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Aylan

I wrap his body

In the finest tabloid paper and

Tie quality strings

With tight little knots

What else can I do with

My celebrated son

But send him to your better world

Filled with food, shelter and toys

I whisper a last goodbye

As I place him on postal scale

Weighing him heavy against

The price of hope

But we both know

He’ll grow cold this Christmas

Under plastic needle trees

With their fake magic dreams

 

Flowering

-->

It was my older Sister

who inspired me

To say, fuck it

I’ll not wear a bra

Today. My mother never

Could have, for I

Was afraid

Of the way hers sway

My Great Aunts

Let their mouths stretch

As they laugh

About how lewdness is their

Art. Shaking their heads

Like cudded cows

With nothing better to do

Than fart.

But my Grandma

With her wiggle on the dance floor

A kid from

A street called

Rough. She was

The one who

Stirred me up

To really strut my stuff.

Riots in Reflection

Is our custodian of calm,

Time?

So elastic and plastic and thin.

Or is it purely a technique for keeping track

When we want something looking back?

Perhaps she’s a gentle nurse,

Tucking souvenir tickets into our pockets.

Tender times spent waiting with children,

Unwilling to urge them into any rat race

Or when I pulled you from beneath a truncheon

moments before it split open your girlish face

The day you wanted something from me but I gave you only words

Wasn’t it you who said it is time we grew up? With

Time a lighthouse blaring warnings of imminent rocky ruin.

Tumbling through hourglass figures to settle on the underside of our hips.

Scorching moist elastin into a salty dry skin that cannot be rubbed young.

Time never stretching languid again

nor preening in the heat wave of unlimited opportunity.

She’s truncating, cooling and separating,

Breaking us like flotsam floating away still.

My nemesis moving fast forward

Intent on her kill.

Queening

I bet the queen wishes

She was someone else

Entirely, a postie or a

Poet or even

A genuine retiree

So many things

She’ll never feel

Like what it’s like to be unknown

Or beaten up

Or sent back home

I wonder if she dreams

Of saying goodbye

To that waving work

Then just going down the boozer

And acting like a total jerk

But why do I seem to need

Celebrities and the VIP’d

Them up on pedestals

Me sucking my thumb

Waiting for mum?

All Love is Opportunity

I’m lost in this

thickening fog of Expectations

 fermenting beyond their prime

On who said what to who again

And when

As though if we can just

Uncover the blame thread

We can each hold up our own head

And cry righteous tears about our undead love

Still the only the thing we both know

Is what we can’t let go

Because once it was the only show

We wanted to watch

But now it is a stale rerun

Of knots that have been undone

Longer than either of us wanted to believe because

All love is opportunity

Even when the sheets are clean

Never to get dirty again

And all this linen we keep trying to wash

Is stained indelibly with us

But even so I fear

Our hearts will never be reopened

After all this vinegar soaking

 unless we stop provoking

All that we ever had will be tossed

Like leaves plucked off in summer

Never to let the tree recover

And if I don’t want to be lovers

It doesn’t mean

I don’t still

Love us

Hollow

Victory has a spineless sister

Whose skin she filleted

When their childish games turned sinister

Not content with slapping face or breaking bones

They blew their mother up

In a race to live without a home

Now Victory stalks the streets

Searching for clean sheets and pillows to weep on

But everyone is dead and gone.

tweet poem about world war two.

Pushing through earth to find, blood of mother’s sons feeding my veins. I cannot weep for I am but a flower, but I can blush.


I'm grateful for my prize book token with which I bought "the paying guests" by Sarah Waters
 Maj x

The Outsider Inside.

An abandoned hostess trolley to one side of a shin high

Smoked glass occasional table

Reflects a jostle of trinkets

Somethings to dust when the telly bible bores

Cloying, intrusive, wonky

The filthy mirror makes her want to tell lies about herself

Not sad skinny, bare bibs behind long hair

A modern day lady Godiva; all posh phony pony and pig pink skin

But behind her brush stroked browns jazz with orange

And cobweb greys give her away

Memories of other peoples’ mother’s houses,

When they are not home but she is there,

With them, alone

Working them up like a spider, leaking blood to build bone

Don’t give her a lecture on the romantics, things smell wrong

If the room could talk, a caricatured voice would say

“Don’t interrupt the themes, however crazy it seems

Try to match the furniture and just subsume”

But she wouldn’t know,

To whom.

Roving

The feast is untouched, like a web in a copse,

But my fingers are greasy and aging.

The spiders of my mind

Are spilling homemade wine,

Stains drip heavy and red from the table.

The fixation on change is an old one I know,

Running determined yet blind toward tomorrow,

Dewdrops of jewellery, wink the sunrise, so

I can’t stop the ache to get roving.

Fruits fall, unpicked by tender hands,

Berries ferment in the dog days of summer.

Life is lush and darkest green with leisure,

Still a tugging on silk strings pull onward

To a lust for faraway buried treasure.

