Oh dear

I’m at nineteen pages, 7,579 words and my beginning is fleshing out in my mind but it’s a way off, the middle will be drastically different split between the voyeur and the voyee (?) and my mum is the only one who has read it because she asked to and she handed it back with a shrug and suggested that maybe she was just too tired to get it.

My dad wandered in and asked what I was up to. Writing, says I. A story, I elaborated. He waited.

I’m writing a novel in reverse, beginning with the end of the world which comes about because God, who is a window cleaner, loses his dog in a tragic accident involving a lot of bleach and the car of my narrator and God decides that’s the final straw and decides to end it all and start again. Then there’s the son of God who spends his time spying on a half-Russian compulsive liar.

That is the synopsis I presented to both parents. My father smiled and wondered where my sister was. My mother smiled, read it and said none of what I said was in the pages I’d handed over. This is mostly true. The pages I have are mostly sex, sleeping and the end of the world. I’m determined to finish this though. I’m giving myself until the end of August for one draft, all done and over with. Sense is overrated anyway.

Muddling middles

David drove us out of the city as per the plan despite the fact that his dad’s old place was thirteen minutes away from Natasha’s home. Fifteen if you get stuck at a red light on Duke Street. David drove us Northward and downward and just before we turned off the main road, just before the bump of beaten tracks jolted us into uncomfortability, there was a stomach-sinker of a dip and the city sprawled before us. Natasha staggered to shaky feet and shook her fingers at the population-marking net of lights. She wiggled her digits in a spellcasting shimmer of pink nail polish.
“Boom,” popped from her watermelon lip slices. The seat skished under her weight as the sharp turn tossed her seatwards.
The sun set two hours and twenty-eight minutes later over a field of puddles and muddy green shoots. Celestial night billowed our angel’s hair and twisted starlight into her limbs. David never once took his eyes off the road. Not since the incident four minutes prior to the loss of the sun when swerving wheels nearly locked bonnets with opposite flowing traffic. Natasha had slipped over the neckline of her top in a sleep-induced shimmy towards the car floor. Blue bra, blue pants, blue bags, blue balls. David tore the night into pieces, hurtling his cargo towards a disastrously ugly hotel building before the skyline followed the palette trend.

-

Marie-Jacques woke up in a strange bed alone listening to the jittery tune of a phone that wasn’t hers. She still checked in her bag twice despite knowing the ringtone wasn’t anything like her own. Sunlight turned the approaching figure into a blocky shadow that presented her with the first croissant (it was a Tuesday) and a kiss. The buttery pastry clung to fingers and lips as she decided to leave that bed, step out on the morning-drenched road and retrace her steps back over the bridge to the museum. A day lost meant she’d have to cut corners and exhibitions. She drew a line round collections in her mind but everything tangled when he pushed her against the jamb of his front door to wring a promise of a repeat from her lips.

What’s the difference between a sign and a symbol?

I read Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami yesterday in the sun next to a family of tourists and two men in suits, one of whom liked to stare. I actually confused Haruki Murakami with Hitomi Kanehara because their novels use the same photographer so I was a bit worried there would be some disappointment. It was an odd novel. I’m going to read it again I think. Some of the imagery was gorgeous but some of it was clunky and repetitive but it’s kinda hard to judge since it’s a translation. It was real, that’s one thing I will say. The narrator and the main character they thought and said so many things I’ve thought and felt myself and at times it was great because I’m a big one for reality but for a little while I wondered why I was reading. And then sometime between missing the first train and the second it took a turn for the surreal, but not too far, and I managed to lose myself a little curled up cramped on a bench with two droning men, burning from white to pink, reading the translated thoughts of a Japanese man about a girl through cheap sunglasses and I was gone. I walked too fast towards the train station and blocked out words and signs until I felt dizzy and foreign. If I’m alone I can rock it, I can shrink away and live. I can tell myself I don’t need anyone and I feel it and everything just makes sense. And that book made me do that yesterday. I’ll read it again and see if it was situation and mindset or the actual words but yeah, it didn’t blow me away but it did something.

