Kingdomland Read online

  while outside the window insects thrum

  there are a mass of clovers

  tangling up in something

  my cup of bedside water is very still

  this is just what happened to me

  I suppose it happens to many others

  if you wear pink dungarees

  at an amiable age

  I’m trying to reach you

  from my position beetled in this stranger’s bedroom

  girl legs up towards the familiar cream ceiling

  I’m taped up with masking and broken-hearted

  in the end he would barely touch me

  were I to stay long enough to scrape dark butter

  onto toast

  mad and thatched

  something skinny as the passageway between lines

  a concertina of worry

  I’d leave them this

  Grow up

  girl in

  silver. No

  adult jewellery

  no adult

  feelings

  compromise

  is a word

  that belongs

  in the desert.

  I despise

  men in

  hard hats

  entering me

  singing as

  they do so

  as though

  they’re at the

  pulpit. Put

  her in the

  river. I will

  decide where

  she ends up

  guilty as

  ever, filled

  up with salt.

  Many Bird Roast

  I came in, dandy and present

  arguing for a moratorium on meat

  of the kind splayed out on the table, legs akimbo

  like a fallen-over ice skater skidding on her backside

  there are dogs in the outhouse and all over the world

  that we do not eat

  and one small sparrow in a pigeon in a grouse in a swan

  that we will certainly eat

  overlooking all the drama, with as many eyes as a spider

  that we’ll cut in two

  and the compacted layers of the various meats

  will collapse away dreamily as a rainbow melts down

  into the marsh where it came from

  slipping meat from the bone

  onto a specially designed knife

  there’s a call out for plates –

  I’m the only one with a sense of outcry

  someone says, you weren’t like this when it was broiling away

  smelling like your history, smelling like

  the deep skin on your knee after playing in the sun all day

  skinned with good dirt

  and your under-blood just showing through

  smelling like warm dry firs after burning and the outdoors

  after fireworks and Novembers after tea

  you eat and smell like the rest of us

  dirty rat under your armpit

  dirty bird in your stomach

  and birds fell down the chimney with thwacks into buckets

  and we got so poor we had to eat them too

  strange cockatoos and once a brilliantly lit pure white dove

  that we kept in a hutch with a small pot of ink

  and when we let it out

  it wasn’t so much a raven as just a plain black dove

  ready to cook, and with superstition, I learnt to.

  Sweet’n Low

  A BBQ in the barracks

  for a saintly boy

  his ears like caravan antennae.

  Afternoon weather is

  generic, like ice on the

  steamy road metaphor,

  not the eclipsing

  originality of

  an elephant.

  I am so angry

  for the octopus

  swallowed in kitsch restaurants.

  Quit it,

  though I still wear the skin of animals

  every day.

  Beef Cubes

  hot tight Penny

  that girl at school

  who put talc on her face

  and sausage blush

  on her cheeks

  was a meat clown

  Terry felt through her jean shorts

  told everyone she was wet

  push him off your lap

  we told her, thong showing

  brown squares in the pastry bin

  as she’d been sick

  she was incredibly thin

  and kept getting thinner

  like when you turn a kind of mirror

  till you’re flat. Muscle memory

  from her panic attacks

  kept her off the beach

  where the whale cut in half

  exudes its yellow fat

  and the tourists come

  stroked and swollen

  on its back, like you

  hot tight Penny

  its fin a Hot Pocket

  people milling as the sun sets

  laying down blankets

  one beef patty turning on the grill

  by the large blue carcass

  by the large blue sea

  The Indigo Field

  Two bees hang

  around a severed horse’s head

  forgetting that they’re supposed to

  pollinate

  flowers instead of

  the roughly opened gland

  of a mammal.

  Black pennies

  with cow faces

  down a black well.

  You stood no chance

  of being born

  I tell myself, as the sea

  cannibalises.

  It manages to forgive itself

  every day, without visions

  of the baby

  making her way towards me

  across the indigo field.

  Seer

  There she lies aching over enamel,

  a blood bath in the city. An animal

  hounded, an ingrate up to the gates,

  ungracious house guest, keening,

  a dog’s deep growling on the turn.

  The green bank that insists on being

  revealed down the insides of legs,

  like the muttering stranger

  who jumps out from behind a tree.

