Sorrow's House

In sorrow’s fractured greenhouse

you traded fabric discussions
(scissored from your bombazine)
for paper patterns
and cabled words,
strawberry-seed eyes –
little against berry-bloodied teeth.
Those rat-bitten, garish maps
of bodice-ribs
twin shoulders, coloured with hard-woven
dyes. My skirts are violent
against your unholy
nails, scattering crossed touches on my veins.

Your ill humour betrays a blushing bride

inside
the small screenplay that you invented.
It was meant to serve its time
as an hour
does a minute
does a second
does a drop
of sand sitting in a wasted wine-glass.
Full of film-reel lips and wrinkled ideology;
ruptured skins and blemished rhymes.
I raised a cross to petition you,
revoke your petty scheming.

Your desultory days inside that

fogged greenhouse
sauntered by fashionably,
untried and untasted by a virgin tongue
like mine.
You didn’t want my tastebuds tarred
like the Queen’s roses
and to unstitch your throat’s pale flesh, red
as those sun-fed blossoms that were painted
long ago.
Like the moon's gauze,
paper without ink’s careless clothing.
You nailed the sweetness to your
corneas, spun beneath
a hungry crowd, and bid me
flee these wicked brambles, take my petticoats along. 

A coronary chest of drawers opens

a garden’s wild bereavement.
I am invited, in my angry frock,
to taste a bilberry while you’re gone.
I hurl it to a weak God’s lip for your
fettered wretched ways.
Now Jupiter watches as a spider-mouth's breath
wakes the lazing glass.
I brand patterns, bone unfurled
to its thatched marrow
by your toil and
my lust.
I left my frightened knight for
an evening in a glass house;
my knave was gone, and the dark
was long, and the rooms were empty.
So I fled the wicked brambles and took Sorrow’s place instead.