Was a bright, and sweet, and hot summer day the day I didn’t love you anymore

The skin split under her nail as Sam fidgeted on the bench. Her book lay on the waistband of her skirt. The pages curled naturally into her stomach, stains and damp spots wrinkled like freckles. It was an old favourite but the cover was irritating her. It was a girl, unremarkable but for her mouth that was barely open. Sam had picked the book for its cover, for that mouth. She heard the parting of lips across the bookshelves and when the spine slotted into her grasp she knew it had to be purchased. But the words were gratingly familiar so her belly button learnt the characters names for a change. Ash crumbled into the fading cotton of her tshirt from the cigarette that shrank in the corner of her mouth as she ran a nail over the dead skin on her thumb. A spot of blood ballooned to the surface and trickled into the probing cuticle. Sam replaced cigarette with cut and ground the butt into the ground with the rest of the packet. Rusty stinging faded against her tongue and her lidded eyes gave in to the bright sun with a sigh. A shudder ran the length of her body as a shadow leaned over the back of the bench. Her feet curled until a shoe tumbled off her toes. Dean planted a kiss on her cheek.

“You’ve been smoking?”

“You’re late.”

ils se marièrent et eurent beaucoup d’enfants

alternative titles: Endings are the most fun to write or I am too lazy to write the middle of anything or (the most truthful) I wrote this a couple of weeks ago and I’m trying to get excited enough to go back and fill in the big ole gap between once upon a time and happily ever after.

Our petite Parisienne drew a fat black marker line over the last remaining section of the city and let out a sigh into the fading afternoon. She flicked through the pages of the notebook she would give me three days later and waited for something. A sensation of completion or a sign that everything had fallen into place. Her eyes faded behind metallic painted lids and white teeth ground impatience into her pink lips. She held her breath and sat utterly still like this but there was only the muted bursts of a band tuning and conversations bubbling. This was eventually disturbed by a familiar twinkling that caused her stomach to flinch towards her heart. It was the phone but this fact took a few minutes to register in Marie-Jacques mind.

“Phone!” Camille called from across the square, waving frenetically at her roommate framed in the window. She could hear the phone ring anywhere and Marie-Jacques sometimes imagined wires connecting the two. Reluctantly lifting the receiver she fancied she saw Camille’s arm jerk. She raised the phone to her ear and the girl down on the street stretched up to the sky. The man calling her name stopped her game abruptly and Camille sank to the curb.

“It’s me.”

The me in question was one Louis Rousseau, our would-be hero of chapter three. What he was doing interrupting a narrative he’d been banished from was precisely what our heroine wanted to know.

“I miss you.”

She slumped in her chair and waited. It was a long silence for you see Louis was gathering up all his strength to tell a girl three rather weighty words. While she waited Marie-Jacques was watching three young men abandon their instruments to hang a string of lights between lampposts instead. The party was an annual thing arranged by tenants on all sides of the square. This year the south was in charge and Camille was the self-appointed chief. She surveyed from her position on the ground, barking new ideas inbetween kisses from her dozy boyfriend. Marie-Jacques watched this bustle of lazy activity and felt her limbs deaden. She plummeted through the cushioned seat of her chair and was in danger of crashing through the floors to the very foundations of the building had Louis not cleared his throat at that very moment.

“You were right.”

There was her sign. Her heart soared before her brain could question further. She still did not know what it was that had a right and a wrong side but that almost didn’t matter. She expressed the sheer exhilaration and release of so many weeks of exhaustive searching in the only word she could muster.

“What?”
“Marie, listen to me.”
“I am listening.”
“Come away with me.”

The sky bloomed a little bluer and a road stretched from her window along the rooftops. A man with dark hair and a warm smile reached out a hand and as he detailed the places they would go, her stockinged feet danced tightrope elegance along the tops of the city.

“Pack a bag and we can leave tonight.”

Reality tugged on the hem of her skirt and picked runs in her nylon legs. It was foolish to leave so suddenly. It would be foolish to leave at all in fact. Marie-Jacques struggled to clear her mind of romances. Had she explored every corner only to discover the answer lay in departure?

