[x]

Somewhere in ScandinaviaShe stands barefoot on broken glass
and precious stones,
wearing white cotton
with crumpled cuffs and collar.

Unbuttoned at the neck
and the leg,
her shirt billows with the wind,
making shapes of her silhouette
that exaggerates the size of the space
between her thighs.

Under a conifer tree
in a forest-full of them,
she feels the frost on bare breasts,
and in the black tangled length of her hair.

Her vast dark eyes are sunken
and stare in one direction.
She swore she saw a man there
standing in the freezing wind
that turns her pink lips pale.

How Soon She Found the SeaThe hooks in the tool shed
are made naked
by calloused hands
and fingertips dipped in ethanol.

From peroxide to ebony
by way of apology,
there's sense in change
where absence affirms affection.

Two swelling ships, her lips,
weigh anchor with port
to starboard bow –
between the sea and salt
and guilt on the rocks.

Cut By a Thumb NailTangerines in the streets
Found far from fruit stalls
By men who follow and find them
And introduce their sleeves.

The unemployed throw stones
At the job centre on weekdays
While squatters watch
And try to avoid the law.

IngressThe lustre of exposed low wattage bulbs
misleads a moth into the bathroom,
where dampened wings would keep it
moving in circles on the off-white wall.
The repetition of the circumference
opens the brickwork to the sky.

A truck driver pulls into a service station
after waiting for the mileage to outdo the clock.
While washing his hands
he kills the moth with his thumb,
and with his fist is pulled through;
a feeling similar to the sensation described
in the one book he’s read.

It was always area codes he remembered
that without the sister digits
are worthless, as much use
as the telephone box he stands in.
He has a road map
but not fo

Track NineWe formed a sort of chapel
Where dawned my spiritual epiphany.
Each kiss was given and received
Under the guise of an inhuman feeling
That stood outside morality.
It didn't.

And that awakening
Predicted the assembly of our bodies.
No longer would the hungry go unfed.

We were each a thief,
Stealing something nameless.
You took off your trousers
And told me where to put my fingers.

I didn't think about your boyfriend
While I was inside you,
Maybe I should have
But neither did you.

I sat on the curb outside his house
While you waited inside for him to arrive
To do what we'd discussed in bed,
After we heard our present

CombustionI can smell the smoke from fires
that tease the sky outside,
in suburban gardens
that make up this city;
set around a cathedral
like the centre of a clock face.

From the inhalation
I have ash on my tongue
and on my teeth.
It may whiten the enamel
the way bicarbonate soda does.
My smile reads like a newspaper,
may I replace it daily
as I press the grey into my gums
and try to outwit my reflection.

I have gathered cuttings
from new growths;
the saplings are far too young burn.
They must know the flames.
I hear them scream
from beneath the bark –
it does not burn but blacken.

The blossom is browning
having fallen from the branch
beside

Where Density Scares HerHer limbs are linked
by ball socket joints -
a pod person behind a window pane.
My white shirt
lets loose the creases of my contours.

From the floor
she picked it,
a semblance of skin,
fit like a suggestion,
a slip of the tongue
uttered behind a wine glass
or a breakfast menu.

Had I had her then,
I'd have bought her a blouse.

Opposite Ends of PavementThe streetlights and trees are indistinguishable
without the dreaded light of the moon.
Each bulb has blown and each leaf falls;
the branch lets them loose as if it knew.
The wind claims them
and the disparate sounds they make:
the guttural creak of bending metal
and the groan of near-dead wood
like the rope and yoke
around the necks of cattle.

AuctionThere's dead men photographed
Underneath the hammer

and Christmas cards from a husband
to his wife
before the scandel
that destroyed his career first.

And some schoolyard artefact
before her blonde locks
were made famous
and she lost her virginity
in the media
and then her bedroom.

The Sun Was Setting SomewhereHow sweet her face was as I remembered it,
shadowed in the hood she fashioned
from the corner of the ethnic patterned blanket
she was wrapped in.
There was something of the native
about the way her hair
fell around her face.

Beneath the blanket she was naked,
I attempted to describe her sex –
the colour, shape, smell and taste.
Her arms were crossed across her chest.

I thought I could walk on the ceiling
from the position I was laid in.
I couldn’t; you wouldn't tell me otherwise
a I tried putting a foot in front of the other
and falling.

The MarshlandFrom the riverbank
he went and wept
with a woman in his arms.
She bled
staining the cocktail dress red
from two bullet wounds in her chest.

His foot swelled
from a fractured ankle;
the bear trap he stepped in
hid in the marshlands.
There were many more ahead.

And there they found them,
taking seven steps a minute.
They formed a half moon
with their weapons readied.
They each fired once
and left them,
putting their bloodied fronts together
in the water meadow.

Westwood MarketShe wears a long black ballgown,
bare at the back,
with one bicep-length glove;
the other's tied around her throat
like a necktie.

She points out items
on the bric-a-brac table
and says "I had one of those,
when I was little."

Now she's had boyfriends
and girfriends and sometimes friends.
She spends thirty pounds
on an old Sega system,
that'll impress someone, she thinks.

So Spaceman SleepThe spaceman died on soil
of the planet he was born on
and not in endless space,
open with stars and detritus.

His words were a constant
on promotional posters
and part of the general memory;
a consensus after our boys
were Earth bound again.

The world watched him walking
as he claimed that satellite for us.

