In my final year at university, I joined SUPS, the poetry society with whom I spent a shamefully small amount of time before graduation. Had I known about them earlier (or moreover had the courage to join sooner), I think I would have a lot more to show for my creative output that year. In many small ways - and a few larger ones - being able to sit once-a-week in a room with people sharing poems they liked or disliked or couldn't make up their minds about was probably the best thing I ever did at university. A little simple, a little sad perhaps (through some lenses), but I hope to find a similar community in the future - if only to kindle the buttfire that keeps me writing.
This poem was written in response to one of the society's weekly prompts, which was the following photograph by Richard Avedon as part of his 'Death and the Maiden' series:
Dressed Up As Life
I.
“So, how do I look?” she asks,
and she flashes herself a smile.
“With your eyes, I’d expect,” he desponds after a while.
“Now none of that,” she snaps. “I’ve had enough of your lip.”
“I don’t have lips,” he mumbles, (and he thinks maybe he should flip
her the bird every time she looks away,
but then he’d drop the mirror, and it would shatter, and anyway,
she never looks anywhere but in that pane of glass –
that pain in the arse – if he had an arse – that he’d carried long past
its welcome, in his thin, unshaking grasp.)
His bones itch. He says so.
“My bones itch!” he groans.
“Bones don’t itch,” she replies, in condescending tones,
“and anyway, you look handsome, so just ... stand there! Keep it still!”
And he’ll stand there, looking handsome, in his itchy suit, until
she stops her admiring – whenever that will be –
and settles on retiring – at which point he’ll be free.
“Just kill me now.”
“Uh! Men!” she sighs.
“I’m not a man,” he replies. “I used to be, but—”
He stops and waves a hand between his thighs.
“Hold still!” she snaps. “Or I’ll get it all wrong.”
And she cries out in frustration as she drops a sparkling thong.
“Have I got nothing to wear?! Where are all my clothes?!”
“You’re wearing them,” he mutters. “They’re right beneath your nose.”
And as she stands there naked, he fiddles with his clothes.
“I used to have a nose ... I used to have a nose.”
II.
She tries another outfit, flashing each a smile.
And he stands there, feeling itchy, as she takes another while.
He watches as she dresses and undresses from her dresses,
and regales the finer details of messing up one’s tresses
for that windswept look, which is “absolutely necessary,”
she says. “It’s what the young people wear this time of year.”
“You could always go outside,” he says, but the words escape her ear.
Though for a while her flashing smiles are fewer in the mirror.
She administers her poison with a knife that points with poise
onto her cheeks and her throat,
and bleeds a hinting, blushing rose
of red, “a little colour,” or so she always said,
“or else one runs the risk of looking all-together dead!”
He eyes the alabaster skin she took out on a loan,
stretching all too thin across her thin and pallid bones,
eyes her with his sockets, those empty holes he owns,
knowing that she’s dying, and knowing that she knows.
And for all the wordless words that might escape his tongueless tongue,
she chokes herself with powder to fill her powdered lungs.
“How much longer—,” he wonders, “How much longer ‘til she’s done?”
III.
She stops.
It’s raining again.
She can see it on the glass.
It’s dribbling down her eyes.
A melancholy dripping
In the crimson hourglass.
But this time it’s a downpour.
This time it might last.
“How do I look?” she whispers,
and she flashes him a smile.
“Like one of us,” he whispers back, and he stays there for a while,
just watching her through sockets, forgetting how to smile,
before his fingers come away and strike the bathroom tiles.
She steps out of the mirror. She holds her scarlet knife.
Dressed up as the living.
Dressing up as life.
And it comes to you in three equally pretentious parts!
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