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.

Out Of Touch

It seems unfair
to be kept from air - held
in limbo between the white
of the skywashed ceilings
and the whites of the eyes
rolling back on blackness. Not
that they care – they’re used to
this confliction, days of contradiction. To us,
to them, there’s no difference - life
is a picture show in black
and white, and when the lights
fade, you’ll see
that this film’s drawn tight
across our eyes – else you might
notice the pressed ricepaper
wings that shoot crinoline
from our shoulderblades. Despite
everything.


Though,
being fragile as we are,
we are not expected to look
beyond the horizons of the dead-
pan stares to where those wings
could take us –

The doors, that swing
on such geometrical hinges
as to open both ways
are to remain forever
out of touch.

* * *

'I know death hath ten thousand several doors for men to take their exits; and 'tis found they go on such strange geometrical hinges, you may open them both ways.' - The Duchess of Malfi - Act IV

Sometimes it's hard to find an escape route, but remember - every trap has a trapdoor.

This is the first of several pieces that are basically clean-ups of old drafts from creative writing club. You can expect a few more of these coming up, I'm afraid - it's the easiest thing for me to do whilst the war against revision is being raged.

I pretty much completely changed the direction of this one, but without changing too much of the original content. Still not too sure about it though... some of the imagery seems a little too contrived - overused by me, if not everyone else. And you know that your work's not at its best when you begin to be influenced by your revision...

* * *

And finally, some news! Remember that school poetry competition I entered ages ago, with Wasteland? Well, I won! :)