Ocean Room

This room has never felt as huge as I sit in the centre of the plastic wannabe wood covered floors, my knees pulled up to my chin as I try to collapse into myself. All I can do is think now, my prose that constantly boast lengthy and intricate lines, simplified to one word: Sorry. I trace the whitewashed walls with empty eyes and paint pictures across it in my head. I paint Pictures of us in autumn shades and I wish that I could change how certain things have happened. What did I ever do to warrant your distrust, to push you so far that you would need to rely only on yourself when you know I’ve given you everything?

If I could, I would do everything right, but I’m only human. I’ll only let you down.

This is all I can think about as I sit and drown in this suffocating room. A room that has grown so large around me that it might as well be called an ocean in the middle of Sidcup.

Questions and Memories and Bite

Don’t touch me,

Your hands as I remember are ice cold

Full of spite and accompanied by the taste of blood

And sick and head splitting migraines

Don’t use words that don’t suit the shape of your mouth

Sorry is the word used by those who feel

Sorry and love are feelings felt

How can you feel when your eyes see nothing but you

You and your fists and your words

Words that cut as sharp as your fists wound

Who were you to do that

Who are you to come back and live

As a ghost in my hall

Who are you to shadow my decisions

And who are you to place your hands on me in memory,

To cause violent shivers when I’m on my own

Who are you that make my memory a place I must hide from

Who made you a god

Who gave you power

Who made you untouchable, fucking godless

What kind of hellish world spat forth

 somebody who could destroy

Like you do

Memoirs of a Lipstick Rabbit

I shiver silently, painful body spread across the blood stained floor of my jail made from cold steel. I can hear others crying out in pain, some who are only babies. They lay alone and scared, sores made by one of you rippling over their body. My fur, once pure-white-as-snow is now stained and tainted by your wannabe lipsticks and poisonous perfumes. Are you pretty now, will you ever have enough of your favourite blood red pout?

As the bulky doors open and let in a blast of light the others around me cry for help. I’ve been here long enough to know there’s no use in it, empty hearts ignore the pleas of the wounded. We all wait; crouched into the corners of our prisons to see who the next victim will be. What colour will your spring line be this year, coral or peach?

Hard steps echo around the room. They’re loud and hurt my burning ears. The smell of rubber gloves and sterile coats reach me before they do. Vacant eyes peer in at me: an experiment or a number. I don’t think or feel to them, I just make money. The cocking of the door lock sounds and I close my eyes. There’s a thunderous shriek as the jail door swings open. I feel Hades’ hand slowly approach me, and then it snatches my ears and pulls me violently from my jail. For a moment I’m in the air, swinging from my cage forcefully onto another cold metal slab. The impact on my body should hurt, but I can’t feel anymore. My nerves have suffered enough. They belt me down to the slab with leather straps. I look about me as they yank my ears up again, pulling the skin on my face tight. The vacant eyes stare into mine once more, surveying my soul. There is something shouted across the room and I watch as they bring a needle filled with green liquid across to me. They find a space which hasn’t yet been made raw and pus filled by their experiments, my last patch of white fur. They ready the section, and then I watch them plunge the needle into my flesh and feel the liquid bubble under my skin then spread through my body. The mint green juice travels rapidly through my muscles, making them contract painfully. My head feels like it might explode as my eyes grow heavy.  My body is full of scurrying fluid bugs which attack my every sense. As I lay in the throws of death, I hear the others of my kind crying out around me. They watch their future, because if they survive the tests they only have death to look forward to anyways.

My body shakes and I feel myself fitting, but because I’m held in place tightly by the binds, I just vibrate against the metal slab. The noise sounds odd to me as everything grows dark. I can no longer feel much of my sore ridden body; it has beaten me to death. The skeletal, black cloaked, scythe holding bastard: come for me at last.

Late Last Night

We sat in your car late last night, the heat from your dashboard warming my face.  I looked at you and tugged at your hand, a hand which so often grasps mine, a hand which had so often warmed mine while walking down a crowded street. A hand which had been the first show of love between us back when you had waited two hours for me to play my stupid games. You refused to pull your fingers closed around my hand. The hand that was the first part of me to touch you all that time ago, when I tugged at your shirt, the first night our souls touched. Your hand just hung limp in mine, no warmth flowed through it into me. No love flowed where it so often has.

      Late last night, I fell onto your shoulder hoping you’d wrap your arm round my waist and pull me close into your embrace. Instead you turned slightly and commented on the smell of booze and smoke that clung to my clothes and breath; the sign of a heavy night trying to get your face from my mind.  You lifted your hand to your lips as you faced the window away from me, running a finger over the contours of your lip. I watched as you shook your head. You felt so cold, your hand limp in mine, your breath short and your eyes tracing shadows that danced outside the window which had started to form a film of pale condensation.

      Late last night, sitting in your car at the end of my road, I pulled your face to mine. Hoping that our eyes could meet, as they have before. Hoping the things that made you fall for me as often as we lay together under your covers would be able to save me tonight. Instead your eyes met mine and looked right through them. Your eyes, my saviours, which had always managed to pull me in and soothe me; last night they damned me. You didn’t look at me and smile; you just shook your head, causing flyaway strands of your hair to bounce along from side to side. I could take the limp hand and the body that no longer fit like a puzzle piece. But the eyes that rejected me now, they pulled me into a dark room. They pushed me into a corner and locked the door, leaving me to fend off the ghosts of my past on my own. Your eyes had regaled me with tales of your love without your mouth ever forming the words. That second night we had met, your eyes guided me to you. Your eyes, I realise had become my best friends. Your eyes, had been the parts of you which ran over me as I got dressed in front of you, hurrying to leave. They had taken me in so hungrily before, seeing no imperfection. But now they saw only the things I couldn’t give you.

      Yesterday you needed me and I left you to fight the thoughts that corrupt and worm their way through your head on your own. Yesterday anger had built up in my baby, anger that I ignored for someone else’s pain. I left you for somebody who had hurt me, an event that you had held and comforted me through. Instead of loving you like I should have, I left you to drown in the vicious undercurrent of reality on your own.  Because of this you denied me your wake, the calming tide of your love. I left you on your own to fend for yourself, something I promised to never do.

         I’ve sent you others’ sonnets and poems so often, to explain my own feelings. Feelings which belong to the young, because they’re something the old just don’t have the heart for. But late last night your car contained one broken heart and a heart that had gone fishin’. Maybe love like this has finally become too much for you, our age gap finally showing.  An age gap which had never mattered to us before as we built our nest out of your sheets and pillows, as we found a home in each others arms. Maybe I’ve let you down  one too many times, maybe the comfort you once found in my presence has become a novelty, maybe I’m just not enough anymore. For all your poorly judged words, saying ‘I love you’ was the worst.

 Late last night there was only one person who said I love you and meant it. Because the other had already given too much love to the ones that got away before I came along. You had only limited love left for me. The rest of it belongs to somebody else, the person who shared your life before me.

L.O.V.E

Baby, if you just lay here

keep me in your arms

I’ll care for you and prove you wrong for the rest of our time -

together, I’ll always say that word

L.O.V.E… and mean it

I won’t mind your stupid thoughts

if you’ll just laugh at mine

your bed can be our castle

the likes of which this damn world could never have designed

we can stay here and build ourselves a home

out of sheets that stick with sweat

and pillows that have fallen off the bed