I am my own imaginary friend. When I do something naughty I blame myself and I feed on salt and pepper. I draw on the walls in green ink and I leave footprints in the butter. At night I sweep the hearth with a besom made of eyelashes and I come in shape no bigger than a cubic zirconia on the forefinger of a stripogram. I smoke thyme in an acorn-cup pipe and sometimes I solve crimes.
I am contemplating a campaign against The Observer, specifically against their Woman magazine. The last issue of this monthly menstrual clot included an interview with Scarlett Johansson about clothes, an article about the rise of ‘slapper shoes’, another about male models and how they are more muscular this season, many, many pictures of handbags and lipstick and in general a load of shite about frocks and feelings. I am (more or less) a woman, and I am interested in clockwork toys, toads and Roman dining habits. I am going to petition them for a monthly Man magazine full of tits and tanks, in which every article is written by Jeremy Clarkson.
Last night I ate cheese that was as meat. I wore the Dog Dress, patterned with pugs, and I sported a luxuriant moustache. This morning I am desirous of a return to the womb. I am jealous because the Best Girl and her man have gone to the zoo. I am going to make my own zoo. I will construct enclosures from books; one for the werewolf (who has swapped his fez in favour of a curly black wig), one for all the clowns, one for Spatchcock and one for the boys, who I will hunt down one by one with a butterfly net and a harpoon. Then I will spend the afternoon throwing bread rolls at them.
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I like this, its measure and pace. Your poems if indeed that is what you call them (that's what they seem like to me) have great strength and vigor and your minds eye perfectly describes for the reader a bit of your inner world.
ReplyDeleteWhat I am wondering though, is what might happen to your poems, and for you, if you were to understand yourself as beautiful...?
I make up that you are holding back, or are held back by a deeper belief about yourself that nurtures a grand deception, and hence the smoke of butterfly's and the confinement of cocoons...
...but perhaps I overstep my bounds...
Poetman
Hello again, nice to have you back.
ReplyDeleteThere are no such things as bounds to overstep, that’s just a story mothers use to frighten their children.
Your comment made me stop and think for a very long time. I had two cups of Earl Grey.
The things I write here are little mouthfuls of pudding in blown-gold ramekins. I do not know if they are poems, but they are certainly exactly how I am. I do see myself as beautiful – even as beauty itself – although my definition of beauty is somewhat idiosyncratic.
I am unsettled. I would contend that I know myself inside-out and that everything I am and do is what I have designed, but I can never really know. Self-deception is a cunning bugger. I am going to need considerably more tea.
Thank you for your compliments and for making me stop and think.