The Blepharoplastiad
 
“to be beautiful means to be yourself” 
                                    Thich Nhat Hanh
 
 
 
i.
 
if your Visacard’s a talisman to halt
the twenty-one signs of ageing 
 
if you want to give the slip to Time   for a time
to ease the raging –
 
yes    i witnessed 
your raging
 
& the little boy behind 
your raging –
 
if you think a scalpel to your eyelids will secure my love & loyalty
that your face is the mask
 
of a glamorous enigma  
let me ask
 
you one thing:  who are you?
& who will you be in the morning?
 
are you giving your face the slip
even the sun the slip as it’s dawning?
 
will you fake your own name?  
your own birth certificate?
 
if this surgeon cuts slivers from the eyelids i’ve touched & kissed
what history’s left for us to share    fuckwit?
 
i stay at my uni mate’s
in Bayswater 
 
as your face is being anaesthetized
trolleyed into theatre
 
i should phone you   stop you 
but your future’s already being smoothed & Visa-ed
 
new moons of your tissue 
loosed & tweezered 
 
a surgeon uncreasing you    unlaughing you    unliving you
unwriting the lines i adored
 
the chance of being ugly?    or being dead?     or being read?   
which of these three have you most abhorred?
 
within the week your eyelids will be incinerated into north London skies
some carbon       some dust       a smut       a mote 
 
when finally my own eyes droop i dream volcanic ash
pours down my throat  
 
 
 
ii.
 
Monday to Friday
neither of us is out
 
weekends        with relief      we pharmaco-create ourselves 
& gad about
 
in clubs where acid-twinks bitch & gloat
& threat-pose 
 
where bicep-fascist queens
throw shade    & salivate   & bulldoze
 
he takes note of them 
not me
 
we dance on nails of euphoria
to get free
 
 
 
iii.
 
now i dream his left eye’s the mouth of Vesuvius
his right eye’s the mouth of Etna    he’s anaesthetized    but still bellicose     
 
he’s enormous   he’s dormant    but full of spitting sucking holes
he straddles me        he straddles archipelagos 
 
then i dream the eyelids closing over them are being singed
by what’s venting through his pupils 
 
that they’re falling ash
entering my lungs    charring my bloodcells    
 
i jolt awake at 3am & see it all so clear:
how my Achilles’ heel’s my pride 
 
in standing by my man
in standing at his side
 
how when I tried to leave him
he charmed me     gaslit me with hot gas    bullied me back into line
 
but that
was fine
 
because i wasn’t done wearing the martyr’s crown
or dressing his pain
 
i wasn’t done trying to make him believe
he was beautiful
 
 
iv
 
next morning at Cockfosters     
petrified i’ll out you
 
you slap me on the back like a rugby mate   look past us
down the platform with a treacling cheek 
 
what genre is this?  romance? 
comic-book EEEEK?  Hammer-homo-horror?
 
fuck knows fuck knows fuck knows    but now a marriage – sorry –
carriage with us in it slows & slides from the station   pressing
 
bone against the glass 
through each dull borough
 
i can’t look at you   i read a sentence in a sunday supplement
ten thousand times
 
i can’t get beyond the full stop of it    
i’m sealed like a filthy secret inside of it
 
then i look out of the window    clock old carriages shattered in sidings
tagged by x-face    tich    & havoc boyz   clock splaying dusty buddleia
 
clock bathroom & bedroom 
& office kebab-shop elidings
 
ten thousand lives all shuddering past faster & faster & 
suddenly a  
 
 
iv.
 
