Fear Of drowning

What if the book and the pen must become my only lover? What if no one else will be able to… love me this way… make love to me this way… with the power of such feeling?
(a thousand valiant horses pounding on my brain, dizzying sex like opium or headlights, flushed breath, insane noises, all flock towards me… eaten by birds)
   
A deranged spinster in an attic flat filled with birdcages and Venetian death masks, radioactive rocks and black and white Audrey Beardsley pictures on her wall?
Muttering to herself, giving herself completely, surrendering all she is, legs akimbo, a sad hallucination, all adoring to her art?

Is this horrifying beauty?
Is this the only way?
Already, no one sees me for dust these days.
Who can match up, how can I match up any more

when I am an overgrown forest, a babbling brook, an overcast shadow, a yellow crab with pincers, a veritable feast, unknown still, misshapen, god, who will take me with so much emotion?

Too many tectonic plates moving, sliding.
I got Ethiopia in my twisted right foot, full scale blizzards in my cheeks, aurora, red, snowdrops, a wealth of peonies, fickle shadows, black legions of marching men, all tramping through the silent place where pleasure soars and danger beats (it’s here, sniff, the light between my thighs)

My writing voice is that of the wizened and post nubile.
Anonymous, androgynous, without form, shape, breasts.

Take me out of this place and I’m ceasing to know myself again.
Alien to me, with my lustrous hair, fingers soft and simple, and they still call me a beauty.

I shed her in these blank pages, dead as a door nail, voiceless abandon in a ferocious wind, graceless.

Such freedom tears me, all abrupt, seeking triumph, absolution...to be faceless.

I fear total submersion in my own rivers, death by drowning.

Pavlova

I watch your face change
like a smooth stone,
water running over;
like wet weather
in September;
like troops invading
a sleepy East European village.


Here it comes.

I’d sat in that same cafe
six months earlier,
Examining every ice cream flavour –
toffee, apple pie, raspberry pavlova.

I'd felt it coming,
like the pull of moon on tides
or a sure bet on ‘Lucky Numbers’.
We slept together
he'd said, face changing
like pebbles,
an ocean rushing over;
like downpours in July,
like men taking up arms
beneath an East European flyover.

I tossed the menu aside,
overturned his
banana cream gondola.
Stuck a finger up at the waitress.
Stomped outside, shouted at cyclists;
shook my fist at a seagull,
spat her name as if it were cyanide.

Felt stupid, went home.

Now I sit watching your face change
from spring to summer to winter.
This time I won’t stick around to hear it.
So I drop my spoon,
lick sauce from my chin,
say: "I bought the last lot.
Six pound fifty.
This time you’re paying."