Her fingers glide over the swell of belly once there She remembers A morning long ago when he first cried, ejected from her womb The weight of him in the crook of her arm Cocooning, disquieting love She remembers Soft fingers at her waist The imprint of teeth on tender flesh The future bloomed through […]
A gauze falls between her and the world Anchorless girl senses unreliable irises unseeing Her epidermis an armoured hedgehog which spurns touch The tide takes her sanity until she no longer knows who she is Everything becomes a performance The ticking of time a judge’s gavel Her make-up sits thick upon her skin like a […]
She loved with a passion that requires courage, her heart a tiny bird in her chest Not for her the robotic focus of suited men and painted wives Or the false gods of screens and cables, the trappings of human endeavour Instead, she ran barefoot through fields and slept unafraid under the stars She read […]
Come into my laboratory where I toil over a bunsen burner, pearled beads of sweat on my forehead You’ll find me in a white coat and goggles the Mary Shelley of my time venturing into the dark when all is lost I hover at the abyss: a witch, a mad scientist, a soul doctor risking […]
Darkness came to take the lost girl Those who were left mourned and beat their breasts They knew not her unease had fled No longer imprisoned by her broken body her sleep was peaceful for the first time since childhood Night blurred into day When she woke an old lady was waiting, blue dots trailing […]
We went back to bright city lights and siren calls bleak rain over stacked chimney pots where the big clock stands proudly amidst carved buildings of yellowed stone sticky pubs and well-trodden streets, in which street lamps cast familiar shadows We travelled back to the rhythms of my childhood of parental love and my grandmother’s […]
I dreamt of you when I was a girl a hazy promise, alien and enchanting The vision bore fruit decades later, a happy union of God, luck and human biology When the time came you slithered out covered in vernix, beautiful from the moment I saw you, a part of myself I did not recognise: […]
An old man came from India, scooped up his savings to visit his new grandchild The baby, quiet and soft, suffered from an ailment that marred its first days Still the man beamed, his heart filled with gladness that the child was there, a gift, a fighter he planned to lift up with his own […]
Sadness heaves inside me, waves of rolling sickness Weight has found a home in the midst of my brow, and in the corners of my downturned mouth Spaces flooded with blackness Concrete over springing joy, sucking away momentum And I am frozen in time.
Walls washed in white Leather seats in echoing halls Piano concertos ring out through closed doors Muted tones of pre-pubescent girls clad in whispers of pink and ghostly tights Pointing, springing, arching, fingers dancing Bending the future to their will.
Shrouded silhouette against the evening light Nicotine swirls in the air Yesterday’s newspapers litter the stairs Shackled by integrity Devoted pilgrim High-flyer in the angel stakes, yet hurt bloomed like a bruise Left bereft by a broken circle of blood Your thoughts now confined to a mound of earth that bears your name Exalted grave […]
My love for you is burned onto the pages of my journal It pools in the grooves where my pen has pressed The past in a capsule Let me savour the man I knew – the one hidden by cares I’ll hold the memory of us on my tongue and let it mellow there In […]