“We can see the country. Travel down the Med. I’ll take you to Nice and Barcelona and Milan. We’ll sail away to India and Japan. I’ll fly you to London and New York. I’ll take you anywhere, anywhere you want to go if you’ll come away with me tonight.”

Our Parisienne took a long look out of her bedroom window. Her eyes followed the skyline she had memorised so exactly in the months she had lived there. The thrill of virgin territory was gone and though the familiarity was inviting it lacked a certain something. Inactivity gnawed on her bones and she consented to her ex-lover’s absurdly romantic request as she began packing her life into suitcases.

Camille didn’t say a word about the bags by the door or the stripped bedroom. She merely clasped warm fingers around Marie-Jacques’ wrist and pulled her into the party. Their skin fused for a second as the sweat of too many bodies clogged their pores. The band flowed seamlessly from song to song and Camille gripped her hips invasively and manually swung Marie-Jacques’ bones into a dance. Camille’s curls were limp and frizzy against Marie-Jacques’ face as she dug her chin into the fiery mane and told her friend the plan.

“I know,” was the response. She twirled Marie-Jacques around and poured her towards the man waiting behind the crowd. “But tonight you’re mine.” Long brown arms encased our parisienne in a flood of homesickness. A deluge of longing as her feet dragged against the beat, digging into the stone to anchor the girl to the present.

Drinks sweating condensation down her arms were constantly refreshed and replaced until the music was a distant roar that her faraway limbs craved to follow and the words confided through her hair meant little. Somebody had commandeered the fountain and soon foamy bubbles covered every partygoer and the air was full of immature shrieks and splashes of movement. Past and future melted and fizzled into the blanket of bubbles and for the hundred or so bodies there was only that moment of tired joy. Louis’ hand sought Marie-Jacques’ and tore her from that collective, filling her skinny frame with resentment.

“Time to fly, princess.”

Her feet stumbled on a loose slab and her shoe was lost between dancing couples. He pulled her out of the square and may have dragged her clean out of the city if she hadn’t wrapped her fingers around the gate.

“No.” Marie-Jacques scrunched her toes over her remaining shoe and examined the iron shapes of the gate. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Louis fell against the metal. “You can’t tell me this now. It’s not”

“Fair?” She finished. “It might not be, I can’t really help that. I can’t leave. I don’t think I want to leave.” She sighed and squeezed his hand. “Goodbye.” She hopped back to a hundred pairs of arms that embraced and absorbed her. In a crowd there is no right or wrong but so long as your smile is genuine this needn’t concern even the most moral of souls.

At four sixteen am the sky flared cold gold and hangovers twinged in the backs of minds. Someone decides to ascend and many others refuse him but he argues so passionately that he garners fans. There are six of them perched like birds above all the beds, floors, couches and snoozing bodies to wait for the sun. The remains of the night twinkled in the tentative morning. Bottles and puddles and cups like plastic rain and on the edge of the dancefloor a solitary shoe lay on its side watched over by a sparrow who was in turn watched by a neighbour’s cat. Our Cinderella smiled at the sight and wriggled the dark nylon toes that had survived the party by a thread.

“Good morning, Paris!” The voice swelled over the city that lay before them and the chest that had pushed it out swelled with pride at its effect. The silence that followed was all the more noticeable for having been broken. The morning ruffled their hair and teased the flame of a lighter as a packet of cigarettes was located to celebrate the dawn.

“My brothers and beautiful sisters,” one of the drunker ones began. “Today we are alive and we must not forget it. This,” he stood shakily but his feet were certain on the tiles. His arms stretched along the river, fingers grazing the Eiffel Tower and the edge of our parisienne’s upturned smile. “all of this, is infinite. If only for today.” A girl tugged on his jeans but he brushed her away. “Once upon a time we were strangers and we’ll live happily ever after as strangers but for now we are one. I am all of you and all of the city.” He swayed as his voice gained decibels and the girl guided him back down safely, laughing over the remainder of his speech. Marie-Jacques did not mind that she couldn’t make out his words. He had been a prophet and a storyteller for a moment and her skin tingled from his touch and the wind and the smoke that stung her eyes. He burst out of the mediating girl’s clasp with one final conclusion.

