Experimental

‘Those lips that Love’s own hand did make / Breathed forth the sound that said ‘I hate’ / To me that languished for her sake.’

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 145

I.

Sweat ran down the sides of each breast

like tears, i thought.

                                Salt leaving my body

where it can, because i cannot cry, just

quietly say okay yes, whatever You need

 You’re the genius, don’t worry about me;

clever man, oh, lover.

                    Baldness peeps through hair

as You write, i watch, composing my own

hot-living-work, desiring in couplets, rage

                        in iambic lines, though You

don’t give a shit about things that are mine.

            William, eye rubbing, breath stale

script scratching in salt-chested night.

II.

My masters’ hands are not doves fluttering

nimbly over spread-legged pages;

they are cold, clammy, calloused, wandering

over my breasts on the morning’s bright stage.

His face is not benign intelligence,

when he screws his eyes up, wetness

seeps in effort from exposed forehead then

his angry mouth, rasps in wrath, he curses

my body, take it, whore, you want more?

My masters’ senses are not god-given

holy instruments of transcendental

something or other. He is only a man.

A man pissing long and tired in the morning,

yawning and rubbing a beard that’s greying.

III.

Our sweat cooling on my body starts to turn

me from hot to clammy-cold shaking,

he sits on the bed, flexing toes, stretching.

Cracking his neck from one way to the other,

and he sighs as he looks for his clothes.

Only one hour before,

his eyes were pouched orbs touring my neck,

hair, lips

small ‘mm’s buzzed in his throat and I felt

liquid                                                 healthy.

Now, I speak,

he responds far away, with a muffled ‘hm’,

looking out of the window as he

quietly       buttons       up        his        shirt.

‘Of all Bitches dead or alive a scribbling woman is the most canine.’

Lord Byron, ‘Letters and Journals, 2: 132’

4.

Finger thumb, traced ear to shaking, dying deer

throat, he pushes, crushes his mouth to me, teeth clash,

scrape like cheap china, he pulls away, grunts stop

tilting your head like that, forces open-mouth four AM

breath in to mine again, as farmers wake, cold nosed,

stifling morning erections, we milk and wane and beat,

hot - licking, smoothing in to each other’s bareness,

feeling the ache of the next day in our endless hand moving.

8.

In nose-straightness, eye-darkness he says

Just move on Caroline, it’s not that hard.

Innards fold, his words curl and brown,

what do you mean it’s not that hard,

can’t help mewing out, thick oily whine.

What do you mean, I wrap fingers in dirt-dark hair

and jerk backwards, making throat muscles contract,

and laugh as he growls owahhabitch getoffmenow.

14.

I try to speak in his voice out loud, but

his accent seems to slip. I can’t quite get

the vowel sounds right, they come somewhat

harsher. I try hard to see his eyes next,

only to find an impression behind

dimpled glass. What stays is the rest.

Sitting on the floor, carefully after a bath,

he’d dry between each toe. Things like that.

2.

He gnawed at nails, I knew it was him,

‘Byron, you have to meet Lady Caroline’.

Wasn’t prepared for stuttering long lashed rims,

of blinking eyes, to be so nervous, behind

the protective performance of poet prick.

With his still mouth-damp hand, he held mine,

‘I’ve been waiting to meet you, since you ran,

from the Westmorelands that time’, he began.

7.

I trace a figure 8 on the back of his hand,

digging each time I reach the top bit making

rivulets, spotted angry flesh - knowing

these marks will be there later if he finds someone,

some slut in his chambers will be fucked

by hands which scream in scabs remember me.

Remember me in yellow, hot cuts infected,

remember me in dark brown flakes on your bedsheets.

1.

The first thing I felt was a kind of pity,

but the kind that turns you on, like perhaps

taking some big-eyed-boy’s virginity,

and the sense of complete power it gives.

As we danced, he was at the edge, sitting,

tapping his one good foot as I skipped

and bowed, fell and swayed with another man

watching him, as I grabbed my husband’s hand.

11.

You were just being used, she said to me.

Used for sex and affection until he found,

someone he liked better, that’s all.

What I don’t think I can ever

admit; is when I look in the mirror, what I see

makes me pleased, that someone so desired,

would even bother using me.

10.

Lacquered door chipped paint knuckles like cod

pale blanched as I knock maid’s feathers fluff

my      breath     crooked                      I strip my

boy’s defence and am shaking pale white fish

fluttering on lacquered floor guts ripped from

bleeding hole underneath they dress me in white

and tell me to leave as he won’t see me so

then I don’t know what to do and pick up the knife  

13.

‘God damn!’ God damn you, ‘read Glenarvon

by Caro Lamb’, bet you thought it was all about   

you, God damn! Like I have never loved before,

like I woke up, formed, when you rendered me -

just some character made to play with. Don’t I have

things to say that aren’t about you, don’t you think?

If you recognise yourself in any of this, I tell you now,

you gave me nothing, at all, that I didn’t already have.

6.

Face settled in to sleep shapelessness, top lip

reveals two sticky, cerated teeth. Forehead against

mine. Our sweat mixing where they touch. He breathes

against my lips, breaths that curl and growl off the roof

of his mouth. This is an intimate moment.         

                          You don’t breathe just anyone.

Yet at soon as he is gone, the day is in bed,

and it imagines who he will be with that night.

12.

Cloth shroud, the stopper between the man

and my want. I peel him like a glutton,

like the first time he got me alone and

I felt each part of undressing him, each button

and lace. I stole his portrait, so it can

bring him back to me, my hiding ‘true one.’

In fact, in a way I like him more, when that

nasty, sarcastic, mouth can’t argue back.

5.

The smell of my Husband’s breath makes me sick,

I try not to breathe it in as he huffs, adjusting his

balls in bed. My lover sweats a lot, yet the man

who grunts and snores beside me, is as dry as

a sparrow’s feathered form. His house spider

hands tickling on to my stomach, his tap against

my clenched thigh. I wish my eyelids did not

flutter and flick, answering yes, I am still awake.

9.

Who is this bitch, I will remember that name,

Jane. Search the face of every woman I meet

at dances, and wonder was it you? Find and

despise, anyone even resembling what I guess

is your type. Early days slips, where you said

‘never really gone for slim blondes’ eat your

efforts like syphilis, as I make enemies of any

woman with brown hair, tits, and wide hips.

3.

His gravy thick laugh moves around the trees,

and his performances are gone in the show of teeth,

euyah-HA, eyuuh-HA sound made just with me.

Come hee-are, Cah-RO, he sneers, flexing fingers,

then broad shoulders slam in to my eager, open ribs.

The ground comes up to meet my face - soft leaf bones

smile, ready to catch me, should his leg give in. I say,

put me down, you bloody fool, not meaning it.

Maisie-May Lambert