When a daffodil I see, Hanging down his head towards me, Guess I may what I must be: First, I shall decline my head; Secondly, I shall be dead; Lastly, safely buried.- Robert Herrick, Divination by a Daffodil
Arse Poetica{1}
Arse Poetica,
That one there:
The writer’s muse.
‘Ow’
And when you exclaim
In pain
He will say:
‘You’re pathetic for feeling that way.’
So we’re playing speaking
Without saying,
Started a study in
Keeping you insane,
Chained up in the dungeon
Of your brain.
Put a lot of thought and effort into
Telling me I’m a waste of time.
Put a lot of time and effort into
Criticising through rhyme,
Pointing out every flaw you find.
Hate could be kept concealed
But yours burns and roars,
Your anger soars and sears.
How many wasted years
Trying to get over without
Ever burning or bridging it closer.
I tried to be kind
And what did I find?
When you saw that I cared
You sneered I was ensnared
And then walked away
From your plaything,
From your prey.
This is a muse,
A still life of a life.
This is a muse,
Stencil outline of a wife.
I’m the divine female
And then I am the fallen.
I’m the house,
I’m his fangirl,
I’m even Gollum.{2}
Whatever clay you want to
Mould with and play.
I’m a whatever criticism
You want to call me today.
I don’t feel and I won’t judge,
I won’t talk and I don’t budge.
I’m the submission to your dominance,
I’m the receptacle of your pain.
I live the thrill of being vain,
You live the satisfaction of the gain.
I’m the cushion to the blow
And you’re the blow that was dealt.
I’m the vision, you’re the action,
I’m the bruise by whip of belt.
You clutch the pen in your claw,
Dip the ink in your saw.
Take and then take a little more
And I drain too with what I want,
I drain too with what I feel.
The inconvenience of being real.
Not necessary for flesh and bone,
No, you are not needed here,
Go home.
He’ll kill whilst immortalising,
He’ll kick it to the kerb,
Fuck it up so good
And then write of how much it hurt
And muse looks on in awe
Amazed at how you captured the cruelty.
Man is so mean,
Admiring from his feet,
Licking the dirt beneath.
Degraded by your disgust
He walks on me,
He belittles me.
The snide man sneers,
Strips and spears,
Pushes past,
Takes the credit.
Wins the trophy,
Sick and sacred.
He wins,
He wins.
I cannot touch
His menacing mercenary.
How do you get that way?
He’s the winner
And he wins today.
Golden
It’s that golden time again
Has run its course;
Come full circle.
Square one:
There’s something so tiring,
So lagging, in the weight of hours you’re carrying.
I can see that you’re flagging,
Not light, no, no longer.
Heaaavyyyy,
Soo slowww.
When you are stuck standing in the same place
And a few years pass
And the same people are regressing
Instead of progressing.
You must have a pretty good idea of
What it looks like now
The bad skin, the forehead wrinkles,
The hairs beneath the mouth.
And the crimson of what’s in the veins
Is the life force of which you have been drained
Like berries chewed by birds in trees.
The cold weather makes its way into your knees.
Bones will grind but minds will crack.
The orchards become your empty lack of love,
Lovelessness: as outwardly poetic as romantic plush
When it blew one along
Such a soft breeze back then
The gale-force winds are aflame after when.
After all, the season is fall
So it had to drop asunder
Before it could hop back,
This is the truest test of stamina.
Fallen: phase two, twice in a row
You will
Wait for what comes after.
Tried to play it with grace
Without a hint of emotion on your face
But you failed while you flailed around
Helplessly, trying to catch a drifting leaf.
Gale force flow, the heater is turned down low
So you can only just feel the mildest burn
And you have to both just take it in turn
To heat yourselves by the wall
While you stick needles in your voodoo doll.
It’s ok, don’t worry
It was only scratches, not scars.
Don’t fear, it’s just a bandage, there’s no permanent mark.
Poetic in its projection onto reality,
Cut wound so strong that it dug so deep
That you can actually see-
I hate you
I do.
I love it when you’re mean to me.
I love you,
It’s true.
The therapy, it works
Remarkably.
The scratching sometimes hurts
When blood trickles down, it seeps a stream.
Nothing has ever screamed so much as your eyes, which are mad.
Never dreamed so much
As when the sands of time were shed
But your mind which is most appealing
It won’t let me in,
I tried all different key combinations
But I’m locked out without the pin.
When he’s done wanting then I’ll want him still.
