All Our Fair Ladies

In conversation with the cannibal kids,
cut and paste under city lights,
I began to sense
that something wasn't right.
We’d talked of kidneythieves, broke-
backed beliefs and the stolen babies
of beauty queens, and each of these
the kids seemed to cull out their shells
with an atavistic precision. They cut
their words with care - the reversed
thirst of a drought, turned inside out -
whilst sucking back martinis of mud,
bloody-beaked.

And though the signposts said 'beware',
I never thought the lion’s lair
would be up-market, fashion-knit, clear-cut.
But now, I see these city streets
harbour the secrets of the meat
market; where even the sky tries
to throw off its reflection, caught fleetingly
off the tops of skyscrapers;
those downtown castles
the kids have kinged.

There's no escape:
the kids have run rings
round all our fair ladies -
there's no 'if', 'but' or 'maybe',
just a wall.
Too vast to measure, too tall
to scale; if you stand up close,
you might not realise it was there
at all, though your nose was pressed
against glass: a looking glass
we cannot surpass, that reveals only
the small compass of our prison.

For the cannibals catch their corpses
in the fashion spreads - catalogue
of gaunt faces, matchstick legs
and the vacuous eyes of the latest
post-apocalyptic girl.
The pages cry out perfection:
(immortal and impossible)
the cannibals' lips curl.

I walk in dreams of mushroom clouds,
pallid paper smoke, and choke
on the expectations of a society
that would have me shrink,
silenced.
When, for all their sharp suits,
smooth tongues and fluted throats,
you could almost mistake the lies
these kids promote
as something 'civilised'.

* * *

More feminist / socio-political poetry! This time inspired by Naomi Wolf's 'The Beauty Myth'.
(Plus, 'Duchess of Malfi' reference!)
Again, blogger hates poetry, so please read this in its proper format here.

Yes, I'm back! And I've finished school forever. Now there's just a big gaping hole in my life which I'm meant to fill somehow. Endings are easy, it's just where you're left stranded afterwards that's the hard part.