The future has seen, what I was supposed to have been,

As the buzz of a thousand flies start their swarming,

And so home is lost to me now, as I nomad my plan

To follow the river wherever she goes flowing.

A to Z of kisses

A is for an anonymous stranger coming close,

B is for the brief air breeze that wakes me from a doze.

C is for curtness, colder than a cut

D is for dangerous, the kiss that stops a ‘but’.

E is for empty, it’s in the kisses that you can tell

F is for frenzied ones that make soft lips swell.

G is for those guzzling with rude sucky noises,

H is for horrid

I is for insisting that I join in,

J is for the juvenile, sloppy learning mess.

K is for the killer kiss that leads your heart astray.

L lingers lazy on my sheets all day.

M is for the memorable kisses that never go away.

N is for the noses getting in the way,

O is for opening up to let a woman inside

P is for passionate roaring pleasure with lipstick applied.

Q is for those quizzical kisses searching for information.

U for something understood, silent and patient.

V is a vicious stinging, deep in a darkened bed,

W is wet and slippery desire being fed.

X for who like lips spiced with extra lust,

Y is for yes and finally consenting to feel

Z is for the zenith, climax of the zeal.

Bright and sharp is the call of the bell; hard and smart is its sting.

                                                                                The forest is death cold, damp and so choked that I am blind for more than a few footsteps ahead. The leaf mould floor is so thick with decomposition that I stumble dragging my legs through fungal soup.  Smells of earth stink up my nostrils; sweet decay follows every move I make.  I have been lost here all my life. Since I first crawled out of from between a trees split roots as a newborn fool. Since she left me here longer ago than I can now remember; my breasts stinging with our first contact. 

                                                            Birds shriek about sex and territory but I don’t listen, all I do is keep looking.  I see a shadow eclipse the moonlight and open my mouth to call her name but only butterflies come out. 

      She is hiding, behind a smooth trunk of an elephant shaped beech don’t ask me how I know.  I lock on, lethal fever joy flushing through my chest.  I surge toward her my heart pounding as angry pine branches tear at my clothes. Bright beads of blood jewel up my filthy skin but keep going. In my mind’s eye I can see her, grinning with childie delight at my approach, preparing to jump out and surprise me. Finally I am through the thicket, cut and ruined but there, hesitating behind the tree that harbours her. I throw my arms around it, long and loose, to feel the beat of her squeal, but only naked bark welcomes my embrace. All that is left of her is the scent of her skin to encourage me.

Bright and sharp is the call of the bell; hard and smart is its sting.

She keeps the game going, lures me on a trail in the undergrowth. Longing to fall against moss with her mouth inside mine, I keep moving.  A spider has used one of her hairs to weave a signpost into it’s home, her clever fingers are as deft and subtle, but I recognise every bright filament.  I take off what is left of the tatters of my shoes, to rummage deep into the sticky mud with my toes, where she stood to signal me.  The rude sounds of the sucking wet soil help me piece together the fragments of the fading memories.

                                           Ours was a precarious affair, full of bitter revenge and feminine fears, we slept in ditches, rolling among soily grass roots, opened our eyes to stare down bruised skies at dawn. She was huge, fertile as a boar, able to ferret out my concealed things with her curved and wicked tusks. We never had enough of skin sliding against skin, of fragrant sticky nests under arms and between legs.  She picked every flower she could find to press between my creases, fragrant petals crushed into a rich pungent paste.    

                                                               Suddenly I hear her carelessly snap a twig somewhere to my left and my naked feet plough the soft ground running to catch her. I pretend I will scold her now for playing so ruthless when both of us are tired. Tired of missing the honey whispers of hot breath into silky hair.  A badger eyes me balefully and I know why none of the woodland creatures are disturbed by my presence, I smell like I belong to them. Why does she not come? What am I, if I am not hers? Whose story am I in, if not a story of us? Where else is there beside the softened mossy rocks of our copse? 

Bright and sharp is the call of the bell; hard and smart is its sting.

                                                                                                   

                                                                          I lie down to beg the ground, beating the wet soil with fists and feet. “Why me?”  I call down into a rabbit hole to her “I’ll do anything.” I choke on lungfuls of dirty air and whisper bravely as I can, my pitch too desperate high. “I give up; you win. Come, I need you back.”

                                                                          As I crouch there in the bramble of scrub, a wet thorn branch tangles in my hair forcing my head backwards sharply. I moan out loudly hoping it is her come back to provoke my desire, but she is not there. She is not coming.

                                                                                              Finally tears fill the cavities of my face. I am ashamed of what I have become. I know she will crow when she sees me crying, after all the tears she shed for me, but I have nowhere left to look.  I pull away the last rag of what were once my clothes and enjoy the sharp acid sting of the cold night.                                            

She is gone; I must forget her.                                                

bully girl

I was bullied as a child.

Taunted with names as many are.

So I learned to bully back.

Learned the sweet thrill

Of pinching soft nipples too hard.

I grew with the power to wound.

