Wearable Art
This skin,
I'm going to step right out of it
and leave it lying here
at my feet
on the fucking floor,
Don't ask me to pick it up
don't ask me to stitch it up
don't ask me to wear it,
I don't feel comfortable
in it any more.
This skin
The skin that strikes
a spinal cord,
watch the zip break
against my spine,
uptight,
wrong fit,
shop-soiled reject
no guarantee
no replacement,
this skin isn't mine.
This skin,
it's the prickly side of velcro
sticky,
tacky,
salty,
saturated semen
rub salt in the wound.
I don't like it,
want it
or fucking need it,
so take it - it's yours
pin it on your bedroom wall,
poster-painted skin
yellow and blue bruises
contours and contrasts,
shadows and textures,
red blood,
seeping to the surface,
filling white space.
This skin
was once
my wearable art...
No more Death Times
Everyone I know
has a death wish
everyone I know
wants to fucking die,
Everyone I know
hates the ugliness
they see inside themselves
everyone wants to
fuck themselves over.
No more death times
in this life time
no more death times
in this life time
not this time.
Back in the Summer of '84
I had a friend who told me
that he wanted to die
before he turned twenty one,
he said that he never wanted to be
one of those 'old farts'
who sat staring at the television
with their feet tucked under
a coloured, crochet blanket.
He never wanted to get old
and sit in a high-backed armchair,
watching 'old people's' programmes
like Coronation Street,
dipping soggy biscuits
into sickly sweet cups of tea,
listening to the
talk-back radio station
all night long
for company.
He said that he never
wanted to be like that...
I thought that he was kidding
so we drove up One Tree Hill,
reclined the car seats
and fucked in time to music,
with the stereo playing
and the headlights turned on
until the battery
went flat.
It was all I could think of doing
to shut him the fuck up,
stop him talking about dying,
hold him inside me
a physical reminder
that he was still
young, warm and alive.
No more death times
in this life time
no more death times
in this life time
not this time.
The next night
I walked into his flat,
witnessed his convulsions,
dry wretched with revulsion
as white foam bubbled
from the corner of his mouth,
like sea spray.
I bathed with him
in his excretion,
lay on top of him
pinned him down,
tried to hold him still
and I watched his mouth
open and close
like a fish out of water
gasping for air.
When I heard the mucus
rattle from somewhere
cavernous deep within him,
I knew that it was too late,
I let go of his wrists
and collapsed like a wave
breaking over the shoreline
on top of him.
I felt weird,
because the night before
we had fucked
and now I was on top of him,
but this time he was dead
and I wanted us to fuck again
I wanted to make him live,
feel him inside me
hard, hot and sweaty with life
not cold and damp
with death.
In two hours time
he would have turned
twenty one years old,
I sang happy fucken birthday
through a starched, white, death-sheet
in the back of an ambulance,
but the siren was turned off
because there is no urgency
or emergency
in death,
no need to hurry
no place to go to now,
no cake to cut
or candles to blow out...
No more death times
in this life time
no more death times
in this life time
not this time.
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Alison Withers/aka error404