There’s lipstick underneath your fingernails.
They’re flaky red encrusted iron sheets.
Your hand smothered my face – once, twice,
Three times, you pressed your palm against my cheek,
And smiling, ran those fingers to my lips,
And smiling, scratched the lipstick from my teeth.
Mackerel fishing – We all do it, to snare the bigger fish to fry,
And hang around the sewage taps, to coyly clamp those gaping mouths
hook, line and tackle: line and bait, those implements of our employ
That once did catch the mackerel fish, that feather tipped
The mackerel fish, that uses bait the mackerel fish,
To please the fish’man’s hungry wife.
Sylvia Plath – I’ve done it again;
I am a cannibal and I eat men.
The heavy fertility of English fields
Turns English eyes from skies of grey
To deep rolled hills and languid clouds
That wash the city smoke away.
This sensual expanse forms afternoons
Waist deep in floods of green and yellow,
Above, the trees reach heavenwards,
Their supple arms breeze soft and slow.
Now tremble heart; the great steam train
Shakes metal tacked horizon lines,
And howls the wind a requiem mass
For the sparrow on the metal tracks.
On the first day, God created light.
The national grid cut the pattern for the sun
then with fingers quick, took a needle to the night.
The concertina threaded barrel of the drum
pulses soft with every smack of yellow energy,
thawing flaccid blue tinged veins to districts red
with ribbon on some A3 paper, happily lost
under partisan souls who impotent, lie
gurgling in fallow beds, picking scabs and
waiting, waiting for a power cut.
Silence, but
the lapwing’s bare backed hunt
quotes rapture filled lascivious mornings;
waxwork jaws drip heavy with brine.
Lichen jowled
fern damp, crossbilled friends find
equine whores break estuary waters;
brackish backs feed hunger with desire.
Dotterel
flight brings fancy fuelled song
to its limits; bone picked, tundra barren
nomads plough stoic, to their death.
I’m trying to get a place on a poetry module at uni next year. I’ve got to send two or three samples in tomorrow and was wondering if anyone has any opinions as to which poems would be best to send?
Also, thanks so much to everyone who takes the time to read and comment. I feel so rude not replying to more people; every time I sit down and try to respond to anyone I get gripped by this choking awkwardness that scares me out of writing anything at all. I really am a very boring person and don’t have that much to say. Anyway, I thought I might actually say thank you and sorry for what must be perceived to be very rude. I’ll shush now.
t. x
When I come home, I tell a joke.
I hit a note with a bell and it carries
(clear enough) across this wasteland
Of a room. I take the mug from the
Sink and fill the silence with my drink.
I laugh again, but you don’t laugh, laugh,
Laugh with me. When my mouth dares to shut
I am strung up by the wrists from the
Ceiling to the floor and the shattering
Of glass is the sound in my ears.
A laugh once more, more word than a
sound and hollow with inane simplicity.
I’m the prodigal son and I’ve come home
Sticky-ribbed with salivating jaws; you
are aware I’m sure, that like the first man
I have several times to die
before I become your daughter and shake
The crumbs from the fold of my dress,
the sty from my eye, the grease from
my hair and the woman from my side.
When you raise your arms, you’re a vessel,
My love. With your arms raised high, he’ll
Pound the pestle to the slab.
When you move your foot hard enough,
There are flakes of skin and flesh filled balls
Seeding flowers, feeding birds.
When you cock your head, you bare your
Neck and risk the wrath of collar and a cape,
Circling, circling downwards.
Still, you stand in the dark with dirt
On your feet and the beat of the drum
Grinds your heels into the ground.
Let us, you and I, break the fourth wall.
Let us stand at the brink just to fall
Out of heaven
and our toes, pasty white,
Tip the motion of the ground.
Let’s forget these years of
Sulphur coated acolytes
And thick yellow smoke
That coddles to a halt.
Let us plunge, heavy angels, into
squalor and the sea.
