Mellissa Flowerdew-Clarke

I’m falling,
Deep down into your words.
Alice’s rabbit has beckoned me in;
Too late to look back now.

I’m falling.
Calligraphic sentiments
Kiss my ‘i’s and cross my t-eeth.
Letter-case me your way.

I’m falling.
Your alpha beats to my rhythm;
I harmonise your notes,
Taste sweet letters on my tongue.

I’m falling.
Your linguistry laps my wounds,
Heals my scars,
Bestills my trembling hands.

I’m falling.
You indent my dreams.
Catch me in the curves
Of our italicised hope.

I’m falling.
Stitch my broken wings and
Watch our worded wanderlust
Take flight.

I soak into your words.
Alice’s rabbit has beckoned me in;
Too late to look back now.

I’ve fallen.

I clasped the hand of my sand-storm lover,
As we walked the beach at night,
Picking amongst the debris
Of a thousand shipwrecked dreams.

I stared into forever with my sand-born lover,
As we paddled our toes in tomorrow;
Listening to the waves whisper
Promises of tide-born hope.

I sought solace in my sand-lorn lover,
When we kissed as the sun rose;
Pouring sea-salt tears
Onto broken, seeping wounds.

I tasted fear on my sand-swarmed lover,
As we drank messages from bottles,
Crushed stones in anxious fists,
Ground memories between teeth.

I uttered my sins with my sand-torn lover,
Cowered in our sea-sick confessional;
My knees still bleed from the shards of
What was left unsaid.

I drowned in the eyes of my sand-sore lover,
Wept as the sun set on my Yaramar dream.
My king amongst the midnight flotsam,
My pauper in the sun.

Lids stuck with labels;
Glue seeps into my tears;
Streaks mark my pallid face:
Tattooed suffering for those who look, to see.

Oh, out dammed spot;
I rub but can’t remove;
Scrubbed raw, an open wound:
Those shadows play havoc with my weary eyes.

Violent concerto;
A rhythm of pain;
A symphony of bruised hope:
Your strings make me burst into flames.

Are my tears more worthy now?

At sunrise I saw him,
In rusty casing,
Tarnished,
Burnt by the breeze,
Branded with sea salt and in-memoriam’s knife.
His soldered cracks seeped past misdemeanours;
Sanded edges softened spiked blows.

At eventide I saw him,
Lichen-love,
Suffocated,
Gasping for air.
Jetsam ditched, lagan abandoned;
His flotsam washed upon my shore,
As the sirens stalked, singing… ‘I love you’.

My Loverbye

Diseased butterflies,
Flutterbyes,
Shutter, gutter, stutterflies
Drip waxen tears of lust and hate.

My skin, it burns for you.
But, to open, spread, present and promise
Leaves me hollow from lip to lip.

Your stutterfly,
Shutterbye.
Gutter, tutter, nutterfly ignites
My all. My nothing.

Your tongue does pierce my soul.
My hole. My whole.
Oh, shutterbye love, extinguish my flame.

My flutterbye, stutterbye,
Beautiful, bastard lullaby.
My disease. My cure.
My lover, bye.

I pressed the red button today.
Torpedoes raced through streets of mayhem;
Mothers wailed, throwing babies out of razored windows.
Glass shards scattered across torched tarmac.

I pulled the trigger today.
Sneaked around crumbling columns, sight fixed on pain,
Dotted crosses on furrowed foreheads.
Oblivion: staining starched collars crimson.

I administered the injection today;
Ending dysmorphic visions of
Fatty tissue and engorged agony.
Sweet silence ebbed through swollen veins.

I broke my fast today.
Supping the hot cup of freedom scorched my throat.
I tasted liberty on my tongue & grief on my lips.
Dunked nuggets of independence left soggy reminders.

I high-fived life today;
Packed my lunch, dusted my heels & clicked three times.
Doting Dotty hop-scotched across parched amber tiles
As I waved ‘sayonara’, my face blistered by the sun.

Jo; after our walk in the Garden of Zion,
Her sacrifice gave me breath
Void of hate, void of fear
She never succumbed to the drug
That I, in the garden, touched.

Jo; after our walk in the Garden of Zion,
Took my hand in hers,
I sang the song of disease
As she ran my palm over her breast,
And without the lust of Eden,
She left me to tempt another.

It’s a time warp this place, a black hole.
In here, time is lost.
There’s no clock on the wall to prompt movement
no hands to direct you home.
Your dinner sits cold on a cracking plate, as the
lonely pace the floor, awaiting the beer-breath kiss
and clumsy grope goodnight.

It’s like the land that time forgot, this place.
Fossils from a prehistoric age
embalm themselves in pints of amber nectar.
Like caged rodents, they sniff around,
searching for boredom breakers.
Their nicotine fingers lay to rest in the
venomous, brimming trays.
They chew on fatty rinds and
wish they were somewhere else.

It’s like a drug, this place.
Imprisoned in the four walls, they grope
for wooden cues -the emblem of The Man.
The mossy table is their grave.
Hours disappear as they
smack shiny balls into darkened pockets,
praying for the glory of victory.
In here, they can be champions.

The walls, colour of cancer, bear scars of a
thousand misjudged battles.
Ale soldiers blindly throw their mini spears,
missing the enemy one by one.
Wounded, they stumble back to
the wooden pews, seeking solace in toxic optics.

It smells like a coffin, this place.
Crumbling skeletons of the glory years line
the dusty shelves and lurk in cobwebbed corners.
A stuffed trout, its glassy eyes staring,
watches over its hapless congregation.

Tug Wilson and Herbert Slade pose, fists clenched,
ready to fight their way out of their glass prisons.
But, they too are trapped in this black magic place.
Paget, frozen in time, stares out from his wooden frame.
His Mecca now a breeding-ground for disease.

It’s a time warp, this place.
A black hole.

The Paget Arms, inspired by a pub in Loughborough, was published in Speaking Words: Writing for Reading Aloud (CCC)

Goodbye Darling

Blind as I am
To the sense I had of wanting,
I loved those little pictures.

How it seizes upon one,
Dream after dream,
So depressed and restless.

Oh, how I wished
We’d brushed aside all that-
The sense of wanting to tell.

The longing and the comfort
Was part of all I did,
And, again, I thank you.

Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s letters to Dora Carrington.