Brackish

After the wet season, before
the midsummer night's drought,
I flight for the floodplains, where
the northern downpour bleeds out
and sweeps its love to the mouth
of my lungs. I sleep in the crux
of an oxbow, let my dreams flux
and flow fractured, deltaic. For this
is the way I piece myself apart,
a resolution, my absolution
in a new avulsion.

During the day, I move south
towards the river mouth, picking
pebbles, coral fangs from the riverbed.
A loose tooth is a common truth
in these parts. Bones are febrile,
eyelashes are made of chalk, salt.
Tears turn brackish. They cake
and crack on the flats of my hands.

This is my Pangaea,
this swollen geography,
this slacken land.
The point of no return.

Here, all else ends.

By dusk I meet the saltmarsh
and dehusk, grow halophytic
in the nightlight. I pull out
my hair, my fingernails, and
fill the gaps in my spine
with reed rhythms, saline.
The final rite: turning flesh to grass.

Tomorrow, morning mist
will drag the whitewash back,
ashes to ash.

And I will walk the water,
with a pocketful of stones
and something new to throw
beneath the glass.

* * *

Spite is a dangerous vice, but I still think I'd rather crucify than learn.
I hope this hurts like it's supposed to. As much as you hurt me.

.

Let's play spot the obscure literary / lyrical / geographical reference! Any excuse to indulge my love of random geographical terminology... xD

Feels Blind

The first thing I remember was the hunger.
Waking up and thinking is this natural? -
the way you fit your hands round my waist
and hold me like a doll, or toxic waste
from a post-nuclear family. - At arm's length.

You said the greed was my fault,
something to do with the biological seed
of what makes me woman. Makes me wrong.

I was told I don't belong here.
I was out of my depth, treading water
with all the other daughters who dared
to speak before they were spoken to;
those who woke and refused
to have the words choked out of them.

You said I was ugly, held down and half-drowned.
That I look best behind glass, or better still, beneath it.
Blow off the dust and learn to trust us, you said.

You tried to give me a new face, subservience,
but I couldn't fake it, couldn't take it - the silence
that lay behind. The binding of all those thou shalt knots.
You taught me my boundaries, gave me a baptism
in your fiction - made me the eve time forgot.


I watched your red tide rise before you pulled me under.
I told you this feels blind. Your words burned
like a lighthouse, guiding in the night:
Out of sight, out of mind.

* * *

With the last couple of poems, I wanted to take a break from all the narcissistic personal stuff I've been writing recently. So here we go, something more explicitly political than I've written in ages.

As always, the formatting's all out of whack, so please view this on my dA page for the proper version.


Inspired by the Bikini Kill song Feels Blind and, less obviously, I:Scintilla's Cursive Eve (although a lot of the original references to that were cut in the redraft). I'd really recommend listening to Feels Blind to fully understand where I'm coming from with this. It's also an epic song, so you're missing out if you haven't already heard it. (:

Stargrazing

On nights like these
we like to call ourselves stargrazers,
deep sky tourists.

We head up to the headland,
where heaven grafts itself to earth,
stitching the breeze between
our cheekbones, our fingertips.
Below, the sea stretches out
with an endless hush. You tell me
we'll sit in the rift
of the tide's smile to keep in touch
with the muchness of being
and believing. But seeing

beyond that pale of blacklight
is another matter. You have a map,
so you take the back of my hand
and paint a picture in mime
and synaesthesiac rhyme:

Our sky is like cat's eyes
kaleidoscoping along a wide road,
a highway of air and neverending
distance, with stars that sink deep
into tar - or maybe sheets - like sleep.
Think of travelling by car, you say. Of flying
then falling. My stars stutter
and flicker with motion sickness.

Our sky is like quicksilver,
mercury melting and jigsawing
across the universe. Sometimes,
metal seeps into the image
of a bird, a snake, a mask –
remnants of a late-forgotten past
and old light, slipping between
floorboards. You tell me to think
of a fence, of running my fingers
over the bars of metal, and feeling
distance, opening itself like an oracle
in the inbetween. All or nothing.

Our sky's a broken bone, home
of frostbitten toes, flyaway hair
and the way my cheeks chafe
against the wind. The sky splits
where the sunset sits on the horizon,
like an open door:
you say, and something more -
but you must be looking away
because your words are hushed, lost
in the anatomy of the Milky Way.

I understand,
I do.
I - I - stand
and shiver.

