Shorts from Marilyn Monroes's Autopsy

Trigger Happy

Every night he pretended to shoot himself in front of her
enjoyed her pleas and screams as the blanks fired.
Time for change, she decided wearily,
swapping live bullets for the blanks,
time for change, he arrogantly decreed,
‘tonight I will pretend to shoot the baby’

Skin’phonies
 
Strung at the throat, each
sinew a symphony of strings
in the unforgiving space between skins.
Sex tourniquet binds bleeding guitar wounds
to drum beating, louder than bombs

Glassed in Portsmouth

Dockyard town, greyer than
peeling paint in derelict factory,
summoned by football Gods to
bear fists in a pub beer garden

Scar rests as empty comma
ploughed above a turret brow,
for every stitch a diamond glistened
as a chandelier lump in my chest.

Just the way it was
Wolverhampton Wanderers ay we

Cut me in half and I still bleed gold & black,
but it was Cymru red which saturated my Adidas trainers
and I held the nurse’s hand and whimpered
‘my train leaves in an hour’

It’s a long way home when the station is closed.

On Journey

Place names are mere scrabble words when
direction is to merely survive on aeroplane time tables.
Shortest distance between you and me is together.

A Womb in Winter

The cortege of miscarried are dead to me
nursery rhyme couplets between
door-breath and half-light:
little boy blue has lost his sheep
hushaby mountain  screams
that voiceless rage of tiny limbs

Smother the Mother with bleeding rag
transplant my seeds into groin of A.N. Other,
but who sees the Mother’s eyes on Xmas morning?

To the Tattoo of Me

Solitary lantern from attic window
frames the hieroglyphics on my skin
maps compass flesh to treacherous harbours,
oil tankers on the horizon were inked
limb cadavers awaiting sea burial,

Until she drew blood with a fountain pen
And drew a swallow on my neck

Sprawled in Summertime Oils
(inspired by Hopper’s Summertime)

The beautiful regret of white
shallow snow of summer falls, still

breeze tastes the warmth between her thighs
liminal lovers will come to her tonight, perhaps