Month: June 2020

Black

Published on by Sarah Drury2 Comments

It was a black day
and it was a BLACK day
I, the newly widowed
clothed in blackbird feathers
Shining like a mirror
reflecting fallacies
not faces
Swathes of blackish sorrow
consumed my
eiderdown of grief
Whilst collective tears
pooling
at my crushed stiletto feet
like seas of emotional
effluent
How many truly cry
when others
snivel in consolation?

*

Coffins muffle the
sonority of
grieving mouths
Damping down the
exaggerated pulse of
blood red hearts
Barriers to paradise lost
remind the dead
not to breathe
For death is
breath without lungs
and mortality is life
without living

*

We didn’t have a church
for you would turn
in your fire-ash not-grave
Phoenix smiting from
the flames
the Godly fallacy
Singing godless psalms
of Elbow
and Eva Cassidy
I wished I’d listened
to your heart
for the reggae in your soul
I painted on my face
of have no feelings
Cherry lips set in
a rigor mortis pout
Spider eyes kept dry by
waterproof mascara
Emotion
Emotion
Emotion
Less

*

And my love is
ash
I am married to
a brown plastic urn
And the wedding rings
don’t fit anymore
Me with my
disconsolate finger
You with your hands
busy playing harps
in Heaven

©2020 Sarah Drury

Stacey

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My name is Stacey
I am hard as the knuckles
on my father’s hand
When his gold sovereign ring
kisses my lying teeth
With a glint of what he calls
tough love

And his Doc Marten feet
dance on my nail-hard flesh
Painting green and purple
masterpieces with
splashes of red
A canvas of abuse but
he says he loves me
And love is precious

And his eyes cut into
my heart like a surgeon
nonchalantly considers
a newly deceased cadaver
I have to look away
or iron palms will smart
my punch bag cheek
But love is like that

I think my life is tough
But at the end of the day
it’s for my own good
My father says
I’m a fucking little bitch
But he will break me
and make me

But he’s birthed a monster
with his fists of fire
and his hands of hate
and his feet of fury
and his temper of turmeric

I am Stacey
I am hard as the knuckles
on my father’s hand
And I am as broken
as the glass greenhouse
where my father
shouldn’t throw stones

©2020 Sarah Drury

Image by Pexels from Pixabay

Compliance

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I owe my life to two things: my son and a drug called lithium. It is not an easy medication and comes with some harsh side effects. It can also be lethal. Here is my experience:

I chew the cud of psychological
plaster casts
A cow crudely masticating broken dreams
Oh, white lithium
Not so refined
as to be spherical
Choking the resistance
Laid dormant within me
Valiance succumbed by
radicalised defeat

My glazed eyes from
days of psychiatric praise
My mouth parched
Drinking deserts
Spitting out the camels
Yet feasting on the humps

I may be as animated
as a corpse
Chasing heaven
Yet pursued by fallen angels
My limbs may tremor
Swathed in tsunamis
as they tremble like
leaves tossed meaningless
in a merciless wind

And in my darkest days
I will be penning eulogies
Darkness clothes the weary
in roseless thorns
Yet when the leaden clouds
disperse
Joy becomes an ecstasy

“Euphoria”, sings the blackbird
delirious on Puccini
Taking flight on wings
of obsidian promises
Just as my mind
Grazes the stratosphere

The steady choke of conventional
pulses through my veins
A military equator
uniformly bleeding
regulated nonchalance

The tick tock passage
of the anaesthetised psyche clock
whispers in demands of compliance
And I dot the i’s
and cross the t’s
As the lithium punctuates my life
into fairytales
Not horror stories

©2020 Sarah Drury

Image by jessica45 from Pixabay

Apart

Published on by Sarah Drury2 Comments

Apart

It is a sad day
When the death knell tolls
When two hearts must part
Ripped out of alabaster ribs
With a gut wrench fist
For the sake of muffled lips
And clackety tongued convention

It is a sad day
When I say goodbye
to a love who never was in bloom
I never picked your rose
Just gazed upon a fearful bud
whose petals curled and sighed
in fearful rumination

It is a sad day
When voices fail to
sing our songs of truth
Chrysalis consumes the butterfly
Wings of trepidation
soaring in a universe of
haves and have nots

We have not

©2020 Sarah Drury

Skipped

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I skip along these scummy streets
Scuff the needles with my Tough girl Doc Martens
Pass the burnt-out Vauxhall Zafira
I’ve lived here a year, I think I’m starting
To blend in with the natives
I’ve perfected the ‘don’t fuck with me’ stare
I walk past the gangs of teens
and put on the act that I don’t care
(and wear my nonchalant face)

I’m used to the tab ends and smidgens of weed
I find in the communal lobby when I’m on my way out
Coke snorting tubes littering the stairwell
Kids smoking joints when the police aren’t about
My son sees the signs and knows all the vocab
I’m trying to tell him that drugs can be lethal
He wanted to know where the dealers live
I tell him that these people are dodgy, be careful
We don’t want our heads kicking in!

I walk the streets taking in the deprivation
when at my feet I find a huge bag of weed
I wonder if a drug runner has dropped it by accident
I consider its value, my bank balance it could feed
I have visions of piles of black-market cash
And takeaways unlimited, new clothes and hairdos
But if the druggies found out I’d purloined their stash
I think of my body splashed over the news
And I get paranoid that some dodgy geezer
is watching me, waiting to kick my head in
So I leave the package where I left it
And let someone else partake in their sin

And I walk along the scummy street
Til I see my safe little council flat
and I think about the stash of dope
and wonder what kind of stupid twat
would drop it
Psychedelic lost property!

©2020 Sarah Drury