#MeToo: Francesca Lisette

Francesca Lisette

 

 

BITCH

 

The heaving & specific ache

belonging to what gives you pain

You didn’t ask,

but I’m telling you anyway.

black pot, black horizon,

deep illegibility

on the spotted fields.

You give me some water absent of fineness

that could never truly satiate

& i am the low mouth sucking on the back of

                                                                     your ribs.

humbled by the late turn into

crystalline light.   i walk with my back   hunched over,

pretending i have somewhere i’d rather be,

pretending i’m not looking for you.

the eyes stare blankly, eat ice

in the glassy visibility of each shop window.

i blind myself reading for hours

searching in the dead-of-night hours,

all in the effort

to forget

a drop of sweat from your brow.

more lovely than a tear, somehow.

armies massed in present time

defend my right to breathe out

this fluent cupped dove. i close myself

in the kitchen sink to block out the constant

sexual bleating, madrigal scent.

     lens constantly flickering on the skyline.

how about we call a truce? you give me back

my life, & i’ll double my image,

so you can have the memory, but

not me. crucially,

i’m already gone:

naked, making love among the dustbins & strays in dark city pits

of a sweet summer song

clarifying with poison berries

the skin you ruptured & terminated like fog,

amid the chaos & the smell, extenuating scream

scrying space

an inviolate diamond

so only my own insight may petrify, only i

ever mark this container again.

dawn peels off the roof

as i crawl away, a wight,

a freed spectacle, no-one’s

precious little bitch

wreathed with glittery trash

seeking some place where the dogs are quiet,

a future in which

i don’t yet have a name.

 

 

§

 

SEE-THROUGH

 

loving as a composite :

                                           : all black elbows & ghosted mirror spires;

a syndicate of aggregated rumour, [rue]

     hours empty bereft watching the fading light bleach the wall

                   perfect summer & perfect sorrow

                                  in one dispatch

                                   – longing & displacement.

cotton: taping up the holes of

               what falls out from dailyness, breezy erasure

   calculated to blind all instincts’ weather.

i’ll never stop idealizing the prospect

of you, so

               it seems

can there ever be enough

         time

to forgive you for being

someone other than your aura

said you were, to me

lasered amethysts

   which don’t choke on

diamonds

   part of getting over my lovers

or even failed crushes involves me

   crushing on people who remind me of them

   painful regret mixed w/ dangerous sweetness

until i release them

& the attraction is gone

   but – there is no-one who compares to you, who is “alike”

i see you as singular

singularly unfit for me

& singular as in

                                 alone,

a permanent state

you teach me only archetypally.

the experienced bachelors of this world

who spend 3 years cultivating a

potential fling then

sucking sugar off their fingers, toss it away

knowing

that: time is of the essence

spit pip erasure nanny boy blue

a toy haunting

self mimicking self mimicking other

mimicking who

i get more & less unafraid, i near it

the delicate centre of my self

fleshy oyster web

shatterable

if i am made of glass

shattering me will also cut you

cut a solemn fist in the dark

night unaware yes night

-ingales sing non-poets to their rest

meanwhile i chatter blankly on

shifting my pain around different

arenas of my corpo-skeletal make-up

withstand the bind

notwitholding

idealist power to be drained one day

loving an artist even a good one

is no substitution for your own art or

for loving yourself

& swallowing fear

& asking for what you really want

– wage war against suffocation

by false loves

whose stuttering haze

is no match for

your solid glow

*