There are days I go to caves
to sit in quiet with myself,
revel in my granite flesh
a polished mirror of rock
mourning the last of my softness
long gone and sea swept.
Poor girl, homestuck on chapel steps,
pin-plucked and nip-tucked
into her paper figure.
They read yesterday’s news
in the ink across her collar bone.
Her classified crowded slippers blister
red blotches panting ‘we’ll be in touch’.
So she tips between pavement cracks
split seams and spills out sand,
has to scour her hours from the floor.
Cello tape smile caught on a crinkle
till the man with a nail for a tongue
hammers her a better one.
He mistakes her legs for screwdrivers,
tries to put them back in their box,
then pets her like a bitch when she bites,
and asks if she’s learnt to beg,
just another mass produced misogynist
with his windup voice box
explaining to her what she should expect.
There’s a cunning to books I don’t own.
Tricks the eye into slipping
from shelves stacked ‘soon’
where old resolutions stagger
parchment pale and haggard
around uncracked spines.
I play a teasing game,
ply their pages with well-meaning,
find an aged acquaintance,
face new with forgetting.
Thumb their successors guiltily
like a child caught, ear at the door,
and smuggle home each new treasure,
slip it into the seams unseen
and whisper ‘no more, no more’
with every book I’ve ever bought.
You come in wearing the morning’s work about your hands,
and deep in the creases of your eyes.
Mud shucked in a brittle heap
you leave your boots at the door,
shed a pelt of polyurethane
its pockets of tags and split ended string.
Accept a breakfast well past your waking,
to watch your daughters rise sleep stained and stretching.
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