dolly sen
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Poems
From 'Eloquent Catatonia':
NEURONES CHEWING BONES
Why is the world
full of purple Santa Clauses
Playing syphilitic pinball?
The walls are turning into clouds
And the window has become a sun.
The kindest of gods make no promises.
I almost had the answer.
But the brain is a strange instrument;
It receives endless messages of pain,
But the horrible thing about it is that
It’s sometimes the sender, too – not
Unlike making dirty and threatening
Phone calls to yourself.
And this poem is one of them.
From 'Maenad Angel Poetics'
I’m an angel
no one
Wants the help of
I’m the angel of the truth
nobody wants to hear
Nobody listens to my story
Of spiritual outlawry
Every time I tell it
I’m taken to a place of safety
Where my soul is ripped in sections
Stripped of my keys,
I cannot sing like an angel
Stripped of my keys, I don’t have a home
Stripped of my keys, I am in a cell
They call me the
bag lady
But I need the bags to carry my wings
The beautiful tyranny of my own inconsequence
The womb where I
came from
Smoked a pack a day
Cried lonely in a bedsit
My father has finally forgiven
Me for my birth
We’re not
gods or super humans
We are people in our own cells
And viscera
In a bag of skin
With a brainwashed brain
Being brainwashed
By other washed brains
I have the talent
of turning
People dysfunctional in a minute
Soul death while U wait
Why not go mad, eh?
From 'Book of Torn Up Suicide Notes'
Q
Dinner queue in the psych ward
I’m stuck between 2 Jesuses
I can see they’re both contemplating
feeding the 5 thousand by doing a
miracle of multiplication with the
rubbery macaroni cheese
A schizophrenic soul abuses
any god that is listening
The catatonic philosophises
with empty words
The anorexic looks down her
nose at us for indulging in
the depravity of sustenance
Why am I here?
Reality, sanity is a book of
lies, I’ve lost my page
I’ve become celestially illiterate
Because I know the ending – no
happily ever after
just lonely death
following
a life
that is just a queue
waiting, waiting
for the
madness to end
From 'ECCENTRIC FISH'
Anger is eating clouds for breakfast, washed down with a little sun that gets stuck in your throat, followed by the picking of teeth with lollipop ladies.
Anger is going clothes shopping, and choosing a skin three sizes too small, and a heart three sizes too big.
Anger is spending the lunch break trying to fit a volcano in a thimble, and losing hope in a bowl of sugar cubes.
Anger goes home, fries snowflakes in the frying pan, and complains there is nothing to eat.
Go to the fridge and find your smile in a milk bottle and pour it over your head anger.
Pavement Poem
Do not step here
my dreams have fallen
out of my pocket, and
are hard to find again.
Don’t grind them into the ground
Otherwise I will have to wait
for the rain to run into the cracks
to the feed the daisies
to push them back up again
From 'Unlovable Sun' (yet to be published)
FRICTION
The friction of life
On skinless hope
The kisses of love
Bleach lost flesh
I don’t mind
My new scars
Protect me
From the sweetest breezes
Everything that has touched me
Has left its imprint
Of boot kicks and butterflies
I am raw sculpture
Still unmade
Yet I still refuse to let
The softest part of me
Turn to stone
I can’t even cry
My tears
Kills itself with fire
There is not enough water in my dreams
There is not enough ice in my sleep
Spit on me
HAUNTED, AGED 2
What is this thing that haunts
That as a child scared me
How did I know to be scared of it?
And why was I scared of it?
An empty merry go round, frozen horses
Dancing in circles
The ice cream van tinkling its saccharine mantra
The nursery song, ‘boys and girls go out to play…’
The dolls without eyes…
There was no screaming monsters
No violent hatred
That came next
No haunting there except the ghost
Of the dead child I learnt to become
To be a baby, a little child
And know haunted
Humanity, you were broken to begin with.