“Du sublime au ridicule il n’y a qu’un pas!”

His foot lost the edge of the roof and ten hands pulled him from martyr back to prophet. He laughed and kissed every one of them until the chastising subsided. With a yawn Marie-Jacques rested her head on her knees and enjoyed the notion that they were the only people alive on the earth. Six remaining bodies and she could only firmly attach names to two of them. But it didn’t matter, none of it did because she was infinite for the morning.

Here I end her search for the missing shade of blue before the first stirrings of traffic taint the cloudless sky and too many eyes push the heavens back up high. I will end in the English way for the French equivalent would seem out of place, you would agree.

Therefore, Marie-Jacques the infinite Parisienne found what she was looking for on the 24th of August atop her apartment building in the eyes of a drunk and the sky above them. And she lived happily ever after.

The sea is just a wetter version of the skies

I found another choose your own adventure story online. It’s on Wooopedia and has several options to kill your miserable self. Half of the choices haven’t been written yet but still it made me laugh and killed all of three minutes. Plus it’s got lines like:

It turns out that The DJ was full of explosives. he ate them to get high. This world is full of suffering.

Brilliant.

Chapter last

It comes before and after this post. Say one damn word about the naming choices and I’ll send wolves to eat your face. I can’t help it if that’s what his name is, I just write the shit.

I pulled the couch into me. Or I pulled myself into the couch. I was trying to get the fat cushions to smother me but my fingers burned when I tried to catch a hold on the ribbed fabric. My hangover was settling in the pit of my stomach and every noise brought burning bile closer to my teeth. This was a problem because the walls were thin and the headboard on the other side was heavy. Every gasp and grunt was punctuated by a thwumpf and a duhdoonk. It’s uncomfortable at the best of times listening to other people’s pleasure. There’s a flash of disgust and a lingering depression that’s overpowered by unwelcome arousal. Your hands creep down to the dick that’s contained in the underwear you haven’t had a chance to change since you left home a week ago. You think maybe if you don’t think about identities it won’t be so bad. Pornography with your eyes shut or like your great-grandfather must have done it before television. Just one hand and the old wireless. Thing is when the gasper is a seventeen year old who thinks you’re a dirty old man and the grunts slip from the son of God well, you might start to have doubts about your hand’s next movement. I couldn’t keep up with them anyway so I resorted to burying myself in poorly upholstered furniture.

I woke up the next morning, or perhaps the same morning my watch was inexplicably missing, knowing she was there before she announced her position with a snort. Rolling over was agonising but the smile that illuminated that little girl’s face was worth it, almost. Those searing blue eyes were unsettling. I’d watched her turn those lamps on David and anything she said or did was suddenly faultless. I thought I’d escaped notice but for reasons unknown to me I was struck by that cutting sparkle before I’d even had a chance to sober up. I knew she was reading my mind.

It’s not my fault! I longed to scream excuses and shake her out of my sight if my tongue would only unglue itself from the roof of my mouth and I could work out where my hands were hiding. I couldn’t help but notice that if she slumped a little further forward her nipple would burst free of her lopsied neckline or that if she shuffled half a cushion towards me I’d know for sure if she’d been wearing any underwear these past couple of days. The more firmly I convinced myself of her telepathic abilities the louder these thoughts became until I could smell the spermicide residued in her pussy and the cum lingering on her fingers and around her gums. Her hair held leather and cigarette butts and dregs of whisky and too much sweat. His deodorant was wrong on her body. Overpowering and only a reminder that he had engulfed her not too long before she decided to taunt me with such proximity. If I took my eyes off her I could pretend I was talking to David instead and that thought did not sit well with the clenching in my gut.