Your sky's a treasure trove:
a hoard of metaphors for
light, love, and the empty spaces
between the stars. It's your future,
your oracle opening onto the wide
unknown. It's matched to your map,
this place where the heavens
unhitch themselves from earth
and float from your throat
to where the moon is berthed
against a sea of sky. It's here, you escape
to Space, shuttling
on the back of the sea's
uneasy breath, her salted perfume.
While I sit and split; lose touch.

You tell me it's beautiful,
but I'm not sure I believe you, not yet.
You say to keep an open mind.

But how can I know what beauty is
when my sky, all I can see, is blind?

* * *

Written for the Spoken Word Poetry workshop hosted by The Writers'-Workshop.

This took so long to draft and re-draft, and I'm still not completely happy with it...
The formatting's not quite right here (as always). It's slightly better on my dA submission, but still not perfect there. Sometimes, the internet just hates my poetry. :P


Inspired by the lyrics to Stolen Babies' Mind Your Eyes:

Doors will scare me,
Windows leave me blind. :heart:

Surgery

Something most people don't realise
is that coral splints, painted brown,
screwed into the skull and mounted
like a crown allow for a preternatural
reconstruction. A rebirth; to break free
and shed skin like tears. A kind of shipwreck
surgery that makes a child look like a deer.

* * *

This, it turns out, is what hypothermia does to my brain. >__<; Based on one of Jack Handey's Deep Thoughts, as featured in the Nirvana song I Hate Myself and Want to Die:
"Most people don't realise that large pieces of coral, which have been painted brown and attached to the skull by common wood screws, can make a child look like a deer."

In The Dialect Of Insects

I hide in cupboards
and under the stairs,
underjoyed, black-eyed
and fossilised, over-aware
of the bitemarks forming
along my arms, my fingernails.

And thereby hangs a tale of
treacheries and transparencies.
I can't deny: I am gutterspined,
my own bone-laced anathema,
my own dead, buried face
to the ground. Lulled

and dumbfound by the clicks
and spit of this insect language,
I find safety in the rhymes
and rhythms of the cockroach waltz,
watching the flick and swish
of clockwork in motion.

Time, passing. The metaphors
latching their claws into my chest.
I'm running out of words to stave
off this drought. And all I know is
that this is lights out, the final rite,
and I will sleep hungry tonight.

* * *

Right now, it feels like insect speak is all I have left.

.

Yes, parts of this are heavily influenced by Jack Off Jill's Cockroach Waltz. It's one of my favourite songs and I've wanted to write a poem based on it for ages.

That said, I was seriously tempted to title this 'Ugly Bug Ball', but then sanity prevented me. xD
(If you don't get the reference, then I'm afraid you've had a deprived childhood).

Camisado

In a double dream, I must spell out the storm:

how the half moon spoke in reams
of folk lore, pipe dreams that tore
the sky in two. How the walls
began to blister and you, sister,
took your place beneath my skin.

We met stargrazing, your eyes electric,
lacing your lies, your intricacies,
like a cat's cradle. And I, stumbling, stuttering
on in a maze of scars. My modern morphia,
sister scarecrow, I'd follow you to the depths
of my chest: to the mumblings and fumblings
of my heart in the dark. To deceit and defeat
and the great empty longings beyond.

For this, this is how
the camisado begins: with broken people
under a broken steeple, an arch of
aching arms and wing bones, steeling.
With the way the day is swallowed by the sun.

Undone, we write our own religions:
a crucifix made of spoons, knives,
our twisted lives. You say faith's
a virtue, but it's not for the effaced -
we who leave no trace above the surface.
But cut me open, explore me, rip me up
by the roots, and you'll find proof
of the things you cannot see: the truth.

Nemesister, teach me madness,
teach me freedom. Let me loose
control. Map the cavities, fill in
the gaps and when day breaks black,
I'll take your hand. Together,
we will meet the dawn where the sky
puckers like a bruise and I finally lose
touch.

* * *

Fear is my religion.

.

No, life and language and I are not getting on a the moment. Sorry about that.
I guess you could consider this a re-write of Monologue(s) or even You're. Yes, that's right, I'm back at square one again. :/

The first line is taken from Louise Bogan's Song for the Last Act. ♥

.mars

.

He still choked on goodbyes,
words like 'charred' and 'charnel',
but it always fell to Mars to make
the house of bone and regolith,
to take fingerprints from the dead.
He breathes the scenes of crimes
time after time in his own grim theatre.

Like a surgeon, he sculpts the earth,
wreaks revenge and wreckages.
Teethes soot and stones into the tired wings
of ribcages, wishbones - each one

a promise. That one day,
bulbs will breach the eyes of skulls,
that fruits will fill the skypits of the lost.
One day, these bruises will amuse, and
all that bloodrush will be just blush
beneath his skin.

