Coming out of the deep freeze
I’m stuck, your cluttered hands doing
the uncultured work as the sun goes down.
What you take as my vow
is just the fissures they allow.
Would you take this sky to be one waking up or one closing down?
You shine like a perfect instrument in a dentist’s tray,
So far away from any surgeon’s table
Where they root around root canals
Looking banal at any cavities to be found.
Tonight will be a murder mystery
but it will have no casualties.
I would love to love you till you stay,
But I can’t do anything but worship the skin that’s leaving today.
The air only holds a typecast moon
twinkling over my biggest truth:
I will lose you.
It’s only a matter of
when and why
how and who
Questions appear before the answers
if you know the screenwriter as well as I do.
Your shy rehearsed lines,
Your bandaged-up body like miniature Russian dolls.
I’ll pull apart the different strands of you
and find where the real woman lies.
Is she stranded between the clock hands that can never find its final hour,
just existing,
Ticking along unaware of the cost of all this lost time?
Please come beneath me,
under those warm arches.
You will never be understood.
Time’s arrow marches forward.
That’s a lie.
I am as lost as the hours we invested in.
It’s all true.
You’re no longer that beacon of hope you were when I first met you,
but you’re still as hungry as when you gave me that first devouring look.
You switch this off somehow
But tell me now:
What will it take from me to bring this back to life?
Freshen
There’s no drive here to make me sane
Or let me sleep,
There are no fingernails vacant enough to descale this pipe life dream,
hanging by a thread on a three-network plan out of reach.
A teenager taunting and dangling a young kid over the bannisters as we speak
The teachers aren’t listening
as the wardens take their payments and don’t dare to catch him.
Pastel paints at the start of a new week.
Before medicine alley
Trying to be grown up whilst the toys are all broken
And the truth is hidden under the guise of ‘I’m just joking’.
My face buried under the weight of a shop-bought angel cake:
Watch it being sliced so delicately,
watch it being wasted on the deities who shun my confectionary
with their dietary legalese.
Still, I’ll drink this substitute dry,
leather lips like hissing possums
running rings around athletic tracks of the academy’s playing pitch
A coach who looks in my eyes, and begs them not to crack under the lines
To jeopardize his personal record timing prize
There’ll be no more deterrents to the most natural of highs.
Whale Watching
In the writers room
Concocting alibis far too sweet for the likes of me,
can you hold that wavering pen and write what I see?
I fear pen and paper is a method I can no longer feel
I feel that breathing is a trick that’s no longer real.
I’ll turn as white as the scrunched-up paper in your hand,
Your dress hung like ribbons,
concealing the only part of you that’s really here.
What are the objectives?
These cloudy mists we write of the hand of a lost judge
passing judgement on a criminal syndicate of which we are all part of
What I hear from the side of the road
is moving parts of engines all about to explode.
To make it blow
What would you do for me?
I like my sanctuary,
my writers retreat,
My baseless study when I can study from a distance
What makes you you
What makes me me
It’s a banana skin slip of possibilities
You were always the type to blot my lipstick,
Pout my courage, purge my skin,
to commit this sin
You’d have to be truly loveless
We’re not there yet.
Now I want to blot you out,
pure ammunition for the page,
A poet’s imitation of a child in fear.
If life is a stage that what does that make us, my dear?
Maybe the cleaners?
I think we’re more than that, but you’ll just sit there
inventing reasons to clean up someone else’s mess.
Let them deal with that themselves
You think of all the lonesome cries for help no one has listened to yet.
Leave the milk turning sour on the shelf
You think we’re Van Gogh’s ear cauterized in a tin of Heinz beans.
Beautiful spirits frail and weak yet to be seen
I think we are as doomed as the great zombies of Nicholson Street
I think we are the beat of a national anthem for a country that doesn’t exist
Paper and glue,
We have no rhythm.
Hang a wall high
stick it back together again.
Draw a border with
a start
a middle
an end.
It was signed by a list of men who hold declarations with no ambition
Under the covers they will make amends.
To have sex with their ghosts you just need to use that well fostered imagination.
You just need to close your eyes and forget about the reality of the situation
You just need to remember that every devastation for them had already happened,
You hold a match that had already been lit
Where do you throw the useless flint
Where do you put its ruthless glint?
Foreign continents, new constituents
Bed-pan parliaments,
Writing for a living,
kissing Euripides on his scarlet cheek.
He falls under the curtain in the Aegean sea,
I see seals on tour in Aberdeen.
The boat driver sold me the fantasy of whales
Well, I blub a tale.
“Have you written all that?”
“Yes”
Exhale.
More power in dead writers than a west coast gale.
Lily Thomson lives in Edinburgh. Her work explores themes of identity, alienation, travel and intimacy, and has been published in Five on the Fifth, The Honest Ulsterman, Agora and One Hand Clapping amongst others. She is a previous winner of the Sophia Jex Blake essay prize.