Like isn’t the same as lust,
Swallowing that mighty jagged pill.
His sting-ray mouth will surely strike
But arguments are attractive
Because the tension is the absence of
And messing with the hippocampus
to maintain a level of interest
Is another symptom of
Frustration in every aspect, in every arena
Like the two sides can’t meet
Not even to flee from the heat.
Can’t even be as intelligent as you
And I’m through trying
Through trying to avoid I-
Through aiming for anything
Through trying to try, try,
Never enough,
Too quietly,
Speak up.
Miserablist Fiction
No dead seagulls in the bushes today,
Sad end of September.
Light falls and casts the six o’clock
Shadow on your face,
And me too somehow-
Sick o’clock sallow.
Stopped sleep and eat and…
The rain is heavy on the pavement…
Heels clack over the top and disrupt the smooth surface
Where the tiles meet with feet,
Where the spit has licked the floor.
I wonder will there be more,
Any more of this?
Or perhaps that will be all.
Again, rain begins to fall.
Water Bored
They might have filled my bottle with chlorine
I had water in my eyes, water in my lungs,
Or was it just the lighting flooding the floor?
And drinking, drinking more…
Tomorrow makes your head so sore,
Too numb drunk to feel any more.
The bartenders like me ‘cause I wear it pretty well,
Take a breath of fresh surface air.
Sea salt faces sometimes swell
But I’m never off the mark,
Chummy, quick and smart.
Shots taste like crap
But the sting just doesn’t last.
Mouthwash, neon blue
Doesn’t look too good for you.
Concentrate- could sick up maybe?
And then aim it at him
Projectile outward with vigour and vim.
Gargle out your goo
We’re disgusting, lewd and crude
And we don’t live very long,
We don’t live very long.
Full Stop.
The embodiment of static.
The opposite of charisma.
Crumbling constitution.
Power cut.
Out of electricity.
Words run dry.
Frau frigid is.
Wordless, soulless, sap sucked.
End of energy.
The final lap.
Forced feeble flagging.
Flat.
Stagnated.
Out of reach.
Mulch
Still the smell lingers of an imagined cigarette,
Just like his
The dried-up brown leaves
Shrivel, littering the compost heap
Which is my breath
And I’ll breathe on you.
The scent of a revival,
It’s time for the arrival,
To own my own survival.
Death in lungs,
It’s good for me
Contrary to common belief.
You need to axe something,
A sacrifice to breathe,
Amputate, de-weed,
to prune the dead old leaves.
Flat Affect
How would you tolerate one another
When both burst into twin flames?
With the angry fire,
Pass you one bomb and you pass back another.
The ticking of a tock
Waiting for the blast is all.
Bi-polar opposites attract{3}.
Reel it in,
He is him-
My mirror.
Supported by uneven stabilisers,
Magnets that can’t touch.
Living each other’s lives
But I’m in trouble,
I’m sure you can smell it,
My double.
I sniffed your solvents,
Sucks so good,
Don’t get involved
No, that’s just rude.
Souls so flat,
Soda bubbles rise
But they can’t last,
Can’t get it to fly back.
The electric, kinetic rush,
Your chemical brings me to live,
It’s something I can’t hush.
All ghosts want is a piece of that,
A little piece of what they
Can’t get back.
Snakes and Ladders
Lying in the dark in fright,
Eyes wide
With the starlight.
You think it’ll happen when you’re depressed
Just to find you cannot write at all,
Think you’ll fight when you’re distressed
But
You’ve really hit a wall.
The danger of elation is the height from which you tumble
Trek to the top was tough and
It took all of your own will.
Slippery slope so fast, didn’t take long to
Roll back downhill.
Get high when things go right
‘Cause it’s so un-us-ual,
Cannot rely on it at all.
This molehill is mountainous and tall.
Interlude
Have been punished many times before,
Once more can’t push me any further into the earth’s core.
9th of May, Suicide Year
Walk me down the winding road like he did,
I wanted to say no because I was sick in my sinking heart.
He didn’t know that I felt the imprint of the road on my skin,
The mental map of the landscape,
An artist’s impression of the decorated shop windows,
Weather-beaten brethren. It’s left it’s trace in my blue veins
And the memory of cars brushing past will forever be a part of me.
I carry it all
because you don’t.
I have no right to my pain
so I held it in so long and then thought
Why not turn it into song,
You’re still alive, you still need to live.