.

* * *

Ta-da! The final piece in the mythology series!
_{[Yes, I'm fully aware I've missed several key gods out (including Pluto, dammit!), but 6 gods, 6 goddesses is quite a nice, balanced number.] :P}

Mars was the Roman god of war, revenge and courage, but also spring and growth in nature. That sense of rejuvenation is what I found most interesting about him.


You can see the rest of my (now complete, at least for now...) mythology series here or on my dA page.

.vulcan

.

Dug deep beneath the earth, there is no light.
No footholds to electric nights or larvae of
synthetic flights. No future. Just Vulcan,
bone lonely, with only his primitive kind of hunger
and a longing to hear something other than
the cemetery talking, walking over him. Unearthed.

This is his forge, where the flower of amnesia,
allowing one man to rewrite another, grows molten -
blown into glass, gunpowder and pyrotechnic stars.
Past, present, but only the future scars in the dark,
this life in transition. And though over and over
he's said it's over and done with, there's always
more. Always a greed, a need for hunger.

God of fire, Vulcan sulks alone, lying low
below the mountain. Nurturing burns.
He's learned to hide his heart, smoked
and charred, but still he chokes electric,
growing on into stone.

.

* * *

Vulcan – god of fire, blacksmiths and craftsmen. His forge is beneath Mount Etna, where he forges weapons for the gods and heroes.

I've always imagined Vulcan as a wretched kind of figure, twisted with loneliness. Probably because my interpretation is based on the impression I got from the Roman Mysteries series I read when I was little (I was quite literally obsessed with it, at one point :P).

Wrote this several weeks ago now (sorry for the slow and multiple updates!), and I'm still not entirely happy with it. There's something a little iffy about the way it slots together...


You can see the rest of my mythology series here or on my dA page.

Notes From A Famine

Lost in sleep, charting
streams consciousness forgot, she
speaks in poetry.

She raises sleepshot
eyes to find a guide – listens
to the sound of skies.

This is where the seeds
of dreams are sown – where muses
grow and feed on stars,

night air arias.
Sleep is hunger, says the Moon,
hung high and rung white.

* * *

Insomnia, again. Gah.
So tired and depressed right now. It was only to be expected, but still. I've had enough. :/

.

First time writing haikus. How did I do?

Reconstructing (De)Construction

I'm only sleeptalking,
speaking fractured poetry -

This is how it feels, I decide,
to be fixed - no longer
building night on the inside,
but succumbing to fantastical de-
constructions, marvelling at the map
of binary constellations written
under my skin. To feel no fear
staring wide-eyed at the sun,
at old letters of rejection or
even my reflection. Knowing
she's near; understanding she's un-
done.

This is how it feels to be whole:
to watch my breath thin
and bend the glass geometry
of these bottled skies eastward
to collect the sunrise. To memorise
the way the light builds and breaks,
and to love every lost second,
each heartache.

And this is how it feels, I realise,
to sit and cry for days,
when you can only sleep
for seconds, minutes. Defiance:
knowing the weight of the world
is heavy as god, but
beautiful as her insides.

* * *

One day, I'll feel this. All of it.

Liar, Liar

If l'appel du vide
is the urge to drown
all sense of self - to split
and accumulate bruises -
then to fabricate fables, to
forge fictions as I do
is nothing more than
poor impulse control.

I do not mean to confuse
or abuse the truth. My lies
are like thalidomide -
junkyard art shoved into being,
or the shards of
gasping hearts breaking
out of code. Making mundane myths
a la mort, a la mode; I'm caught

in distortion, pretty as drugs.
Junkie; addict. Liar, liar,
I require a fix of fiction -
the lies I tell and spin to sell.
(Some tears, a loose tooth,
the unravellings of truth.
The sum of myself out of
all that's left to give).

* * *

I'm attempting to come to terms with my own constructedness. The amount I lie – entirely pointless lies, mostly – is getting out of hand. Most of the time I don't even realise I'm doing it, it's only a while later that I'm like 'Hang on... That wasn't true. Why the hell did I even bother saying that?'
It's compulsive – like the want to throw myself under every car that drives past, the urge to fit myself into the smallest corner of my room or the sudden need to smash my wrists against something.

I don't have a clue what's going on anymore. :/

Make Like A Train, Take Tracks

This is escape
(or so we'd like to believe) –
taking the train through nowhere
and reaching now here. We'd hoped
for such a scape of waste
land, where the sun gutters
from the sky, and our footprints measure
not distance, but scope. Where, other
than the echoes of electric exoskeletons,
hoarse codes from broken throats,
the world is mute. Colourless.

