New Skin

Such arrogance found in the hands of lovers
who dare unwrap each other
despite their knife nails.
You cut me with your forked tongue so often
I keep a first aid kit tucked behind my excess rib.
We love like gods
reincarnated
and not yet used to these fragile bodies.
We don’t expect this to hurt as much as it does.
And yet
we just can’t help ourselves.

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Mountain

You feel so heavy some days.
Like you’re too rooted, too solid.
You wish you weren’t a place tired pilgrims wander to,
when they want reassurance of how far they are willing to go.
Listen sweetheart;
do you think a mountain looks up and wants to be a bird?
If you ever falter,
remember how you felt like you were once part of the dirt,
and how you’ve raised yourself high.
One way or another,
you’ll reach the sky

Skeleton Love Affair

I’ve ground our love affair into bone dust that people will use to get their own heart beating.
Like that of ancient mythology dumbed down, simplified, made feral.
Drink this tea to break your own heart, sprinkle this over your meal to be better.
Your hands are on someone else’s breakfast table and I
did this.
Kiss me
and see how I make us into the fluttering of someone else’s eyelids,
heavy and heady are the words,
so unlike my own trembling lips and panting breath.
I will give them the bones of us,
but I will keep the flesh between my own teeth.

The Book Of The Lynx And Amethyst

In my scripture the creation myth is a soft cat and a magpie, both taking turns rousing in the sleeping girl,
and the cat is animus and the magpie is anima.

In my scripture the creator is Ena and Ena is all,
Ena is fe(male) and neither and both,
S/he,
She
He,
Round and angular, soft and hard, open and ready.
Neither. Sexless and soft hands, calloused hands.
Looks at me with eyes of a magpie, smiles at me with the teeth of a cat.
Ena is the learning maker,
and she, he, neither, both, twin tongues, no tongues says:
Teach me.
And the words we speak to each other are those of impatient understating and frustrations.
We create worlds we don’t understand on the tips of our tongues,
in the bath, in my daydreams, in the spaces on the train.
And no one even knows the cosmos is being changed around us.

In my religion the temples are clusters of mugs,
towers half empty, towers where new life stirs.
Every stepping stone is a dirty spoon I have licked like a blessing.
The basket of donation is full of coffee grounds, milk and teabags.
Rivers run of sugar and honey,
and lipstick marks across the door.
Everything here decorated randomly in chaos whims, I am not a quiet priestess, pilgrims carry the towers up the stairs to me,
Ena tells me to drink water,
drink water,
then coffee.
It is in the commandments.

In my religion there is a broom on the wall so I can always remember that I start with brushing everything clean,
out the door.
The rituals are of water and fire in the morning;
the rituals are my hands in the earth,
my mouth around air.
They are silver around my neck, brass in my pillow, and a amethyst heart.
There are concrete hands on my face, there are things brewed in small bottles and drunk with reverence.
The rituals are always changing;
new seasons are blowing in and Ena changes like the leaves.
Ena is balance and sometimes there is fury in the steps we take together, sometimes there is calm.
Sometimes the temples get so high the pilgrim’s can´t even reach them anymore.
Ena says it´s okay,
it´s okay.
Fire and water in the morning,
fingertips in earth, lips around air.

Ena tells me;
Put your forehead to the ground, you are the universe, the maker, the religion, the scripture and you are the hymns.
Now pray.

Heart Hoarder

I tuck my words for him behind my uvula, where even you can’t reach them.
I am an over boiling pot of love poems,
lust poems.
I’ll tell you about every boy and girl I’ve wanted to plunge my fingertips into,
to see if I could dig out a reason to keep going.
But you can’t have this one.
I’ll wrap him so tightly in metaphors you won’t be able to tell where he starts,
and I begin.
My lips are sealed around his memory and you
can’t have him.
My flat mate knocked on my door last night,
told me to keep it down,
his voice leaks out from underneath my hands when I hold them on my body.
It whispers:
Good girl.
Yeah.
Come here you.
So now I sleep with my hands wrapped into my lovers hair and cross my fingers,
hope to die,
this isn’t a love story.
This is the story of the small hissing thing in me,
which hoards hearts

The Pantry

The witch’s pantry contains small bottles of every shape,
it’s a certain type of woman who bottles up her emotions and puts them on display.
Red and knobbly sits a bottle in the middle shelf.
It reads,
actually it sings when you run a finger over it.
“You, you, you.” like words ripped from a lovers throat.
You,

you,

you.

