Nobody's Home

1. Spare Parts
She did it to feel real, or so she said:
cut out her caustic catatonia, and donated it to the collection
tin – spare change, or rather, change
spared, as she still keeps her splintered trophies
hugged close to the air, along with the trackmarks that cut
across the ceiling, and the rouged wrists that are just that: bruised
like fruit, with juice just as sweet. But she knows
that fate can’t be rearranged or exchanged –
a foetal-hearted metamorphosis is the inevitable
lullaby that dulls her days,
and though it's only first light,
the time is ripe
for the whitening of her bones.

As the sun unhusks itself
to an earth-spun hush, her silhouettes shatter – collapse
into the blackened bracken that’s struck its roots
through the floorboards
of nobody's home.


2. Birth Day
Her bones crackled for some time
before they were subdued to a satisfactory hue,
and she was tipped from the spilt-ink womb
to the lidless rooms of nobody's home,
where she found her whitened bones had grown
wild amongst the cabbage-roses of the carpet.
A garden weeded with spare parts.

So she sat among those thorns, pumpkin-crowned
and indolent, innocently waking,
waiting for answers
from the mute bulb-skulls
of the flowers.


3. The Waves
She had sat there for hours in vain
when the waves came; breaking against the windowpanes
with their foam-haired brows and rasping mouths.
At first, she was afraid - she shook,
and puked, and pared the moons right out
of her fingernails. It wore her thin,
desperate. Sleepdrunk,
she wormed her way through the wardrobe
and lodged her heart, disparate, between
a hard place and the stone face
of the wall.

It was months before she crawled
back to the surface. She learned
to brace herself for the impact
of the wracked waves' hollowed
bodies; their great blue tongues:
the elaborate act of composure.
Now she meets them with the
stone-lidded eyes of an angel.
Hallowed, statuesque,
she's abandoned all her prayers,
her layers of hope,
and holds only
a fistful
of dust.


4. Whitening
Sometimes, a child is born that is happiest alone. And when alone, they find that Nobody has locked her fingers into theirs, and dragged them to Nowhere, where Nobody keeps her hollow home. Here, Nobody takes their bones and buries them amongst the roots of her bracken-built throne, where they chatter and snap into maps of the heart –
impenetrable dark, where a tunnel opens upon a tunnel, upon a tunnel, upon a tunnel, upon a vein, upon a throat, upon a great blue tongue and the sound of the sea -
widening, whitening,
until there's nothing left but the whiteness
of a whitewashed heart of stone.


5. On Reflection
And she has no stories to tell,
but her clasped hands make a well
to cup the babel; a shape for shadows.
Her eyes are made of glass; her lashes, cut-grass -
they reflect, like mirrors, one whole.

{The mirror is a hole which she fills
until it becomes a glass half-
full.}

She's stuck in the deadlock of
a dumbshow with nobody –
and Nobody’s not giving anything away.


6. Barren
The silence is broken only by footfalls;
the soft calls from cut to cut,
inching the length of her arm like worms.
But there's no mine to be dug deep -
though rot aches from the maggot-jewels
of her eyepits, mouldering peach pits,
Nobody is barren.
Yoked too tight, she steps
carefully, cracking the fragile domes of ghost-shells,
cabbage-rose skulls -
each step and each snap
echoing like a harsh word angled
amongst the scars.

The girls who come here think they are birds.
She'll break their necks else
they fly.



7. The Door
Night time, and nobody's home –
she's left alone to roam the rafters
of the attic. Seeing the framework
of this ghost house is like peeking
behind the scenes, or peeling back
skin to see the skeleton within.
And by God, she's tried;
clawed at all those doors.

But in this time of silted moons,
something's shifted.
Everything is eerie in the dusk: even she
feels estranged, changed
by the low light of rumoured angels.
Little more than whispers, but they’re
the shadows that she’s shaped.
She'll unfurl their fevered wings and
fold them into form. Then,
they'll hold their candles high and melt
their waxen faces until their bones
burn to ash;

till she unravels the map and breaks
through the skylight of Nobody's home -

the knowledge of which is
weighted like stone.

* * *

I'm not going to lie – I quite like this one. I've been searching for the words to write something this personal in ages, and it's so good to finally get it out of the system. I feel like it's the most honest I've been able to be with myself in a while now.

The form is inspired by Plath's 'Poems for a Birthday' which is similarly written in seven parts, each section working as a stand-alone poem, but also as part of the larger piece.

Please go and read this in it's proper format on my dA page.

Which brings me on to some good news - my poem Of Star Guts and Satellites was recently awarded a DLD! This is the second time I've been featured by the group, and just goes to show how much my poetry has improved since my first real attempts back in the summer of 2008 (trust me, you don't want to see those!)