When I talk of a landscape,
I speak of this silence:
this space, this time,
and how it means forever.
An emotion bled-out,
compressed -
under snow,
under duress.

* * *

I wrote the majority of this on the train back to uni after one of the most surreal weekends ever. Whilst feeling all insubstantial and disembodied and unreal, we passed through a mini snowstorm. You could just see the pylons looming out of the white like the imprints of skeletons on fossils.

There's nothing like nowhere to get you back in the here and now.

Terra Firma

This is an allegory; I
am not what I seem
and yet this means something.
Re-read, and you might realise
the abstraction behind my eyes -
a break like toothache
I shook to bake. Instant magic.

I talk good, you eat glass -
we do crosswords behind our backs:
each clue cryptic, a crypt.
This fable is a whole world
under the kitchen table,
curled like a cat or a cardigan
or a knife.

Life, distilled: a cold brew.
That’s what I offer you.


Across this mirror,
this terra firma,
I’ll throw my reflection
towards the light -
hoping that someday,
it might mean something
to me, too.

* * *

Hello, self. I've a story for you.
It ain't gonna be pretty, but it could be the truth, if you'll take it, if you'll make it your own.
Are you sitting comfortably?

Then I'll begin.

Twickenham Garden

The garden is dead.
The sun is spent
and the earth is sunk,
sullen. And everywhere
the scent of soil,
defeat. Deceit
in the shape of a serpent.

And here I stand:
a senseless piece
of this place; a faceless
participle caught
in the present tense,
in the I am, I make,
I do –

I make-do with the dead.
With the lost marble
limbs and the mandrake.
I suck venom from the snake
and sap the crocodile's tears,
for I do bring the spider love,
fear; that old self-traitor.

O the webs we weave –
the stones we've sown
into the horizon,
entwining spine
and time
like so much rope
round my neck.

Dream, she says,
of the age-old tale.
Sleep. Weep.
The fruits of my pilgrimage.
I'm in over my head,
and O, I know that
the garden is dead.

But this is not
the end of the world,
no -

It's just the beginning.

* * *

This is not solely my voice. It's just my take on a re-write of John Donne's Twickenham Garden.

I think all the late nights and excessive tea-drinking of uni life are finally starting to get to me: I'm actually starting to like Donne.

.jupiter

- Is this your first time drowning?

I'd let you speak for yourself, but I note
that in your – not inconsiderable – credentials,
it states you're a compulsive liar.
And you've a throat of thunder, at that.
You've been choking back
on atelophobia ever since you woke
under turpentine skies. Wondering why
the cat has nine times to die
and you have none.

- What happened to the sun?

You know only too well.
You gripped it too tight
and snuffed out the light.
Show me your borders,
your whalebone girt,
and I'll show you the way
the rays will pucker your skin
like a Nazi lampshade.

- What about the thunder?

Yes, what about the thunder?
The way you dialled telephone numbers
on knucklebones? The way you put your ear
to the floor, one foot in the door,
and felt for a pulse?

Each of these is a symptom of acute
sickness of the mind:
labyrinth disorder and your own kind
of Stockholm syndrome.

But I'm curious -
did you ever get an answer?

- And who sent the rain?

The answer's the same;
the same old shame
burning like a bolt
through the blue -
all that's left of you.
I am the perfect mouthpiece,
the missing organ,
and you say it all
in the way your bones
groan under stress.
In the stories I spin.
And in the way you begin
to stumble as you
carry yourself
home.

* * *

Yes, the mythology series is still going!

Jupiter – ruler of the gods. God of the sky, lightning and thunder. He had many alternative names, including 'of the light', 'thunderer', 'defender of boundaries' and 'sender of rain'.

There is only one voice in the poem. He's the doctor or the politician or the priest - the mouthpiece of the gods, who really never get a voice of their own.


You can see the rest of the mythology series here or on my deviantart page.

Tales Of A Tub

This is it:
the storybooks,
the soft carpets, and now,
at the end of the corridor,
the bath is running.

The water is tongueless, breathless.
I make a well in the thunder,
and shape a space for myself
to rock shut in the crux of a chemical
imbalance, this dyskrasia. It tastes
of finality: the salt of stones
and shattered wrists. Restless slumber.


But
it is also this:
my fists clenched on the future,
a destiny of my own design,
my own undoing. There is no aura,
no mystique – just a raw kind of power.
An open weakness. No more
tapping tables, knocking on would-
have-beens. I'll just lay back,
get waterlogged;

get ready to dream.

* * *

Dig, Ophelia. Just keep on digging.