She cleared her throat meaningfully and the numbness that had concealed the whereabouts of my extremities was shattered. The elastic of my boxers snapped audibly as I shrugged her eyes away.
“What day is it?”
She shrank a little from my breath and sighed “Wednesday.” Six days then. Six fucking miserable days. I could have worked it out from the growth on my chin or the build-up of grease in her drooping curls and the way she held herself away from the touch of her drooping outfit. I needed a shower. I wondered how many more days before she’d join me.
“What?”
“How much longer do you think we’ll have to stay here, I said,” I said again although I didn’t remember what I’d said the first time round.
“David says not much longer.” We were silent as if to recognise the full significance of this statement. “Are you staying here?” Those eyes were back on me and I shifted in my skin. I made a series of movements she interpreted as a yes.
“You?” I croaked and I know she noticed how rough I was becoming. It was getting harder to open my eyes after every blink. I was tired and she stank. Worse than I did, arguably, since she’d arrived here with the scent of mango butter and expensive names etched on her flesh. I wanted to bury my woozy head in her stinking breasts and lick her clean again. Wipe her down into the bright female we pretended not to worship. She was shaking her grubby face at me.
“I can’t. Don’t tell David.” Curiosity fought the alcohol draining through my system and battered out an enquiry. “He wouldn’t understand,” and there, in that offhand reply that answered nothing in particular, there was a connection. Tenuous and ultimately pointless considering our situation but it was there. She had given me power and disabled me instantly with a secret. I pulled my body into the back of the couch, trying to make myself smaller and somehow more likeable. She scooched closer. I can tell you she was wearing underwear; they were blue like the stretch mark that curved around her left breast, with pink spots a shade lighter than the dusky ring around her nipple. Natasha slid onto her side beside me. Her hair stuck to my chin but I didn’t brush it away. Instead I played it safe because I’m a coward before I’m an asshole: “Where’s David?”

She pointed below to the basement and dropped the indicating arm between the two of us. “Do you really think the world will end?”
I tried to control my breathing as Natasha fumbled over the front of my boxers and her fingers memorised my geography, waiting for my answer. “I was never really sure it had begun.” One of her legs swept over mine and she positioned me between her thighs.
“Don’t you wonder what it would be like?”
All the time.
“The whole world going about their lives, oblivious that this could be their last moment and they’ll waste it. Just like they’ve been wasting away all this time.”
Terrible. Absolutely terrible.
“And we could have done anything we liked, safe in the knowledge that nothing mattered anymore and all we did was sit here and get wasted for days.”
It was difficult to listen to her, partly because it was true and Natasha was not known for her honesty and partly because she was rolling my balls in her palm as she said it. Mostly because she was rolling my balls in her palm. I dropped into the tangle of hair in front of me.
“We are pathetic,” she finished with a sigh and kissed my cheek. “There’s tea on the table. I’ll be downstairs.”
She staggered past the stairs and out the front door. I could make out her bare feet slapping against the tarmac all the way down the street and crunch through the park round the corner. Natasha just couldn’t help but lie. I buried myself into the couch or the couch buried me and hoped I’d be asleep when David came back upstairs.

She hadn’t been a virgin and he hadn’t been a god

I have ideas for collections every so often. I tend to run them into the ground if I actually try to do them but I like to think them up anyway. I still want to make a book of photographs of toilet philosophies, I’ll be armed with the camera on my phone when uni starts back up. I miss out on the men’s stuff so basically if you’re male and see something great take a photo and send me it. I just love the conversations people write on walls and tables. I’ve always wanted a collection of poetry as well but I’ll never write a poem I can happy with because I just can’t work out how to know if I’ve written a good one or not. I can usually tell instantly with prose and I think it comes from the fact that while I like to read them and I love writing them, I’ve never been a poetry person. 

Despite that I’m posting a poem I wrote last night because I had the vague idea that if I could write poetry I could make a collection of diary poems. A series of secrets, thoughts and worries of a teenage girl and each would be titled with a date and a time. I pulled out old diaries and pulled out my own thoughts and the thoughts of my equally foolish friend only she went the step further, wanting babies and meek motherhood. I thought why waste such a girl on bitter memories and contempt and I started a poem about the idle fancy she had about living with her boyfriend but it didn’t turn out quite as I wanted and I gave up. You can read it anyway because why not.

