poetry

Red lipstick
This wound has a voice
but she quiets it with red lipstick.
Makes it deeper, redder,
wider, wider,
blow-up doll '0' of surprise.
It has fewer uses than most.
Rip back the flesh and watch
as the blood bubbles burst at the corners
with every 'sssss' sound.

This red dress is a mess. It clings to the inside and vomits sulphur sinews down my thighs. But I don't mind. My body perpendicular in this dress and my breasts inconclusive. Question marks. It stings sometimes where it rips, cloth torn, red smeared on wipe-clean skin. I smell like lead. It's been a while since you were close enough to smell me. Neither inside or beside me. Stay outside so your hands don't pluck me, with the dirt from a thousand and one and fifty searing scents of smoke rising where they fucked me. This red dress is a mess but it's all I have left. I'll never wash away the dirt.

Amour Macabre
I feed him my neuroses
rusty spoon and spittle strands.
Jaundice-yellow eyeballs
rusty nails, calloused hands.
He gift-wraps his psychoses,
a blunt-edged head in an old shoe box.
My lover, my friend, my nemesis
stapled to my skin, prostheses,
artificial emotion and strap-on penis.
I'm two-headed, limbless, a torso,
a between-ness.
The place where he comes in.
He slaps my behind, writes bitch on
my back in black biro.
Butchers me with butterfly strokes.
Shrinks me with halitosis
like a scalded candle melting.
Hairline fractures, a broken jaw,
he stinks of all the others,
the virgins and the whores;
I suck up their sex just like before.
Delirium coats my skin like verdigris.
His fingers leave me wanting,
greasy dirty neonatal.
My heart is in his top pocket
the blood bleeds through like
a leaking red pen
that spells x loves y till then.

I am not my mother
I am not my father

I am definitely not my father's

therefore I am born of...
water, fish gills and plankton
I am narcissistic
egoistic
slightly masochistic
an erring sadistic streak
I am vain
hypocritical
superficial
with illusions of grandeur
(the kind that accompany those
moments of nervous hypermania)
Invulnerable I am but not to death. Or beauty. Or passion. Or whateverthefuck.
I can read and I do read but only for myself.
I am private and very very honest but only when masquerading as someone else.
I am an idealist in love with a realist in love with a...
I mean, I am a serious kind of girl in love with a comedian
Everything is association.

Negative Space

I am:
the cracked vinyl
the bloodied swab
the empty shell
the discarded needle
the second interval
the broken watch
the ghost limb
the single shoe
the ugly view
the half-chewed
the penny in the dirt
the hole in your shirt
that you can't stop fingering.

You are:
everything else.

Slap that smart mouth.
Tongue another pill
through red lipstick
eradicable;
inappropriately worn at all times
blood-red for funerals, whore-red
at his sixth birthday party.
You invented a new language and
speak it without meaning, involvement.
Incommensurable.
Just to feel the alien sounds
squeezed between molars like fish
eggs, their delicate bursting orgasmic.
Cough up another white hairball
albino spittle strands indigestable,
congenital.
Chew that pork fat gossip,
the grease sucking up to your fat red lips
like a glistening new-born animal.