Another bottle is blue like harebells and twinkles like you thought they would,
it reads,
actually it sobs when you knock it over to the floor.
“There are places we can’t go back to, we’ll board the ship and find no harbour.
We’ll walk the path and find no gate.
Oh, oh, the harebells bloom without you now.”
She leaves it on the floor,
nudges a toe at it so it rolls under the pantry.

She wakes in the middle of the night, coughing up a storm.
She brews thyme tea with honey,
At 4:29 she coughs up a small bottle, the shape of a frog and the colour of mud
that shines green when the light hits it.
And it reads,
no, it croaks when she lifts it up.
“Peace be with the girls who are forest wanderers,
do you remember the smell of pine needles? The feelings of sap on your hands?
A small frog in your pocket. Keep walking, keep walking.

Tide

Home is a piece of driftwood crashing against the rocky shoreline of a place I have kept sailing away from.
If this life gave me anchors I only know progress will be slow,
but it wont stop me.
If life gave me salt water I know storms will come, and come,
and come.
The punchline is I was born by the ocean,
I know how to wait until the inevitable calm settles again.

I Am Magic

I call this a mythology,
because it feels safer to name beasts
than to tattoo medicine labels onto myself
I call myself priestess, goddess, lynx;
Holy trinity of “Holy hell” and questionable decisions.
I swear I have claws instead of nails and there is
a bestiary
of all my bad habits
and nightmares.

I’m all heavy handed symbolism
and suppressed flinches.
I keep a tally between the weather and me,
who breaks first,
and how often.
I think I’m winning but it’s been raining a lot lately,
like the weather wants to remind me where I am,
that I’m still mostly water.
If my garden has taught me anything,
it’s that I will swallow anything I cultivate myself.
Even badly thought out creation myths.

I say magic is the way of perceiving
what consequences and chance have in common,
the outcome of what we put out,
and a willing mind
that grasps
what comes back.

You remind me of the failed love potions I made when I was 13,
the smell of rotting rose petals everywhere.
So when I say
kiss me like you mean it,
when I say
I am magic;
I hope you can taste my whole mythology.

My Heart Forgets Itself

This isn’t a love poem, just so you know.
If my heart hasn’t learned by now not to beat
so hard
when you’re close by.
I’m not sure It’ll ever learn.
to be perfectly
honest
I know
I’m about as subtle as a train wreck,
I expect strangers to stop
in their tracks and say wow,
wow look at her.

Damn.

This isn’t a love poem, not even remotely.
this is
like vaguely remembering running out
into a storm
into your teeth.
Over and over again.
I want
to be ruined,
to be torn.
Flayed.
So open you can see
my stupid bloody heart,
shouting:
I can’t help it, I can’t help it.

Fuck.

Bread Dough Heart

When I grow old I want my kitchen to be a heart.
I don’t want rooms like open wounds, I don’t want blood on the walls but I want the steady,
thump-thump
noise of being alive.
The racing of too much coffee, the warmth of two big hands around two smaller hands rolling bread dough.
When I grow old, when I grow tired I want my kitchen table to be a harbour.
Where all the ships make it home and all the prayers sent out to sea will come down on us,
like sugar being poured in a tea cup,
making everything so sweet.
I want this kitchen to be so sweet it sticks to you when you leave.
The sound of laughter and colliding of cups and saucers whilst a small girl falls asleep,
curled up on the sheepskin on the floor,
taking this moment with her into the future.
So when she grows up, she’ll know the heart of the house is the room where we come together to make and break bread.