​Inheritance

Safety in silence: here in the dark, we are 
carving wickerwork out of our shoulders, 
washing the colours from our skin and the
rage from our tongues. I don’t know why 
I wear the quiet like armour cold against
my ribs, with this language (dirty) closed 
book pressed against my side and buried 
(blade) in my chest. Maybe it’s because my
mother wrings her hands when I speak: 
keep your head down, and they can’t touch 
you. My voice is an invitation alongside 
shambling name, but I join a long line of 
us, told to study hard to acquire the voice 
we already have. You are soundless (still) 
after years of toil, wearing a face of fear over
your mouth of love; and so I let the tart 
English rain swig back this body in drifts, 
chisel away at jade, and bath me in blood.

“You’re so sharp you’ll cut yourself”

In the books I read as I child, it was the veiled threat of choice, it was what the villain said to the young hero.

“You’re so sharp you’ll cut yourself”

Someone said it to her as a child. She was bright and, quite frankly, a pain in the arse.

“You’re so sharp, you’ll cut yourself”
​
She did.  

Loose Threads

There's nowhere to keep the words once
he's read them, so he just lets them fall
to wherever it is thoughts go when you've
finished using them, and continues reading.
He's managed to convince himself that on some
level, he understands them; that somewhere, beneath
language, the argument is unfolding in his mind.

It isn't. Not really. He's followed little details
perhaps, clutched blindly to a single thread of
reasoning and felt his way along. But he can't see
the web in its entirety. His mind is out of
focus, so it latches on to out-of-focus things -
the vague outlines and blurred edges of

the world at 2AM, when reason is
asleep: the way the patterns in the wood
change shape, the distant cries of drunken students
mingling with faulty car alarms. The undefined
sections of the night. Little details. Like loose
threads in a tapestry that he's scared to pull on
in case it falls apart.

Duet
​
Some struggle to hold my wrist
in separation from its bridge,
and the E-string peg had special
panics attached. I was having
to root through cadavers left
in the storeroom, looking for
a substitute after the snap.
That was the dream–wound too tight
and then it draws a perfect line
of blood, wherever its lash
should fall.
                     Not that I made it
happen–I always deferred about
finding my naturals, given half
an accidental, or chance, but it had
to spring apart even as he tuned it.
Bad fate for those lost instruments
to become my nervous salvage
(I thought myself a surgeon then,
before the Browning got me,
and I tenderly removed the spare
cord from a long-unplayed heart
as if it was my future), and with
tremored hands I went to tightening
it, getting it taut, taut as I dared,
and always having to turn it further–
until, with mercy, the thing was done.
 
It wasn't wounds which stopped me
in the end. I had a flat, prosaic hatred
for playing my scales. Yet here you have
some love–some fear. It's all for violins.