  The white ocean spreads itself

  like the badly iced top of a cake

  seen through the smeared Plexiglas

  of a cheap hotel restaurant.

  I grate flesh into garlanded toilet water,

  rearrangements of a desiccated sky.

  A sound pooled in water, as oil pools

  in water, a ghost caught in the layers.

  Intestinal scorching, a stomach of shavings.

  Being haunted by a baby is worse

  than you’d think. I don’t want her,

  an ingrown ghost, intermittent horror,

  the same horror of no stars on a clear night

  that means you see nothing in the dark.

  The kind of dark you find inside a body.

  The kind of darkness you find a body in.

  Sick honeysuckle on the air smell

  and all around the hotel, rural noises.

  The sky is wet with blood and solvent,

  sinewy like a fish spine, illuminated

  with stars like bone-ends. If you climb

  onto the roof and watch this weather

  from the weather vane, to hold this

  poor memory up, like a sacrifice

  to the firmament, you will be exposed.

  Dad the Pig

  with a Snickers

  in his trough.

  I dreamed this poem

  knee deep

  in silk –

  I mean silo.

  Slice him up

  there’s a vacancy

  in the sky

  and complacency

  in the sty.

  Who’s useful after
that

  vasectomy anyway?

  Someone painted him

  in pigeony colours

  everyone knows

  they’re the worst

  crayons

  (they’d run out

  of flesh pencil

  well it is the rarest

  colour in

  the tin).

  Ball him up

  like an egg

  careful of his

  front bits

  wobbling.

  His turkey neck

  sack like a

  dangling

  testicle

  stretched down

  to the dirt in

  blow-job pose

  escaped man

  fallen to the sand

  on his knees

  in prayer pose

  pinched and dead

  puffer fish

  on the end of a line

  in its last

  breath pose.

  At night Mam

  dreams of taut

  hot pigs

  bullish and red

  with blue veins.

  She wears him

  calls him

  the big holdall

  keeps him in the loft

  only takes him out

  when we go camping.

  Porcine Armour Thyroid

  I am a gland, the smooth opal gland

  of a pig, who is bubbly with glands

  and the glands torn open in this pig’s

  shorn neck look like droplets of sperm

  on the end of your glans. I eat the glands

  of pigs for breakfast, and I take a few

  in pills each night, slipping down my throat

  a smooth oblong, like oysters or snot.

  I rub the loose oil glands in my hands

  to moisturise, pale mermaid’s purses

  salted like eyeballs, like lychees, and then

  I bathe in some glands, slipping round

  each other, the miscreant lump under skin

  a gland enlarged with the promise of sickness

  grey and portentous, a gland cut open

  and placed within another gland creates

  a geode of glands, the colour of bad livers

  the smell of bad lungs, full of poor white

  blood cells, or good white blood cells

  or the blood work of a pig, whatever’s

  farthest, most holy, to the ground.

  Cravendale

  Purblind monkey

  purblind fatted cow

  waiting in the queue for the contract

  made on her behalf

  low in the muddy sundown

  their moans create the dusk

  not the other way around

  stinking path up to the freezer

  further up still from the abattoir

  the thin incision on her leg

  so she’ll kneel before walking

  on the plates of her knees

  up the old gravel road

  a cow in slow and silent

  moonlight, grass in her ear

  no cow is really a mother

  but to milk in the air

  or air as milk

  or milk in her eye

  like a hot blue steam room

  holding worlds of fat

  mysterious for our benefit

  in pictures of the quaintest

  traditions cream is tugged

  into pails

  while in the background

  pyres burn on

  her low down warm front

  puddles on the gravel

  cow, eye as a creed

  or the look into your eye she makes

  a bond, you imagine

  moving past you on her knees

  caved in from the walk

  but laud the pole

  that mighty design

  like a bolt through the head

  there’s one still fox

  looking up at me

  from the field of sheep

  as I go by – he’s the advert

  at the window

  as I’m falling straight down

  Crying girl

  in the canopy

  branch held

  unstable

  a face drawn

  pendant-

  shaped, from

  the bark

  marks

  how like

  a tree is

  a woman

  crumbling

  with age

  conversations

  inaudible

  without a

  stethoscope

  to the forest

  floor and

  even then

  we whisper.

