by Charly Cox
No choice in whether it cements a building for their ego or a fence around a field of flourishing flowers
All grown for you
It is what it is until it isn’t quite it anymore
Until you become loathsome for the quibbling quirks of comfort
And love writes as a rule to deplore
Makes perfect logical sense, sure
Until the it that isn’t and the was that wasn’t
Is just a silhouette of your insecurity
And truly nothing more.
weight of you
As my body writhes around a different bed
It feels taller even though it’s not
Semi-clothed and cold it feels different
But not lonely
It feels older and as though it knows further and fresh
It learns less of you and no wider of me
But it understands something new
That isn’t uncomfortable
It just wants to find you again and for you to know me once more
And for that once more to see what I wished you’d seen before
Before it would cry out a screech of heart strung bedlam
Lying with a bread-bloated belly that looked pregnant
Pregnant with the thought of you
Coming back to bed soon
But you didn’t
Different cities and marbled skies
Slow the pace between us
And Indian spices heat the burn our tongues loved together
But now saffron and chai
Taste an unsavoury uncleanness
There is no loneliness to chew
Just a space in the creases of linen
That should belong to the weight of you.
lipstick
Let me kiss you close mouthed
Let me rouge your bitter cheeks
With this darker red
Let me wrap the gentle curve of my body
Into someone else’s bed
I’ll let you wipe the cherry plum stain off
With the memory of when you said
‘Cheer up sweetheart, the thing with
People like you, is they’ll only love you
When you’re dead.’
lovebites
I hadn’t noticed it at first
It was done with such kindness
It hadn’t thought to hurt
But as I stumble off the train
With my knickers hitching my skirt
It would’ve been nice to know of the night
That instead of just leaving my phone charger behind
I’d be taking away a lovebite
A ‘hickey’
A purple blue yellow not nearly skin-coloured enough to cover
With make-up
Tricky
Situation
Learning to flatten my tones from their guilty high fluctuations
When I say
It’s eczema?!
At school a girl had one on her head
And said
She’d headbutted a cupboard
And cut in a fringe before the teachers had discovered it
Is so silly that they must be hidden
That something which once brought pleasure
Is suddenly forbidden
Like, grossly forbidden
Like, I walked into a party and everyone was shocked
That I was either bursting with pride
Or should be embarrassed that I’d forgot
To slap on some concealer
Or that I was akin to a slapper who’d hooked up with a drug dealer
Which for the record would be fine
It’s my neck to be decorated by whomever I desire
Minutes of passion holstered to a circle
That gets flashed every now and again
Like being autographed with a biological purple pen
It’s a bruise from a kiss
Not a place keeper for a fist
Just a splodge of romance stamped profoundly pissed
It’s as fleeting as the youth we’re scared to miss
As it’s administered
I struggle to cast it off as something sinister
And for whatever attention they seem to seek
I’m happy to laugh in their existence
And thank god that they only last a week.
with his assistants
She squirms nearly naked beside me
Lollipop stick legs
Like a Lowry
Waiting to be coloured
I fill her in best I can
With a haze-hugged recital
Madness over just one man
It splutters slurred and sloppy
I feel her skin soft and on me
She breathes a sigh drenched in
Yawns for coffee
We put on one of his shirts together
Find the slunked-off socks
And bury down secrets we now have to keep forever
His face is unimaginable
He’d have guessed it sooner
Had his lust been made more tangible
But he was busy
When we were busy for him.
doubletree by hilton
Mesmeric in the most disarming demanding way
I flash honesty brazen and wasted
As you kiss the words from out my mouth as though they’re still untasted
Satiated
We lay
As you press your head upon me and lie about my beauty as though it’s your unspoken duty
I feel safe because you’ve said it
Feel a rush of adrenaline and then push it from my head
You said it
I watched you close your eyes and forget it for a second
And then deny it
You falsify your worth with memories unjust
You try nothing more than to make me feel I was once untouched
And now all I want
Is for the history before us
To erase in diluted drops
That you slipped along my index fingers
When in this heat my rings got stuck.
porn
She moans
As he throws
Her body
From arched feline back
To face in the pillow on her tummy
He pulls her by the ponytail
Her eyes widen with excitement
Loneliness
As well
Banshee screams and hollow slaps
Perfect nudity and waxed arse cracks
Half taken by the throng of flung-off thongs
I’m bemused and sad and thinking
Why do they never show the naps?
