Ceremony

Awake with eyes still closed

The feel of blood trickling from forehead

Knowing the touch of life and it’s feel against skin.

 

A red line running down past an eye and over a cheek

The track run by a lovers finger

A touch to sweet.

 

Thirst reaches out past plate, knife and fork to glass

It’s place not seen but felt filling the space before

Glass is to heavy to move, placed to perfect to leave.

 

Ticking from the plate is a worry

A finger before the hand ceases it’s cry

Edge so sharp and skin so weak.

 

Burst red from finger to hand

A feeling well known

Plate ticks but worry is forgotten.

Us vs Them

Love, your name.

What I called you at least.

What they called you didn’t matter

Because they didn’t matter.

And it was with they who didn’t matter that you left me

And I still hate you for that.

 

We would sit in the quiet and emptiness of the third floor

The home you had built for yourself above all others.

A heaven so appropriate for such a god.

You willed me to sleep in the arms of my true mother and lover

And taunted me with dreams of our life together and alone.

Apart from the rest. The rest who we would laugh at, from our perch in the clouds.

 

But I was not enough for you

I and the life I offered

My life. My heart. My soul.

All offered to you in willing sacrifice.

To be rejected by god is to be rejected by all there is

And it was you, my god, who rejected me with your end.

 

Love, your name.

What I call you still.

What they call you doesn’t matter

Because they don’t matter.

And it is I who is left alone now on the third floor

Cowering in your empty heaven.

She moves in the weak light

A theatre, old, decrepit, and left alone to rot by all but her.

A single weak spotlight falls onto the broken wood of the stage

Heavy with thick layers of dust.

Within this dull light she moves

She moves in a way so inhuman, so beautiful, so lost.

There is only silence at this

No gasps of delight or applause reward her.

She cares not.

She moves in the weak light

And it is reward enough.

Repeat

There are ghosts here

Moving in the corners of our eyes.

When we shift our gaze to capture their dance

We are met only by the blank eyes of our reflections

Smiling back at us mockingly.

But we are not smiling.

This Shape of You

I have no memory of you

 

Only illusions that wrap themselves in your shape

And cross out the marks on my arms where I bled from your touch

All of eight years ago.

 

They laugh at me, these shapes

Kaw, kaw, kawing as they bend and convulse

To form pattens in the dust behind my eyes.

 

One of them, the smallest one, moves away from the others

I recognise it at once

It smells of the wicked snare that encased you.

 

Oh you, oh parasite that you where and are

How I willed you to feed

On my care and my worry and my doubt.

 

The shape now forms a merciless smile

That I know full well hides a cut-throat tongue

It taunts and teases me with its haunting kiss.

 

This shape of you.

Fun and Games

When I was a child I would pretend to be dead.

 

It was a game, it was my favourite game. One I could play alone which where the only games I played. I would lie on the floor and try as hard as I could to be dead. I would be as still as I could be and try to stop thinking, stop being, stop. I could feel myself sinking into oblivion. I knew with the certainty of a child that if I let myself I could die, there, then, blip, gone. I could will myself out of existence. But I never did. It was a game, a risky game yes but the best ones always are aren’t they?

 

At the very last second to stop myself from stopping I would start to think again. Think about the dead body, the lifeless cadaver, the soulless husk that I now was. I would imagine the long quite hours I would lie there undiscovered positioned in the way I’d seen the corpses on TV. Always on their right side arms out in front in a V shape. I would imagine the huss and bustle of the paramedics, who back then were just doctors, and the detectives, who back then were just policemen. The nice lady with the short black hair who always consoled my weeping mother. The two doctors in their bright yellow jackets who tusked, tusked, tusked at such a young life lost. And best of all the short, squat policeman with the moustache and the raincoat and the smoky cigarette that never left his mouth. Who would eye my parents suspiciously.

 

But eventually the game would come to an end. The point came in the fantasy scene when my body would have to be moved and the game was over. This wasn’t a bad thing of course, games have to end. Without all the boring things in between what fun would games be?

 

Anyway that was my favourite game as a child. It was a marvellous game. One day, I think I shall play it again. Just for fun.

Birthdays are fun for everyone but the victim

A bloody mess leaked from the cake as it was cut into.

Most of the guests smiled smiles of gleeful anticipation,
Their faces half full of hunger and half full of lust.

There was a small few who wore expressions of implied revulsion,
More out of some misguided social instinct than true heart felt disgust.

After all they were hungry too and though they did not allow their mouths to hang open with want,
They too felt the rush of saliva and need.

The cake, now in individual pieces, sat on individual green plates,
Each decorated with the most wondrous acts of jealousy.

Each spongy mass an island in a pool of coppery blood.