  The Girls of Situations

  History holds the incorrect theories of the sea and how they don’t fall off the land, made up by men. Small clouds align. Theories of worship. Women’s bodies collect material the way metals accrue in organs. The accumulation of chemical residue, the red bricks of the day in a woman’s chest like weights on a diver ungracefully stomping into the lake.

  Behind me, a genealogy of red-cheeked maids in maroon-check pinafores. Not a hair out of place, no boarding school narrative, babies shooting from them, straightening beds, nursing while smoking, in labour with rosacea burns, hairs on their breasts wet with the strain. From them I have taken yellow hands and knees, arthritic from kneeling to scrub.

  The man he tells you he is not tells you to get an abortion. I live in skirt-behaviours round the social club, where men and cheap beer will spin you till you’re sick. Governance is bountiful other than for the young girl who swims out to sea for her reckless behaviour. I make my face white and orange for the jewellery I expect to own. A mimic octopus might be many things but it cannot mimic me.

  I stayed with a man after work who kept tarantulas in the loft space. I had on my mint deli uniform and my face was grey. I cut cheese all day long and ham on an industrial slicer. I didn’t want to see the bastard black legs of the largest tarantula, he called it King, it slept in a plastic container with air holes at the top

  and my protests were nothing down the rattling metal pull-down stairs where he came with the wobbling box in hand, how sad it actually was to see the spider uselessly point his legs in the air as if to sense a threat in this house with a Disney princess quilt and frieze for his six-year-old daughter who stays each Saturday, we don’t talk about her, he hides the spiders when she comes around, I am not enough to have them hidden for, the blanket of my apron is a pouch for King and in the dirt of his kitchen I would like to go home.

  We chew processed meat in the grand old hall, my hand on a gilded bannister. Above a musical washboard, they hang like ceramic angels, faces chipped, hands chipped with warts from galvanised steel and other kitchenalia.

  My mother folding tumble dryer tubes next to the sleeping baby while detergent wends through her arteria, replicating in the blood and gathering as a bright yellow crud in the historical river, brown toxins shared down the gene pool.

  Too young to work, but still changing beds in the early hours for a holiday cottage foaming at the mouth for a future untenable, stealing biscuits from a tin. A lousy future that taunts itself on the end of a string, composting from the inside out like a Halloween pumpkin gone bad. I will ask my mother to push me through the ivory gates. I will raid the box of coupons for an answer. Lost to the coins kept in the Steradent tin. I will steal from my own mother to make myself feel richer, and smoke her old cigarettes to make myself sicker, become impregnated with ideas and resist her own impregnation, cut anything out of me that starts to grow in there.

  Up the chimney and towards the field, a stark bright woman in glowering dusk wears blinding white, and like a fish she sheds herself, and in her hand, she holds something small, ungrippable.

  Remedies

  Seek god’s face in the pustule of a teenage girl

  whose wrists smell like table sugar

  whose hand you hold

 
; under the green and white striped awning

  of the beach cafe. Sand blows into ham sandwiches

  while distemper accumulates at sea.

  Green parsley and an excess of vitamins

  we whisper remedies out of habit.

  If we are passing through the water

  and the water is delivering us from evil

  forgiving us our trespasses, as we forgive

  the cramping tide and waves

  we might eventually enjoy grainy tea

  in cardboard containers

  and look forward to late at night

  her arm stretched across me

  pressing into my stomach and counting down

  the space between waves

  a best friend with green eyes

  as shallow as a harbour pool.

  Tower of Masks

  Chisel at a

  bout of stone

  head of hair

  picked from

  rock, incorruptible

  in among

  the citizenry

  she is framed

  cherubic against glass

  and people congregate

  like eyes on

  the end of a stalk

  picked out

  from the crowd

  a reclining stone

  the woman

  is fuller with

  her captured rock

  inside the modulating

  curve, the dish

  of her hip

  puckered as

  flesh is, orbed

  and facing up

  ~

  Girl in the shadows

  still and marble

  the preferred stone.

  Girl with a full old

  and baroque heart

  remains stationary.

  Girl with pain in the shins

  deep muscle burning

  delinquent, mineral eyes

  nothing like anything

  but a tower of lips

  now I am obsessed.

  Blue expression of trees