21/7 0.34am

Sorry I’m late, sweetheart

as he kisses the top of my head

with a hand on my hair and I

look up from my book

with grin plastered features.

Swollen belly patted

hidden package cooed

simple love lounging

on domesticated upholstery.

But on the other hand there’s the

devastating thrill

of your

abortion.

 

Which is sort of when I realised I shouldn’t have combined both of our mindsets and I gave up.

I’m just a jerk playing with matches

Le Monde

It’s a world of

numbers and 

symbols 

I’ll never understand,

I don’t really want to 

either.

It’s a world of

pictures

and words

tried and tested

and true, in so far

as manipulative lies

can be true.

But they can bind

her to your side,

protect

swaddle

in concerns and ideas

and won’t let her stray

until

it’s time to slash

into ribbons.

Here’s a new rope

round a prettier

neck.

White skin

choked

and she’ll let you because

that’s the world for you.

 

Nobody knows what 

they want because they want

so much and they

worry

worry

worry

that maybe 

what they want

is wrong so they’ll be

sorry

sorry

sorry.

Who can tell?

A man once told me

of a philosopher who

believed what you wanted was

right

and not seeking, possessing, living

what you wanted was

wrong.

Now that I think about it

I’ve muddled two philosophers up.

One believed that we must want what we want.

Another believed we must forever strive to achieve what we want.

But all in all it paints it all

black and white

like pen on paper

so it’s apt.

The same man once told me

he’d been in love with his wife

for years and he still

loved,

so happy bound

to one another.

He had spent one year

down at the bottom

of our

kingdom 

when his wife

was not quite

his wife and the woman

down at the bottom

of our

kingdom

was most definitely not 

his wife.

I was thinking about this

on the bus to work

where groups of people work

to sell the ideas of other people

to more people.

I just scrub away the coffee stains 

and steal the pens.

The girl in front of me as I bumped down 

the long street cityward

was decorated skin with swallows

and I thought how I do swallow

philosophies

with a grimace and a knowing

wink

because that’s what this world is made of.

Sometimes I spit it up

in fractured bursts

onto rumpled sheets.

Sometimes I keep it down

hidden in my depths.

Easier not to think too hard

about it, especially

when I gag, but

I’m building to my

climax.

 

Somewhere

no

Somewhen

along the line time

the physical challenged

the spiritual to a duel.

Pistols at dawn

and the spiritual

cheated

with a conundrum. 

The round of high velocity

metal was a pile 

of used up

atoms that none

of us could see.

The blood on the ground

was a pool

of used up

cells that none

of us could see.

It didn’t make the wound 

any less

horrific.

The physical denied

influence,

admitted

defeat

and sat

sloth and avarice

rotting in a corner

of drunken desires

and foolish decisions.

I’m left with a

handful of

dreams and whispers

of a kiss

snatched from lips barely

in focus for a brief encounter

but the world is a 

silence of wanting, a

silence of longing

because there’s too many numbers

to count and divide.

 

A man once told me

a philosopher who believed in desire

was so selfish and greedy

the most bohemian of

bohemians

cast him aside.

Another man once told me

that I had pretty eyes

and it’s a tried and tested

compliment

that’s as true as a

manipulative lie can be

but it made me smile

for a moment

and maybe

that’s all this world

needs

to be.

 

Craving ravings

Itching in my bones

shaking in my shoes

and my fingers

pick 

pick

pick

pick

a strip

a strip

a strip

of skin.

The guy next to me

came back from his 

hurried smoke outside 

the library barrier,

I’d watched him breathe sky

through the window.

I want to bury my nose in his

hair.

My nails, far too long

now, tap

a tippy-tappy-tappy

rhythm tappy on the

plastic casing

of my stolen pens.

One between my fingers

two in my gonna-fall-out, will-it-fall-out, please-don’t-

fall-out bun

one between my lips

dangling heavy like a fat fruit

on a branch down

towards my cleavage

in this top that isn’t even that low

my posture is terrible

slouchy

and the guy beside me is 

STARE ing

and I want to bury my nose in his

jeans.