And when I’m a ghost back in that bedroom
I’ll be looking out at streets where you can see
The students you semi-know,
Walking along serenaded by bird song
in the beautiful spring light
That cradles you in its warmth.
Over-romanticise every moment before the last hurt,
You don’t realise how authentic I’m being,
You think that these are just my words and not my feelings.
The melodrama of saying they choke me:
I tell it to paper, absorbing an etching of an unspoken shriek.
No one can hear me gasping,
Placing a hand over my heaving heart to try and still it.
Who will read this poem? Who will read these messages?
You think it’s an inconvenience,
Easier to irritably ignore it then.
I’ll never get over this,
I’ll cry for the rest of my life.
As Haunted as a House Elf
Here is Linus, here he is clutching a plastic bag
Here he is wearing his bin bag
On bended knees,
‘Would you look at me please?’
He’s stung by love and laughed at.
Crazed, confused and outcast.
Here is Linus clutching a plastic bag
Here is Linus slipping as life sags.
Sipping on cigarettes and smoking coffee,
‘Could somebody love me?’
Pity is a shitty excuse for sympathy,
They don’t care- they keep him down there,
Elevating themselves to reach the trophy.
It makes me feel icky,
It’s tricky to convey,
I’m not wholly sure
Why I thought I felt this way.
But it lasted so long,
Put the words into song.
He’s faking but managed to make
him look pathetic and crazy.
Preserved himself perfectly.
And no one will know
About the time capsule frozen in the snow,
It’s buried so deep
Underneath your stubborn feet.
Ms Barch
Mesmerised by people,
So self-assured
That they don’t see anyone looking.
They are whole
In their collective soul.
Question it?
No, not for a second.
Appearance?
On fleek,
It is assumed.
Fresh as war paint,
Well presumed.
Boys in their brashness,
A group of pack animals.
The likeness
It’s uncanny,
Most manly.
Girls, are we gloriously gentle?
Today we gather
Secure, never needed another.
Unfelt absence of gender.
Safe and harmonious.
Compassion and understanding.
Nothing was lacking.
The winner,
The sinner must win.
No remorse if
It’s not caught on camera.
The story remained unstained.
Not all men,
Only the strongest,
Most powerful and influential.
This is how you get things done
Stolen by us
At number one.
Harvest Season
Starved and famished
He loved some girl before me
Starved and famished
Oh how I do adore thee
Starved and famished
So he’ll make sure to ignore me
Once thought me something sweet but now I’m
Starved and famished
Turned out a tricky treat.
Blunt and brusque and cold
Perhaps your soul’s already been sold.
Your turned shoulder looks so sharp,
But so is everything about you.
How many under the covers?
How many hiding behind the scenes?
How many girls are on the go?
Does the queue last longer than I know?
Sending out messages to some other
In the hope that this is not transparent.
I know about the girl with the ribbons in her hair
And I know you’re now longing for somebody calm and fair.
She’s drifting over there
Moving through a fairy tale,
What did you do to her? you cruel…
Did you hurt her? What a fool.
So he’s burning up his fuel,
He feeds off of what he grows.
At harvest time he pulls
All that he ploughs and sows.
Come on man, your time is here
So don’t piss on it, don’t disappear.
Autumn leaves blow in the wind
But the pumpkin patch is bare,
You took all there was to share
And now there’s nothing left to spare.
Don’t look to me for squash or neeps,
potatoes at your feet.
It’s gone, season’s over,
Hit the road farmer, your bounty is poor.
It’s sad, you’re so destructive
With any goddess that gives.
Here’s hoping she keeps on dreaming,
Knows that she’s too good for you, too gracious,
I hope she realises…
He’s too harsh
On her soft focus.
Man is mean
He gets a rise
Pointed features
Angled eyebrows
Lazy eyes
Snap, he’s killing her spirit
Snap, he’s getting away with it
Because he knows he’s oh so pretty,
Thinks he can treat them really shitty.
Reel those fishes in
Current too fast, forgot to swim.
I don’t think so,
See I think
It’s time for you to fail.
You love the game way too much,
Your ego is so frail.
Burn his envy,
Leave him lonely.
Water witches will prevail
And sail away from you,
Floating far away
On the deepest darkest blue.
Epilogue
What if I don’t feel like the red storms,
Twirling in the rain umbrella, straight hair,
Lashings of evil glares whip you unawares?
What if now it’s all big eyes, Disney princess?
No more nasty burned by my lighter but instead
Floating down the river of seasons and
Sailing down the stream in the fine and floaty weather.