This - this was painful. It's based on something that happened a while ago now, but I've never quite managed to tell anyone. I'm going through dark spaces at the moment, and I keep reliving this, over and over. Thought maybe it's time I let it breathe.

Again, sorry if this makes anyone feel uncomfortable.


Title's taken from Tale of a Tub by Plath, which this is in no way based on - it was just something I stumbled across again whilst wracking my brains for a title.

The New Zero

You say
there is no sense
in long nights spent
spinning myself out of glass,
the web of imperfections that
choke out my reflection. But I'll
do it anyway: trace the scars that map
the arms, the rough husk round zerospace.
Taking each new glitch, each old, unspent
love and shaping it into formulae, answers.
And if you could only understand one
thing about me, I wish it were this:
that there are two sides to every story,
and while there's one in composition,
the other's weighting,
in position.

* * *

'God, how self indulgent, I thought, but whom should I indulge if not myself? ... [They are] battle scars. "I have a heart to break" is all it means. "I am killable". ... It was never supposed to be a way of life: it was about survival.' – Emilie Autumn, The Asylum

Sorry if this makes you feel uncomfortable – god, I know full well how it can make people feel. But it's something I felt had to be said.

Title is from this song of the same name by Rasputina. I feel it fits.


Please go and see properly formatted version of this here on my deviantart page.

Fever Pitch

This is the only way I know myself:
from here to here; the clutch of gut
between an armspan. And you –
you are the whorl of pyrexia
in my chest, a knot of words
I can't quite express
except in a kind of half-rhyme,
in a rhythm that falters like a pulse.

And I know my boundaries;
that there to there's just air – a gulf
before the sure borders of your shore.
A full fathomlessness, bream-deep;
seasick retrogrades, and a thousand reams
of water to tread.

But I feel just fine,
I could run forever -

For you,
I would scale the depths
of this fever pitch,
and bring you back
what's stitched to the linings
of my ribs: too deep breaths
and a casketful of sleep.

* * *

For you.

I woke up today and realised that I am not a robot, after all.
[I am in fact, a nuke bomb, but that's another story...]


♥ Fever Pitch – The Romanovs
♥ Incident in a Medical Clinic – Rasputina
Perhaps two of my favourite love songs ever. Not that either of them is actually about love. :P

Rhetorica

It is for the best (they said).
They meant the fall. But
there is only light when the sky is rent
and I have sold my soul for another attempt
at this -

the chimeric fantasies, psychosis
in the palm of a hand. It has a certain charm
about it that few would understand,
like a clam that's swallowed a pearl
and lets the ancient words uncurl
across its tongue.

My own poetic prophecies didn't turn out so well.
I drunk a whole epitaph; my own epoch
that I picked from the pockets of time.
It was a binary kind of silence, acted out
to the knitting of heels to train tracks,
the breaking open of mouths, sealed.
They said the sighs would interrupt the songs
but I never had a melody to begin with,
I never had a voice. No choice but to let
the ceiling slip; to learn to inhabit an emptiness
once more.


Sometimes I check the empty spaces
between the collarbones to make sure
I'm truly alone. Paranoia's my symbiotic,
my rhetoric, and all I know
is that when I go out
I'm never
coming
home.

* * *

There are two sides to every story. This is one of them.
It's the most wonderful and terrifying feeling. Last time, I couldn't stop laughing for hours on end until it caught up with me. Hitting earth again really hurts.

Let's play spot the reference! There are several literary/lyrical references here (from 2 songs and 2 books). Anyone who manages to guess one gets a virtual cookie. <3

I Capture

Let's talk about something else.
I have decided that I am not going to grow
into anything other than who you think I am,
and that in this, I will finally be life-size;
happy. Through you, I will save myself –
memories of a scrap of civilisation, bone
china and tectonic plates - a relic
for the children of friction, clutching
at my wrist bones, my knee caps,
their scattered gravity.

Once, someone said We are all born undone,
and that we would find ourselves in nots –
the hips, the ankles, the knots of rib and spine.
The spacetime in between. I capture
the tarsal, frozen in a footprint;
you, a series of scars.

This is what I want to believe in:
the architecture of a fiction,
of a woman with a Mona Lisa smile.
I am not what I am, but what you see:
a whorl of semiotics; an artist's impression
of me.

* * *

Enough talk about me. Let's talk about you.
What do you think of me?
(L7, 'I Need')


I'm pretty sure this is one of the reasons I write confessional poetry - to get someone else to answer the questions I can't.

Quote is from Moll Flanders. Which I still haven't finished. First lecture is tomorrow! :\