Here’s a moment of a girls’ life
it flickers, it flickers like a skirt, caught on a black railing, rented, torn, pried apart, and released, to flap, uselessly and without form
she’s lost her purse, her lipsticks rolled behind the bus and she didn’t put on her hose just right
the seams you see, they’re supposed to line up at the back where her heel hits the smooth patent of her shoe like how the girls in WW2 did it except they used eye-brown pencils because silk was needed for parachutes, oh and who can afford the cost of the worm?
that’s the way it should have turned out, fixing her seams, walking in with a kick and a smile, wooing her audience, beguile them, beguile them and they shall fall helplessly
exercise in futility, that’s not her, she doesn’t do performance art, that’s the image of her projected by those who believe, with her lips, and her green eyes, she’s kryptonite, such a bad bet, she’s a lame horse who prefers the stable, all those shrines to her potential, before she drank too much anxious about oh, more or less, everything in the world
and drinking they say, even in France now, is not du rigor but ruled out, if you wish to avoid your one out of eight women gets breast cancer statistic, what the hell? How to survive without sipping it down? Letting fermentation do its ritual on her guts, lifting her back into the gilded frame
she wished she were a boy, boys can still drink, boys don’t wear hose, they don’t have to worry as much if their armpits stink and they won’t have another boy tell them that their breasts sag when they rise up and clasp the void
if she were a boy she’d want to be a pretty boy the kind that other boys would probably hit on, with a large top lip and gleaming hair, because pretty gets you candy and she has a sweet tooth
if she were a pretty boy she’d try out fucking a girl just to know what it felt like
to be a version of herself with other body parts
would the girl look at her with frightened eyes, hooded and suspicious like a Russian doll, daub her sides with ancient gild, would she open her legs only because she wanted what you held back, in your frayed pocket, tightly wrapped, here it is, take a mouthful, bitter taste, will we live longer in our knowledge? The apple glows in the darkness from its position alone hanging from the lower branch of knowledge.
when she wakes up in the night and holds her singed hair back, hugging porcelain throne vomiting what she’s learned time and time again just doesn’t stay down
couldn’t she purchase another way of coping?
apparently pills have their own set of demons
she learns the art of the mask and strips for the doctor who takes his swab. It’s a painless test he lies, grimacing as he breaks her bones and pries denial apart, you won’t feel a thing
and then everything turned blue and the water didn’t stop running down the sink in the wrong direction and the clocks lost their hands and rolled into glue sticking to the inside of her emptiness, where no life was, sharing its wasteland
on E she danced until the fat at the top of her clavicle, that little jiggle you get when you drink lots of milk as a child and push your little breasts together, grew and people said well … don’t you have a fine pair on you?
not really she’d think if you could see how long it takes to get this look, all the tape in the world, and they’re still not really sticking
a bit like her, unhinged at one corner, asking; peal me back see what’s underneath
her own preference was for girls with skinny chests and protruding nipples she felt they were saying fuck you to every kind of lame expectation, their knife-like hip-bones, shaving her under the sheets like the incisors on wolves, the anger glowing in their eye, a Cheshire cat with blade
but she was too soft for that hard look and wore instead the conicular implements of torture Madonna had cast off
looking back it was fucking embarrassing
when did she learn authenticity? On the way home from the hospital when it rained and the dried blood on her legs, wound down her legs like a cat’s tail and smeared the grass beneath? she saw only mouths open, trying to speak, what do they want to say?
authenticity died between her legs and grew cold in formaldehyde and the rubbing of fingers itching for a cigarette
walking the streets homeless, holing up in an office during night hours, smelling the feet of those who worked there during the day kicking their shoes off
stains on the office sofa that never came off
when he would deliver her bag of drugs and she paid him with herself because she had nothing else
how much would that equate per kilo?
quite a good bargain all things considered, it was like he said, she made him act that way by the tilt of her head
I’m only tilting my neck to get a better view of the strippers on Wardour street she’d say standing at the window, neon blinking in and out, in and out, little panties not yet showing their wear and tear, don’t worry they soon will undo their pretty dark pink bows
he told her you have the smallest waist you look like a french dancer in a Toulouse Lautrec painting
I am a french dancer she would reply and smoke a Sobranie to the gold rim to make the point
gimme a break, you don’t even like Ricard Pastis and those cigarettes are Russian
you’ve got a point there, Pernod is vile, mix me something chopped up, cut it fine, I want to hear music, open your eyes, open your fucking eyes so I can hear
I like the taste of aniseed
I hate it, it reminds me of my grandfather’s fingers and that imported saddle soap he used, when I looked into his throat he had coals burning there, they could extinguish your heart just by breathing on you
change the record / or you’ll kill the mood
he was always in the mood, even when he hated her he wanted to ransack her empty space
lucky she licked the bag clean or her price would be too high, nothing is too much for a fistful of dynamite
I wish I could live inside you, he would whisper, eyes already rolling like a horse about to be led to slaughter, to the exit sign
christ I can’t think of anything worse, she’d reply into the pillow, limbs trembling, her neck aching with his pummel
how long can it go on? can you make yourself wet when you’re faking? Or do you have to run to the bathroom and stick your fingers down your throat? Fake sudden illness to avoid an overdose of you
back in the days when her bladder was strong she could take a pounding and not need to pee afterward, they used to say, you can eat motherfucking hot curry, be given one like a sailor and still walk straight
how many sailors were bent over themselves and filled with whiskey and crab claws she wondered
but you stand up too long, with eyes on your back unpicking your defenses it gets harder
how many times can you shout, oh yeah baby just like that, just like that, you’re the best
he is hard he is inside her he feels like metal she feels like clover and the bees the bees swarm around her obscuring her open mouth the color of raspberries
that’s why she never cuts her hair you can hide so far inside if you carve out a tree and wait patiently for the thorns to do their climb
the wood cuttings of her twins mocking her sins, cooing; what a dirty little girl, you turned out well darlin
I want my moneys worth, he would say half in jest, nostrils crusted with crystal, beckoning her with dirty fingers
take the blue pill, take any pill, watch yourself swallow, there you go, to bed now child, tomorrow will be another show starting at six pm promptly and ending, never
she’d pretend she was sea anemone, anyone else, the girl outside in Soho gyrating to some euro pop song her long fake nails glittering against piercings speaking rapid Lithuanian into a pink phone
her nipples hurt where he burned them with his need to leave a mark, a tattoo artist without his equipment he improvised his layers of penetration
give me something to remember bitch or I’ll make it hurt more
she thud lifelessly above him like an unmoared boat seeking harbor, half-conscious with sorrow, afterward she lay closed off and drugged, as peaceful as an envelope that has been licked shut
and never, ever, ever did she learn to undo, the need to exclude herself from the world
so where’s her next fix? how does she stop wanting it to fill her veins with code
listening to the grind of the world outside, a room with a view boarded over and willingly comatose, two words inscribed on her tomb, ecstasy denied
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The day they pricked paint into her back
If we are honest
TheFeatheredSleep 