Attractive to the weak and the teary.

I loved myself powerful and

It seemed I was loved in return,

But some people still spurned me.

Why those others interested me

More than those who liked me

I could not comprehend.

Perverse wanting what you’ve not got

Maybe, or perhaps in your heart you just know.

The self-assured did not like me

They could see how I always talked about me

How I never admitted to any flaw

How I could never let my hair down

And just naked be me.

The more these people walked away

The more I wanted only them.

The more I pursued them with my

Usual ploys of gifts and cajolery,

The more I saw them run.

Eventually I had to explore

That they knew more about me than I did.

Knew what I was up to, my tricks,

My techniques for making them my prisoner,

That they were too wise to be caught in my spider lies.

So I let it go and with it went

All the glorious swag my blag had bought me.

I had to learn to simply be nice

To be selective in my friends

To be only, easily hurt me.

Now when people try to bully me

I bare my teeth, but I understand

Why they choose this niche.

That the journey away is hard and long and often cold

But every fighting dog, one day gets old.

goggle box

goggle box

by majikle

My TV is a pit-bull dog

Locking on its jaws,

It is a stealthy burglar

Rifling through my drawers

My TV is a space alien borg

All futility of resistance,

It’s hydroponic dopey skunk with

No points for persistence

My TV is a car alarm

Drowning out other creatures,

It’s a coke-a-cola sugar rush

Disguised with social features

My TV is air conditioning

Taking over from a real sky,

It’s an earworm of a lyric

That has no one shouting “why?”

My TV is a stringy thong

With no sympathy for soft tissue,

It is an endless row of chain link fence

When pushing together is the issue

My TV was not born bad,

 It’s the best oracle I ever had

But so much is only tinsel dust,

And desire isn’t love; it’s just lust.

lampeter food festival - photo by T.Dove photography

The Opposite of Jealousy is Compersion

My girlfriend is a warm wide sea

Where other people swim, besides me.

Her rising tides bring such unseemly bliss

That even if I could deny them this,

Why would I?

Capitulating slowly to her insistent waves

Steals us away to exciting nights and carnal days.

The roll of her storms are exhausting but,

They take us further than we’ve ever got

Alone

My lover’s love is deep cleaning for the mind and skin

There is room for everyone to just dive in.

Her briny buoyancy holds our bodies up

In gravity defying, floating open sup

Of generosity

So if I chance to hear her mermaids call

As someone else unburies her treasure haul

Even if I can’t share those salty kisses

Who profits from her happiness’s?

But me?

the domestic violence

A twisting rain of copper and gold coins

Pays out from the patient nurture of trees,

As we arch our backs in the hot room

Gazing in awe at the leaves

Happy he leaves for the airport

Hoping to have an easy day

Having outsourced his share of the dishes

The wind is only blowing his way

Elsewhere silent air ires to roaring

Forcing people to bow down exposed,

No randomness in these victims

Simply a blitzkrieg imposed

Furious home planet is struggling

With temperatures beyond her control

Cooling water choked by pollution

She sweats it off pole to pole

Look away from this bloody devastation

when filthy bodies litter the land,

it is only the broken bones of nature

As we crush and pulp her hand

Tomorrow.

Saying goodbye to the summer

With an empty glass in her hand,

Wondering what salutation to say

As she watches the leaves drift and land,

Is it better to have laughed and then lost it

Or to never to have peeled off her clothes to bathe in that bay

The carpet of lawn grass is thinning

Revealing dark wet earth below,

Frigid fingers of wind pull her hair now

Where once in warm waters it floated away,

With layers of protection receding

Stones that bite into feet start to show

As a new season approaches

She hopes for things to be gained,

Warm fires and cosy gatherings with

Hot buttered toast loaded with jam,

Appreciating the support of other people

With a new garden yet to be planned

But today with the past not quite behind her

She grieves for the losses ahead,

The feel of soft skin plumpness

Running in air full of animal sun,

Waking into the joy of bright lightness

And anticipations still yet to come

surge surfing

Fingers of the ocean rush out to pet our toes

As we dash down the waves, hunting with boards

Then bobbing black insects we cling to life’s rafts

Waiting simply for motion to pleasure us

Watching for the right swell, careful as polymaths

Foolish as foals we leap aboard

And if we are lucky, find ourselves

Dragged along like seaweed, screaming laughing.

Finally thrust grazed against the foreshore

We bask in the glory of our briny ride

Until the pull inside our greedy water baby souls

Haul us up for again for another go.

City park

at dawn a team of trench coated crows

solemn as a forensic squad

stalk the new mown grass lines for discarded body parts

ignoring black clad joggers

plugged into their separate realities

who scuff plough dusty paths in parallel to the municipal track

as they pass the shifty dog shit sitters

urgently rustling plastic bags

anxious to cue their charges to produce in a convenient location

mist clings ever hopefully chaotic to our aviator sky

but mother, with her wired up toothless jaw

like London trees is dry.

Maj Ikle June 2013