The intimate legs twined like spaghetti
Cooked and thrown back in the pack
Stuck with starchy love
That’s the real magic, that
That’s what turns me on
When after all the sheets have seen
Where you lay and nose touches nose
And you still know where to kiss
With the lights still off
Because you’re lit up in a childlike beam
And through panting pause your mind wanders lost
Feeling your skin cling innate to one another
Like a baby to a breast
That first breath
When you exhale and simmer,
Two maudlin corpses
Too hot and they still shiver
Craving more whilst digesting a slither
Of moments ago
She moans
As he throws
Her body
Wanting it with a posture comfy
He runs his fingers through her hair
And tells her that she’s lovely
Beautiful in fact
He grabs her by the waist
As she holds his face
And steadies gaze
Whispers lightly in his ear
; I’d rather make love to you
Than just simply let you fuck me
There is plenty of room for explicits in complicity
Now that I’d understand
A prude I’d never claim to be
Though nor a connoisseur of wild intimacy
I’ve always taken it how it’s given to me
… directed it occasionally
But there’s something that seems strange to me
That we get off on a close-up of a staged aggressive filthy
When we all know in reality
The best is sweet and purely
Ends the same
The two of you, vulnerable and glowing
With the taste of each other’s name.
evolution
Days later
Paint-like
Each layer peels
And falls from my lips
That you bit
And thus become features
That are no longer owned by your kiss.
snapple lid facts
An octopus has three hearts
How does he find time to use them?
Dexterous in his tentacle touch
It must be hard to know what’s a tickle from abuse to them
What space there is for entertaining a mermaid or a sea urchin
He doesn’t have to unpick beauty from sense or smarts from lust
He can just drink them all up
In a salty ablution
And sit drunk
Sounds nice but
I bet it’s secret emotional hassle
I bet he’d prefer to slurp a sluice of Snapple
What decisions are necessary to make when there’s a home for each mistake
All kept warm and left unsearching
How does he find time to use them when he needs it all just to keep them working?
Keep each beat in syncopation
Without disrupting the sea’s heady and unforgiving intention
Selling him gravelly bits of information
As he presses his ear to a shell
How does he decide what’s worth keeping or best shelved?
How does he pick what’s right and fulfilling
When he’s got three beating organs never fit to burst or to be pained and unspilling
How does he feel anything
When he’s got capacity for so much?
Squirming neatly on the sea bed
He stretches out to disturb the dust
Half swim half sleep he imagines what it would be like to be us
How simple it could be
To reserve all of his energy
Into just one place to love.
kaleidoscope
As you bashed my eyes from blue
These distorted shapes were carved by you
Until swiftly all I saw judged hope
As you threw me in your kaleidoscope
Pushed down a misted barrel lens
Creasing wraps and crushing tenths
Squinting smiles as you kissed wrists
and squaring miles on homebound trips
I wandered calm for months before
Became the girl you swore unsworn
And now headfirst it smacks me clean
You conjured colours I can’t see
A fool I often am
But tonight a fool I’ll gladly be.
rosie cheeks
It smells as delicious
As my mind told me so
And as its thorns graze my thigh
I apologise before its beauty
And cry not for pain
But for getting too close
To something much more delicate than I
And not expecting to leave bloodied.
app cheats
Their names together wash over me
Syncopated
Hypnotic
Tepid water rushes through my sinuses
Until it heats to a gentle boil
Slow bubble, rising
To sit along my lash line
As a stagnant source
Awaiting provocation
Syncopated
Hypnotic
Vindicated and
Neurotic
I almost wanted them to
Sound like a flood
I scrounge for photos of
Them in love
I rip through feeds
And rehash texts
And play out what
He didn’t say next
As though he did
I am crazed by the drama
That has been denied
And scroll through three years of holiday photos
That he profiled as a lie.
first west service
He pressed his palms against my breasts
On a crowded bus
Cradling the darkness in my head
Until it felt like it was just us
And when we got back to his
In solitude we could melt
I went to tell him who I was
But learnt he wasn’t there for how I felt.
You sit with your tongue pained out of your mouth like an artist, bottle of stolen rum from your parents’ cabinet in one hand and an emptied bottle of water between your thighs.
Don’t. Spill. Anything.
You learned only last night that Malibu has a particularly unforgiving stench when left to soak in carpet. Neatly, you tuck it into your school bag, pocket four pound coins from your father’s parking meter compartment in his Volvo estate and head to school on a cold Friday morning. The night is young. The night is so young you’re checking for spillage in double maths and texting a boy from the school down the road ‘wuu2 tonight?’ with one eye on algebra and the other on your LG Shine phone. You know what he’s up to.
