cheap photographs flicker on the
television
and I am actually a good poet sometimes
my skin is white and dirty
like a parisian house in montparnasse

I do cry;
when flight attendants move
their formal limbs
like mannequins

I can draw dirty buildings
and feel the watercolour paint
tracing wet curls on the
nape of my neck.

when poetry
is this subconscious mess
that swirls in your stomach,
you vomit words like
a bulimic
spewing french words you never
meant to know
sucking on your pen until
your teeth are black.
this is my dinner-
my veins as black as the cracks
in my teeth
the way they grind
the gristly words like
coagulation
conglomerate
yellow-
they stick like lemons
and your fingernails are the colour
of five six twenty hours
spent scratching the paint
from the London Underground
the way the orange flutters
as you spill it across the floor
someone painted the wall,
and their sighs and grunts
echo in the space between your rough skin
and yellowed fingernails

how you can have life like this
a sort of jaundice-coloured madness
your blood rushing through your body
like the 4 train as it whips
around earthy curves and
scrapes its feet
screeching
on the lines in your palms