In Response To An Indian Summer

Many thought it would be the summer that never came

Many couldn’t have been more ill prepared.
The Island was hit late July
The sun a salvo on its civility.

A girl left a novel open, face down on a picnic blanket.

The leaves growled aflame within half an hour.
The people told tales
Of birds falling from the sky
Observed in the process of ripping out their feathers with their very own
beaks
Presumably that their blood wouldn’t boil underneath.
The people told tales
Of road kill decaying within a minute
The process quickened like hideous stop-motion
The bones left charred and dusty on the tarmac.

Women had grown vulcherous

Through a cessation in appetite.
Jewels at their throats melted
At the command of Helios, the unholy God,
To leave marks, cruel and lasting
Where their adornments had burned their skin.

It was commonplace to get nosebleeds from standing up

So lovers remained prone
Occasionally scratching each other with a little finger
Only to recoil like an animal, bitten
Into the obscurity of its cave.

Men became violent in their lechery

Like dogs in heat
And whilst slurs erupted out the sides
Of car windows
And through the harmony of flies
Zipping and unzipping
The young and the vulnerable
Picked their way between shadows
Like bony strays
Guilt marring their features.

Those who were able

Fled these shores for some dark tropic,
To feed on tears of incense and grains of paradise
And hope, that like the phoenix,
From the ashes of their being
They would rise again.

I sat hunched in my garden

And passed an unlit cigarette to, and from my lips.

Gadabout Press, Out Of The Box, June. 2014

Smoke curled from my ribcage regardless.
This is the passion and every hillside is Golgotha
Giant daisies smouldered in the flowerbed
And I thought
That hell is indefinitely the image
Of two pink plastic flamingos
Melting in the heat.

Gadabout Press, Out Of The Box, June. 2014

Mermaid
Is there any compensation for chemotherapy? Can you dance for someone
who lies unmoving between muslin sheets? Can you taste death on the wind?
Does it taste of cloves or wine?
I think obsessively about my Grandparents youth. Wondering how I compare
to Anna and whether I deserve to carry her middle name. She lies buried
under a sycamore tree and people tie things to its branches in the month of
September.
This is a kite and I’m running through nettles and dragging it through
seamless seamless skies ahead hoping to catch fragments of the gold dust
edging the clouds. Needn’t worry about the stinging calves – someone will
skin me when I return. Hang up my flesh like silk from the doorframe and I’ll
lie on the floor trying to grow a tail.
When they sew my legs together I’ll practice moving through lakes bleeding
whalesong.
Down here the trees are made from wire, and scar-faced girls remove their
clothes under the branches.
Nothing is seductive because seductive means secret.
Would you like a cup of tea? I say this because we’re halfway across now and
I realise its brutal and you’re infinitely more beautiful than me.
We can live in a church with two steeples and breathe dust from time bronzed
novels.
I want wings that wrap around my frame.
I dream fish with fins of flame.

Gadabout Press, Out Of The Box, June. 2014