tunnel vacuum-
packs our lungs
 
our reflection in the jittering pitchblack window 
shows us captured     skewed
 
handcuffed to our starbucks coffee cups
we’re playing inmates being transferred
 
or sex-mates in a porno with no script     or mates who’ll mate for life  
everything’s ever-so-slightly blurred
 
then    lightburst   blue-white   ripped back into light    
an inspector sways towards us
 
hole-punches
our destinations
 
 
v
 
laid out to the left of me’s 
a shimmering blue-white aluminium estuary
 
a river   a sea   mid-draining    post-op    gleaming past    gleaming still    
i have no more energy
 
for this     i watch the bright studs of waders      terns      & seagulls
riveting the muds in place
 
as if they never shift  
they do      they do       like skincells      like bloodcells   
 
the train window’s shaped like a cinema screen
the estuary glitterdimples where the wind has been
 
the outside of the glass has mudsplats scuffed sideways by the wind  
the river-sea / sea-river’s vast     seems to last     forever
 
superimposed on the glass    on the blue-white scene   
is the reflection of my face   
 
& his face is superimposed there too   on the blue-white scene
me-you /  you-me     though shadowed 
 
possibly crying     possibly pus
possibly sleeping   cotton-wadded
 
as a man dodging fares or fires
has eyes open by a slit 
 
as a salamander or a chameleon
has eyes open by a slit
 
as a crisped survivor
has eyes open by a slit
 
i wonder which bits of this
we’d edit
 
you mask-wearer    (i can’t do this without painting
a monster-mask for you to wear)            you cutter     you narcissist     you nutter
 
it cuts me to cut you
 
you off-cut
 
 
 
vi.
 
fare well     be well     age well    big spiker
big faker    big pharma     big charmer     
 
big heart      
you brittle fucking disarmer    fare well   be well    age well      
 
i touched & breathed your eyelids     
& now i have to get off soon     
 
i touched & breathed your eyelids   for years will dream your eyelids
but have to get off soon
 
one day you’ll understand 
why this is the stop 
 
this is the stop this is the stop
 
this is the stop where  
 
 
 
i’m born  
 
 
 

Quayside


Abdullah, fifteen, Pashtun
who'd have an AK47
ink-hammered the length of his forearm 
if it wasn't haram
is trying to get online.

He sits in the gutter, knees to chin.
               A Greek Orthodox priest passes by on the other side.
He sits in the gutter, knees to chin.
               A tourist in a carcrash bikini passes by on the other side.

For a signal he grips his phone against the sky.

On it are photos of his parents    that barbecue 
​in warm fields of grasses and red poppies and blue flax last June,
an address in Nottingham.

What's that trickling down his arm?  Sweat?  Goatsmilk?  Seawater?

Yes, Driver.  I'll do that thing for you.
Yes, Driver.  I'll stay alive.

On the quayside, as he waits for the ferry to Piraeus, he thinks:
this phone          this phone           is all         I own.

& my eyes

& my name

though his eyes - all the long, dark days & long, dark nights
​in the lorries from Kabul, & then the boat -
have become               like stones

though his name - all the long, dark days & long dark nights
in the lorries from Kabul, & then the boat -
breaks               into breadcrumbs                    in his throat.​


('Quayside' was published in the anthology In Transit: Poems Of Travel, edited by Sarah Jackson and Tim Youngs)
​


Pine


Once, at dusk, from a summer train
I saw a burning Ford Capri
at the edge of a peach fuzzed cornfield
two boys
running away from it
laughing.

In winter I saw that same car in a costume of snow
sinking
as if with the joy's weight.

I found out this:  there's no such thing as sin.

Take last night, here in Festalemps:
a white hair of lightning clove a pine
clean in two.

I held the man I'd stolen, as he held me.  Equal thunder.  Equal thievery.
We were each other's hot money.
We were each other's.  In wads.

Then we smelt black smouldering.  Flesh.
Not us.

                                   The pine.

This morning we walked to where it had split & burnt.

Ants were making chains of themselves
sneaking off 
with little lamps of resin.

Since then it's been little lamps of resin 
walking out of his nostrils,
little lamps of resin
walking out of his ears & lips,
little lamps of resin
walking out of every hole

in his lit body.


​'Pine' won the Stonewood Prize in the Aurora Writing Competition, April 2016