In The WindowsillI’m left naked
reflected back from the black
outside my window.
The houses out there
are identified by
lonely empty holes lit by bulbs.
Trees hang like lashes,
blinking in the wind.

My make-up’s smudged,
I rub blackened fingertips
over and around my thighs.
I break the scabbing skin
across my knuckles
and wrap my hand
in my pillow case.

My head is heavier
than the rest of me,
I sit in the windowsill
to sleep,
misquoting stories I’ve heard.

The 440A lost bus from London
Travelled through the big top
Of brake lights and back-lit signs
Of expensive restaurants.

The driver had his passenger
Navigate with an atlas
That took them further south
Then the place-name
On the front of the bus.

Browse More Like This

Download File
HTML, 835 bytes more ▶

More from ~Obsidian-Nightfall

Impersonal TerminalSinatra makes every airport
like the climax of Casablanca.
As for train stations,
they’re far grander with a brass band.

The coffee's hotter
and the sky seems greyer
through an unnatural canopy
of perspex and metal.

Three Bisque Faced DollsShe puts pink gloss
on lined lips
with the tip of her index finger.
There's an unpronounceable perfume
on her wrist, a mist
on pale, blue-veined skin.

Bluer than the topaz in her earlobes
are her eyes;
a blue renewed
each and every winter.

Her blonde locks,
more white than yellow,
were wound around a curling iron,
like those on the dolls she sold
after her daughter left home.

At the Bottom of the Widows PeakHis forehead falls
from a widow’s peak,
rigid as a melted candle.
He puts plasters on his palms
and finger tips;
there's no need to wash his skin.

Two women, shoulder to shoulder,
leant against the headboard;
his tongue tastes of each
of their pencil coloured stomachs
and bare pubic hair
above the waistband
of their underwear.

Poem for Ted HughesHow handsome the man,
he stands on shorelines
on both sides of the Atlantic.

Each trick he tries
is with a pen and not a wand
and each poem is a bomb.

Translator of the foreign page
and what he sees
on a walk or boat journey.

Each fleeting flirtation
had him more removed
from that damaged poet
at his homestead.

Night DisciplesFleetwood Mac
was the sound of their summer,
not in the same way
it had been
for their mothers and fathers.

She dreamed of leaving the streets
and he would throw stones
and disturb the surface
of the reservoir.

The bedroom door is locked
and the curtains drawn;
there he'll eat
whatever she feeds him
with his open mouth
and bended knees.

View Gallery

Featured in Groups:

#Writers--club
A group for all writers!

#Mind-Syndicate
Let's mesh

#xWritersUtopiax
The utopia for all writers!

#Ispirare

#Ethereal-Art-Poetry
Emotions of the Heart and Soul

#Word-Smiths

#EliteLiterature
Elite Literature Collective

#15-Minutes-of-Fame
World famous in 15 min or less

Show all (10)

Details

Submitted: December 2, 2012
File Size: 835 bytes

Link

Thumb

Statistics

Comments: 13
Favourites: 14 [who?]
Views: 126 (0 today)
Downloads: 1 (0 today)

[x]

Candy Coloured Mullet

by ~Obsidian-Nightfall, Dec 2, 2012, 12:45:35 PM
Literature / Poetry / General Poetry / Free Verse

You've had your hair coloured
like the boiled strawberry sweets
my mother bought me on Sundays,
that even as a boy I thought
looked like a barbershop pole.

What became of your brown curls?
The fringe is strict across your brow.
The length that dipped
inside your coffee cup,

those damp strands that stuck to your cheek
were sectioned on the salon floor.
The sometimes ponytail is left long
from each ear
to between your severe shoulder blades.

You're not wearing a blouse,
that, in blue and white, made you seem
like a medical professional.
You wear a poncho over bare flesh
with the side of your body displayed.

Candy Coloured Mulletby ~Obsidian-Nightfall

Literature / Poetry / General Poetry / Free Verse

Like me [link]

~MeineSehnsucht Dec 6, 2012 Writer

Nice work. I'd suggest to put a nice blank rule somewhere in the second stanza, for better reading. I'd say somewhere after 'inside your coffee cup'. It's just a suggestion anyway.

~Obsidian-Nightfall Jan 30, 2013 Student Writer

It's a fine suggestion, thanks for it.

~MeineSehnsucht Feb 1, 2013 Writer

You're welcome. It looks good like that, nice.

*brassteeth Dec 4, 2012

Reads like an innocent, clear observation, almost youth in revision...

~Obsidian-Nightfall Jan 30, 2013 Student Writer

Yes it does, I hadn't though of that when I wrote it but that's the wonderful thing about interpretation. Thanks for saying so.

*glossolalias Dec 3, 2012

incredible imagery.

~Obsidian-Nightfall Jan 30, 2013 Student Writer

Thank you very much

*LancelotPrice Dec 3, 2012

Sounds like a style you may have experimented with sometime in the past.

~Obsidian-Nightfall Jan 30, 2013 Student Writer

Possibly

*LancelotPrice Jan 30, 2013

More from ~Obsidian-Nightfall

Featured in Groups:

Details

Statistics

Candy Coloured Mullet

Candy Coloured Mulletby ~Obsidian-Nightfall

The Journal Portal

Polls

What is your preferred drawing software?

deviantART [dee·vee·un'nt·ART]

Keep in Touch!

Deviousness

Add Media

Style