidermy, right? i asked,
squeezing her hand,
my thumb rubbing hers, innocently.
the early days are always beautiful,
mind.

could i offer you some jam?
the fruits of my labour, i said
as she dipped the knife into my open wounds
smiling wide, ‘i did this for you’
and i said it so proudly, at the time.

i prettied myself up with doilies,
a gingham tablecloth too,
covering the unsightly parts of me.
only for her to give me that look,
that disappointed, never good enough

look.
its pithy. there’s too much substance.
and she spat it back into my face,
the red creating a clown-smile
the only smile i could muster, at the time.

and then she started to scream,
and that’s where my memories lapse.
hacking sounds, bones snapping.
it happened kind of quickly.
severed heads, severed hands,

what does it matter?
if your lover is thirsty, let them drink.
it’s simpler that way,
it keeps lovers as lovers, the naïve part of me said,
like a mantra, over and over.

deep inside, where my strength lay
(and i wouldn’t usually tell people this
but as you may have guessed,
mere air particles don’t have much to lose)
i wanted to scream, fight back

give me that back, that’s not yours to take
but the words are lost,
her slickened hands over my mouth
drowning out the nose,
as she runs away.

******* coward. leech. parasite.
i want my body back, i wheezed
as the final breathe escaped my chest.

do you ever notice,
how i won’t stop making jokes,
just to make you open the curtains,
let your teeth open the blinds,
as they peel apart, crescent moon shaped
letting your natural light flood over us,
even in the dark of mid-morning bleariness.

(brightness,
creating brown eyes glazed in honey,
my morning coffee).

but then somewhere above,
a cloud overcasts the rays.
minor eclipses, everyday
stealing the moment from me.

the sky has a way of telling you to look away,
i think.
but i’ve never been a fan of reality checks,
i don’t think.

as always, it’s bittersweet,
to see you in grey one more time.
a sepia photograph reminding me,
always,
that sometimes what’s for you,
does goes by you, with the wind
never to be had or held again.

but instead of dwelling on it,
i weave these dulled threads into a blanket,
cotton, familiar, protecting,
to put over my heart.
because every time you look at me,
as the light comes in,
i can see exactly what she’s falling,
drowsily, wholeheartedly
in love with.

and i won’t tell a lie, old boy
it hurts.

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.