It feels like the longest day of your life, in hindsight nothing really does ever feel as long as today. You are a worthy warrior that fights each pounding heart thump of anxious anticipation in her stride, you valiantly navigate the hours with nothing but a muted floral bodycon skirt and silk low-cut top awaiting to be loaded as ammunition. The day dribbles off into the later afternoon and you salivate to evening, thirsty dry mouth puckering in your mother’s lipgloss. The prolonged MSN chat has been aching, tension-building, near nausea. Tonight you’ll have your first kiss. You know it, you can see it, you have dreamt enough Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging scenes, it will be tonight. It must be. You feel so terrifyingly far behind that if it’s not, womanhood will never greet you. You are not a girl nor a woman, you are an unwanted potato in a packet, left to half-freeze too close to the back of the fridge. It must be tonight. The process prior is almost ceremonial, the half a beer that leaves you giddy is a toast to the gods of fate, the borrowed pair of tanned tights is your celebration wear, the panic attack in the locked bathroom of the party before you’ve met is a nod and a vow to the severity of the process. It’s all quite dumb, all quite ridiculous, all quite right. The party is quickening in pace, the toilet door you have bolted is being kicked at to make way for an early casualty of apple sours, you steady your defences and anchor a root in a confidence you have grown in that moment. Animalistic in your approach, you sidle past each faux drunken swaying body, pushing through a living room, a kitchen, and then to a garden with purpose. There he is. Too tall in his body he has not yet grown into, he leans on a trellis in the rain. You say your name at him like a greeting. He nods, accepting, watching your Bebo user flash before his squinted eyeline. You talk. It is all so unbearably awkward that you look for other familiar faces you can slope off with. You slope off with him. Backs against a forgotten Wendy house, you kiss. It’s unlike anything. No metaphor, no simile, no book you read too young. It’s tongues and hot flushed panic, it’s anxiety boiled to a surface of pure sugar resin that you bite from each other’s lips. It’s a morishness sans lust, it feels innate. It feels as though there is an end point you must discover but you only have the tools to enquire and not conquer. It is feeli
ng without thought for the first time. It’s delicious – brief flashes of mortified and embarrassed – but delicious. No kiss will ever be the same. Some more prolific, some more dramatic, some more regretful, some more meaningful. But none the same. None more swift and intoxicating. None that was so unashamedly stenched with a mud-stained half hangover that when you head to text him the next morning, the ambush of ‘WAHEEEEEEEY!!! I SAW YOU LAST NIGHT!!’ splashed across your Facebook wall lights you with unabashed pride that nothing else will ever give you. You later realise, much much later, that the grin that lasted for weeks was the end of all those months of feeling like ‘the fat friend’, ‘the nerd in disguise’, ‘the uncool one’, ‘the forgettable one’. They were all sad endured lies because within those was ‘the girl that would never be kissed’. And she was. And she would be again.
the first time
Numbed nerves and conceited confidence
We fall into a depth of expectation
Familiarity grins back at us
And it laughs
And we laugh
Complexities lace around your features
Truth curling through my tongue
Slicing through a mist of excitement
Spilling to curdle into bittersweet reality
Mistaken as a mistake
As your slow body collapses
Next to me I watch your mind spin
Tentative teeth caging your thoughts
Until we digress into secrets
Misjudged, misinterpreted, mishaps
We are wondering
You are lost and I have lost.
love part 2
Love is going to smack you in such a way you don’t recognise it, from the hands of a man whose fingers you wouldn’t trust on a trigger. Love isn’t what you thought. It’s not what you were ever expecting. In your twenties, naked body sprawled across someone’s bathroom, throwing up all within you, listening to the clink of plates as he toasts you crumpets having just cleaned up your mess, you muster, ‘I love you.’ Weird. Uncomfortable. What?! It’s all too much to fathom. Surely you can’t be that basic? It changes.
One night, when you are in his bed, his hot sticky breath scalds your skin with a thick jamminess, it prickles quick temperate flashes along your neckline and you begin to cry. You reimagine all the times he stopped to take your photograph. ‘What are you doing? I look so gross, stop it. What sort of memory is this?!’ You’d bat, pulling strands of hair from behind your ears over your face to hide. ‘It’s only for me!’ Only for him? You could never quite grasp why anyone would want a collection of pictures of you with burnt rosacea red cheeks, often hungover, in his pyjama tops, in budget cafés, until right now. It stings you as he leans to kiss you and you can’t pucker because all you can do is cry. It’s not really even a cry, it’s a sob. A snot on your chin, belly aching screech of water works. He is confused. His gentle comforting strokes force your body rigid. ‘I’m fine, I’m fine, just change the song. It always makes me sad.’ This is partly true. The other part loops behind your eyelids as you press them into the pillow as he panic searches for something new. It won’t stop. Never had an end been so grotesquely visceral. Never had a projected moment of foresight clung to your brain as though nothing else would ever be more true. When would anyone sit and look through such bizarre, such random, such inane photos?