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In Space of You

This morning I was late for work

For lying in sun

In January bed

Inside Alice Walker –

 

I am a moody woman

my temple as black as my brows…

 

The shadows of your kisses pulled

From my frontal lobe

Incessant infant fingers

Insisting on this sadness – is it mine?

Or only romanticised remnants left-behind

When you said – I’m leaving?

 

(Or did I say please go?)

 

All the vacant spaces in my house –

In the study, behind the curtains

The four-finger-width of bed you were allowed

Are ‘supposed’ to feel lonely

Now

 

In your absences

 

I let my thought stretch into those inglenooks of un-achieved possibility

Between the fireplace and the mind

I like them the way they are

 

A woman needs space to write

Men create it

 

Their shadows elbow rudely whilst they gaze the other way

 

I am a feminist

And you are –

 

Alive

 

- fleshy shadow sleep-breathe loud, unaware of space you are taking -

 

If only women could live

Without being feminists

And still be alive.

 

Why am I so insatiable in the face of your satisfaction

Wrapping latino-heavy lips around my groundnut soup?

No more English boy

Cross-continental loving

 

Is it because, as much as I want it,

Comfort anesthetizes my greatness,

My appetite for experience?

And I want greatness more

- even than you –

and a women does still have to choose

 

In your absences the rage is a cold and ruthless lover

I become lightheaded

- Blood virile in clenching sinew -

And I want to castrate them all

And hang them out to dry

And make the world anew

 

Seemingly incomprehensible fantasies -

These furies fuel my fight

I need their scarring embraces

 

But I need you to come home to,

And love me with your feminine member.

 

 

Cradle all of my Revulsions

Breathe them in

Press their bespoiled, boil-bearing surfaces to the soft love of your cheek

The caress of your lips

Wrap the folds of my perversions in the breadth of your hands and cradle them, close

Cradle all of my revulsions

 

My revolutionary thoughts

Ladels of fat and necessities of excrement

Oceans of rancid acidic tears and rippling lard-laden-lagunas of useless depression

Deformities, depravities, defiling the tender flesh of your paper-thin-palms

Cradle all of my revulsions

 

Bear my discontent with smiles and understanding

That which makes me untouchable, embrace

Lick the leper of my soul and bathe your genetalia in the bowels of my humid discharge,

unfathomable extinctions

Muscle tissue and waste

Cradle all of my revulsions

 

Wrap the folds of my perversions in the breadth of your hands and cradle them, close

Closer almost than you can bear,

 

And do not flinch.

 

Not once.

Paris is Burning

Reading 'Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism' I smile ridiculously hugely at the woman in hijab in front of me on the bus - remembering hate-crimes, vigilante of the swines, spitting, cursing, hitting, hating - to let her know I'm on her side. I feel protective of the back of her mind in a country she may fear is turning against her. She turns and smiles back. Her charcoaled eyes crinkling and transparent.

 

Paris is burning and the borders are closing

Paris is burning and fighter jets are leaving

Paris is burning and France declares a state of emergency

Paris is burning and François Hollande "is becoming more and more the image of a war president"

Paris is burning and nobody speaks about Calais

Paris is burning and "5,000 bullets are fired in Saint Denise"

Paris is burning and David Cameron begs for war

Paris is burning and a Jewish woman is stabbed, her likeness to a brown muslim woman apparently showing through

Paris is burning and a young woman in veil is punched and slashed leaving the metro in Marseille

Paris is burning and I see brown faces all over the news and the synapses in my brain trigger "terrorist" "bomber" "extremist" "killer"

Paris is burning and I see white faces covered in blue and white and red and I feel as though they have drawn a line in the sand and I have stepped over it

Paris is burning and I see windowless houses and children's bedrooms raided in "the grim estates that breed terrorism"

Paris is burning and none is reporting on migrant deaths any more

Paris is burning and I know that "We are here because you were there"

Paris is burning and all I can think of is more than two migrants for every 1 Parisian who will die of exposure or drowning or hunger every month in Europe this winter and their names will not be reported as 'one victim one tweet' - "Restauranteur. Aspiring actor. "A boy with deep kindness." #enmémoire" -

Maybe more.

 

But Paris is not burning at all. We are not killing Hijabs we are killing people. We are not fighting terrorism, we are fuelling imperialism. I bite my tongue to stop from screaming and blood fills my mouth and it tastes like cheap oil that I cannot spit out. 

me and my delicious self

Me and my delicious self, all wrapped up like butter

Melting

 

Gently

 

Cotton absorbing flesh

Fan flying

Tickling

 

Gently

 

All oozy in the heat

Like sex left too long in the sun

Big sun

Red sun

My sun is warmer than your sun

Playful pun-ing yum yum self

In Iquitos where the rivers meet

Lapping

Licking

Lulling

 

Gently

 

Thighs like great mountains in the bed

Rising

Falling

Needing

Wanting Nibbling -

Plenty to spare -

Feeding colonies of species upon the earth of my big round buttocks

Yum yum indeed

A sweet treat

Young delights

Of fresh flesh in heated colonised town

White paint peeling now

Blood red dried beneath

Drying wet

 

Gently

 

Still expact L.A man sells his chia seeds and cocao nibs

Drawling oh-la, oh-L.A, oh-my, not a word of Spanish?

 

Retreat to overflowing Clara,

Señora, señorita warm and cheekiness etched in every lineless fold of her face, 40-no!

Hair so long it tantalises fossils, buried deep, passing through Earth and Equator 'down under' dark

Loving rumbling lulls me to sleep

A world in your hair dear Clara,

and the shrewdness of your money talk

Many Spanishes

 

Chatter

 

Gently

 

Me and my delicious self

So much softer in the heat - all over

I shaved my armpits and wept tears of black wet curls

My sexy friends

Down the drain

For heat not patriarchy

The moon loved my hair

Peeking, glimpsing, dancing, chanting

 

Gently

 

In the gender-less world of my arm-pits

More gendered now.

 

Guidebook that talks of 'plantations' as a substitute for the word 'Black' for the word 'slave'

I feel like throwing it away

1.5 kilos of historical baggage

Not quite yet

Still some de-colonising to be done

Humble as the whipped dogs

Some of the worst I've seen

Eyes down-cast and half-drawn

Half-dead

Not wanting to see another dawn

Cruel stick and humourless face

Smiling, madly

I see that life can be hard here

Hard

And hot

And Mosquitos biting

The itchiest pricks to the heart

 

Punching

 

Gently

 

Peru is outside of my windows!

Little holy arches worshiping the sunshine

No glass

No interruption to their vigil

14 hours a day

 

Afro feeling defiant calls for breakfast - now!

Tattooes the love on my skin

Lest I should forget in colder climes

Me and my delicious self

All wrapped up like butter

Melting

 

Gently

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