The dull lights give me a 

headache and my teeth

buzz and my nose

itches

itches

scritches

scratches.

 

I count out the pennies

in my purse noisily 

but they won’t match the price

tag behind the counter

and anyway

bad, bad

focussssss 

on the words

immmmmerse 

in text

you have a test

remember?

 

Fuck it.

 

The walk down the hill

is slippery with the dregs 

of people who have no right

to block my way with their 

bright smiles and messages

in pamphlet form.

Fists curl in my pockets

as I forget how to walk

down the hill.

I’ve lost the track, the path, the way

and I take a d e e e p  b r e a t h

this anger is superficial.

The pennies in my purse

match the price

on the board and I 

bury my nose into

steaming black, bitter

salvation and smile

at the boy next to me

who looks down my top

that isn’t even that low

I’m just slouchy

and offers me a cigarette

from a crumpled packet.

I shake my head and pour

another sachet of crystal

sugar into my paper cup.

Victory is mine.

Look at me go, like I know how to write poetry

Prophecies don’t mean shit, little girl

There was a clearing in the forest

of desire. 

It was covered in leaves

red and gold

because it was 

Autumn.

It was pretty, sure

but everything was dead

and disintegrated like

the wings of pesky moths

underfoot.

It’s sort of funny

when you think about it.

How some of the most

beautiful

things

are dead.

Like stars 

and the aforementioned leaves. 

Our heroine crunched

through this clearing

in silence,

apart from the crunching.

She was wrapped in leathers and furs

and she had a sword

and a bow

because she’s a heroine

and these are the things a heroine

needs.

She had fire in her heart

because it was breaking

because her one true love

was dying

or maybe he was just bored of her and couldn’t think of a good enough excuse.

It was I’m dying or

I’m gay

and he kinda fancied her sister

so that wouldn’t be the best line.

Anyway the cure lay in the clearing

so onwards traipsed the heroine.

There was a large wooden chest in the centre

intricately carved and locked

with a gold lock tarnished silver.

The key was the problem

but she’d followed all the signs:

the bird, the leaves, the flower,

she had a birthmark on her right shoulder

and her name was Pandora, for chrissake,

if anyone was going to

open

a box it was her.

So if she was the one

and this was the box

then the key was round the neck

of the keeper

and there were certain rites to follow.

Certain procedures

protocols

She’d consulted oracles, elders, gods and seers.

But she was impatient

because of her undying love

for a dying/homosexual/really just a shitty excuse of a

man.

She drew her sword and 

CLANG

the lock did not break because she did not hit it.

She hit, instead, the sword of another girl,

dressed in the same clothes, armed with the same weapons

but her hair swamped her, flowing over the lid of the chest

and her eyes were outlined in kohl

that carved a pattern down her cheeks.

She looked bored, distracted, and yawned 

a little sadly. 

“Go home, kid. It’s not worth it.”

Our heroine shook her silly head

and ground her feet into the leaves

in a fighting stance

if you can imagine how that looks

because I’ve never seen one outside of 

the movies, 

there are few duels

today.

The girl on the chest

drew a long, long chain

from around her neck

silver silk in the low sun.

Greedy hands screamed

gimmie!

Save the boy,

save the love,

save my life!

GIMMIE IT NOW.

But for her haste she lost a finger.

The bird that had flown 

to show the way

darted for the keeper’s face

but she crushed it

in her hand.

Leaves swirled as menacingly

as leaves can be.

The rustling was impressive

at least.

A sword pierced through

our heroine’s

shoulder

through the middle of her birthmark

and tears sprang to the 

little girl’s eyes.

“Why do you want this?”

Key dangled in front of cloudy eyes.

“For love. For life.”

How poetic.

“Go home.”

The heroine says no.

The keeper twists her blade.

“But the prophecy?”

and she slumped down dead,

blood soaking into Autumn,

not making much difference.

The keeper uttered the title

and now you have to go back 

if you can’t remember it

because I’m not typing it again.