Aspurged

There is a butterfly lying in this puddle,
underwater flutters dulled by ripples of breeze
so that passers-by don't recognise
the fragile mystery inside a watery cage.

Mottled patterns pulse outwards in perfect mirror images
which do nothing but amuse the grass. And me.
A tea party breaks out nearby
but they are ambivalent towards suffering.

The butterfly must listen, but I,
I hide my ears amongst the simple bracken
as the clatter of cutlery, the screech of fine china;
the disturbing murmur of conversation penetrates the atmosphere.

Wings convulse, antennae twitch and stretch,
I ease open a paupiere to see faint bubbles annihilate themselves
atop the shimmering film of water.
Meanwhile the butterfly thrashes in millimetres.

The guests invade further and further,
Armed with teaspoons and tongues they tear up the air
and blur the outlines of plants and dewdrops,
which cling uselessly to their shapes, gasping and sighing.

I feel nausea and sleep rush into my intestines,
twisting at my liver and lungs and drowning my brain,
tempting the toxins to emerge and dance and play.
My chest flutters, my lips quiver, and I slump; hidden.

When the dizzy world shudders into view there are no guests,
no tables or chairs or teacups or sugar bowls or milk jugs,
no screeches, no groans, no hysterical laughter or murmurs-
the ground is stunned to silence, an elected mute.

I raise my aching body and turn my eyes towards the puddle.
It has become a tiny glacier, little sugar crystals and porcelain cracks
have flung themselves all over the surface.
Beneath; empty, numb, and completely still, lies an amputee.

Tweety

Emptied buckets lie waiting for a sharp impact
right on the curb, beside the sharp tarmac road-
each bird beak spike rips your plump sole a little,
revealing flesh a little whiter, a little dirtier.
She'll pull on the soft rubber mask and drag you by the hair
drag drag drag
what a drag it is, sitting up here
without hair,
she'd say, before then. Life is a cab,
a dirty, smoked out cab with a grizzled grey man leering
at you, his eyes forming a ray of light through your pretty pretty dress.

I'd better leap through the glass walls into the dank, open air.
She found you walking there on the pavement, without shoes,
your body had been carefully constructed out of bird's nests and gauze,
eyes drooping quietly, squinted even in the cushioning gloam.
Disease, decadence and desire had exploded nearby
and you bore the twitching debris,
even your eyelashes were weighed down by encrusted glitter fragments.
A wafer of life beneath the heavy world of the senses,
unable to escape predictability to everyone but yourself.

She felt your frame was delightful, and pounced,
and now your skin is being eroded by the spines that previously
had only teased your feet for a game of pain.
Now those wounds are shrieking to be touched once more-
anything but to avoid this war of attrition against the body,
corpse to be.
But she just left you in the nearest dustbin when she noticed your unbroken nose.
Way it goes.

Inburst

I stared into your eyes like their grip would never give up
and those seas of adventure and excitement
would never pour out onto the stained sofas and wizened nudity
surrounding us, impounding us.
What good are hind legs, mongrel; lady,
if you cannot scratch them? See through them?
Once more I would like to be unstained as I was at the start,
trailing in shyly with my petticoats licking my heels
and asking if I could be permitted to stand alone.
Oh how wrong I was to trust my singular judgements,
all of them stacked up, filed away in my intense cabinet mind
which ached, so ached, to be it's mother.

Cage

These next few poems have been inspired by little other than stockholm syndrome for my bed and my regression to a lonely little girl, mending clothes, baking cookies, throwing screaming tantrums when nobody's watching..
I wish I could be a real feminist. I have fallen wildly in love with Lydia Lunch at the moment. Sigh..

Hotel

The shadows teetering beneath your eyes have sparked up quivering glitter fragments in my peripheral vision.
I'm holding on tightly to the clammy ceramic sink
and staring down the hole in the centre,
watching water washing down beside coagulated structures and metro stations.
It's taken easily.
My acidic muscles refuse to stand up, the ground is moving too fast but the stuttering furniture is tempting.
I rise and fall, rise and fall, rise,
collapse, towards an atmosphere empty of oxygen-
oh god, get me off this soft, pale planet! It is too close to my own reflection and I am unable to see clearly, my vision is lopsided-
please, undeniable deity of desperation seize my splintering bones and break them cleanly,
stack them neatly and create a secret garden for mannequins to stand and creak in.
It can be homage to my pathetic existence.
I wish the wind would whistle through me like it does you.
Surely my body has simply become too tight, too secure a cage for such force;
anger and rage creating visions which pulse through my cavities and make me convulse, froth, writhe, expire,
at least for as long as it takes. As long as it takes for whichever fuck dragonness that brought me in to bring me back,
screaming and asking for goldilocks to save me, just to see if I'm the right size.
I know the answer before the breath is drawn.

Paris

I just spent a week in Paris. Slightly irritatingly, I have been far more inspired to paint than to write. I'm going to spend a while making marks on paper and reminding myself what a chore brushes can sometimes be- I think I've become too lazy and lethargic to devote myself to something big, but I might do a few small ones just to get this out of my system. I don't think I appreciated just how lucky I was to have time set aside for doing this at school!

Oh, and I kissed Oscar Wilde's grave!

I did write a few things while I was away, but I'm not very keen on them. I only wrote one poem, the others are essays and don't belong here. I think I will post the poem anyway, abuse it as you see fit.