Are we free? The girl asked Her wrists were unshackled she did not have her hymen sewn shut or clitoris removed by a shard of glass so comparatively she felt like she ought to be free there were no brands upon her back nor was she jailed for loving another girl and sentenced to die […]
I grew up fetishizing
the nubile antonyms of beauty
Helmut Newton’s exploitation
penis behind camera stroking
sloe-eyed girls with tired mouths
smoking yellow papered Gauloises
nipples grazing peach crinoline
men’s eyes like dry stones, seeking squeezing
I grew up thinking
contortion and bondage was
an art form not
excuse for masochism
as unsupervised child, I’d look through
graphic design manuals
that inexplicably had vulvas and
perky breasts
to illustrate Pantone
it was after all
the seventies
what did I know? Except
women on beaches without tops
giving me francs for not spilling their dirty martini’s
Mon sucre d’orge, sois gentil, va me chercher mes cigarettes
always gentleman watching
the rise and fall of female throats
nicotine mouths, stained vermillion
long tan legs swept beneath chiffon
men taking them to hotel rooms
children
smoking the leftovers whilst adults
fucked behind closed doors
wondering
when I grow up
how can I lie beneath
a girl whose sweat glistens
like marzipan
and if she should
sip on me I think I’d scream
all my silver bracelets falling off
like metal flowers on hotel carpet
after all
life is a film
where we tie ourselves up
with want and ritual
At fifteen a lewd boy, only 5’5 asked;
Will you pose for me with your legs spread?
She hadn’t shaved in three days, the stubble rubbed the backs of her calf where she pressed against enamel bath
A maelstrom in her eyes instead of pupils
He said; good, good, excellent, just like that … ba-aby
Now … Open them
And she remembered the first time she unfurled
Like those Chinese paper flowers that grow in water
A warm rose bud disturbed by prying fingers
She recalled the way unwanted thumb pealed her exposed
A fruit chewed on before ripening
The sting afterwards
Like she’d dried out all her moisture and hung like a salted fish to be slapped and dismissed
If she gave this boy, with sweat on his lip instead of hair, his hand down his pants yanking something terrible, a rolling storm, tattooing bruised landscape
His way would become her path
What would be next?
Can you scissor yourself over my friend and lower down like a stray bullet?
We’ll make money and you’ll have value
I’ll take care of you, afterward you can pretend it didn’t happen
We’ll smoke away the taste and I’ll move inside you until you release
Regret
It’s easier to prostitute yourself when nobody has your back and you didn’t learn how
To save yourself, to feel your worth
The sabotage within, so achingly familiar
If I do it’ll be like every other time I ruined myself over nothing, you say
Feeling deserving of the pain, shame is a funny fellow, makes you quite attached
When you’re adrift and running on empty
Who knew how easy it was to ruin a child?
Set in place, steps of greater sabotage
She could feel their sticky fingers on her thighs
The voices murmuring, it’s what you deserve
Sickness in a learned desire to be debased
On her knees being ridden like a horse, the riders
Grabbing her innocence, one handful of hair at a time
Til she was all used up and another empty set of eyes
Waiting for the next fix
She saw herself at thirty, dying in an empty room
And the boy who encouraged her now, high on himself and the vigor of youth
Didn’t know how easy it would be for her to tumble down the rabbit hole, he only thought of
Getting his cock sucked and how he could brag if she’d pose for his fantasies
She wasn’t his, she didn’t want to be the next hole, willingly bent over
She wasn’t a plastic doll or his fist, she didn’t exist for him to spank himself off
Her image was sacrosanct, her body inviolate
Her legs weren’t going to open and be his willing whore
Just because she felt empty inside and his thin flattery pretended to assuage, all the pain and losses
That wasn’t her path
He didn’t get to see her center or hold her up for inspection
The fine line between loss and lost is not so fine
She stood up for herself for the first time and learned
What we do, matters, impacts us, stays like a cancer
Life already hard, she needed all the breaks she could get
It began with leaving and not looking back
At the boy holding a camera in one hand
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
TheFeatheredSleep 