MY DIRTY EYES WON’T LOOK BEHIND.
I took a gamble on the heart of a horse,
my sister then beat it’s limp body for milk
while it’s desire to live sunk in a pit.
My father broke the bread raised from my mother’s broken hand
while the stars began to settle a little east of Eden.
I took a hand to the bottom of a well.
He repeats that some have luck thrust onto them,
I said it first.
But he means that I could stretch out and become something burning,
something properly beautiful, something that knows good words, something that could’ve been a
better girl, a writer or a poet.
The ghost of my ambition made a mess of his floor,
sulking beside me, dreaming of dirty things all the time:
bad men, bad blood, bad pulses and the touch of bad skin on my skin,
making divinity a final home.
I took a bus down to where paradise drifters turn under stone.
I kicked the rubble over my mother’s bed,
that stuff didn’t upset me anymore.
I felt all the wrong ideas in my head,
sitting by her plaque, I listened to her accent linger more than her words from the static of my phone.
Mould grew over all of it.
I began to laugh,
I found it funny how many lives I had to leave to live,
remembering that my girlhood rested with her,
with the ventilator screech, that hospital bed.
My unwounded slates I let to rest, soiled by her absent words.
I took my dream with me, down to his house
and wondered if he knew that he screamed at me just like my daddy did when he got mad.
I beat on a baseless drum,
I looked out into my lightless jungle and imagined sailing out of the gravel
and into the noise of
bridges turning to motorways turning to pavement,
hanging with noise, dripping with change
and I imagined boxing up all of my noise
and wondering if he’d miss me when I was no longer seventeen and by his door,
and if he’d ever think back to when he told me that I was immature,
so I asked him what to do-
since I was so young and there was no love that I ever really knew.
I took a walk through the breadth of market stalls on my way home.
It was sinking in the smell of something, the same look of something,
hearing phonecalls about something, feeling the same lameness rough and fucking me over;
a huddle of girls hunched over, a crowd of belching boys,
heaving ladies, a silence trusted in the qualms of a patient baby,
the vibrancy of the commuter signs and the adverts shoving it in your face
that you’ll never have that, the phone in my pocket turning slowly green.
I stared at the road listening to the man saying something about something
who stood in front of me waiting for something
like I was waiting for something,
anything.
I took a free ride from an angel when we both got lonely.
He picked me up off the side of White Horse Lane,
he couldn't touch me, I couldn’t say anything.
I almost asked if he knew what it meant to be nothing
because I didn’t believe in heaven too much.
Instead, I touched my shoulder,
wounding my skin tender as my heroes began to turn to dust.
I knew about all sorts of losers and ugly things
and how they still counted down fate on their fingers,
and how fate was waiting for me,
out of the car window, out of a youth never spent,
out of the calamity which threw my dirty eyes tired-
into the horizon of a world hanging from infinity.
Marghlara, 17, London - England ✯ almondbunny333@gmail.com