Last Nights Fairytale

Your lips, your touch, butter and silk,

Your eyes, your thighs, toffee and milk,

Eternal bliss, forever and a day,

At dusk you offered your life away,

But the Devil had you in his jaws,

under scattered fragments of the disco ball,

Fairytales swam thick in my head,

Happy-Ever-Afters, sleeping beauty's bed,

Now honey sticks between the sheets,

and you left before the sun gave greet,

You softly crept towards the door,

sweet-nothings lay crumpled on the floor,

And when I rose, from my slumber,

I found no note, no telephone number,

So beneath the stars of last night’s sky,

'Prince Charming' didn’t even say goodbye.

Clean up the Filth

A musty film envelopes everything. Even her corpse like hand as she reaches for more stale, cornmeal bread. The chair gives a low moan as her weight shifts, its legs covered in splinters waiting to bite at her ankles. As she brings the morsel to her mouth she is interrupted “Don’t be greedy now musikana”.

The room is dark and smells of damp. Sewers surround them and the sound of sloshing and gulping is enough to make her wretch, but she is used to it by now. They used to say that this was the best place for people like her, under the streets, out of sight. She was nothing and she was where she belonged. The president had told her so. ’Murambatsvina’. ‘Clean up the filth’.

 Thick stone walls drip with the stench, and when the light is allowed to enter she can glimpse the deep indentations of the ones who have gone before. Controlled numerical scores keeping count turn to panicked scratches. Frantic cries for help, a silent screams eternally damned. The claw marks frighten her. A trickle of dried dirty blood is encrusted just below a tough broken fingernail that’s embedded in one of the blocks; it looks like it has been there for a thousand years.

Melted Faces

Once upon a time in a hobbit house,

Perched high in a tower of dreams,

The sweet face of a lover melted away.

Lanterns swayed and cracked in the wind,

Voices floated from distant seas,

To fall on the ears of a goblin.

All slept and was still as in Tomtins land,

And she quietly crept to the highest room,

To spy the burning skulls.

In the fires they burned and smouldered and laughed,

And pulled the stars from the sky.

They rose up from the ground and reached out their hand,

And took the goblin under.

She waits for a night when the moon sits just right,

Under that hobbit house,

For the lanterns to sway and voices to come,

Lover return and look to the skulls,

Where she waits, she waits, she waits.

Nurses Station 4am

They wheel her in on the first spare bed.

They do that. They wheel them down the corridors in front of everybody. I watch them from my station.

The girl is the third this weekend. She stumbled in from the cold, all the way from the alley on the other side of town. She has been running. I walk to her room to fill out the necessary forms. Name. Age. Current address. Anyone we can call?

Stale blood has infected her shorts and she is shivering. They do that. They always shiver. They’re eyes, brown, blue, the occasional green, are always wide and glazed and they always smell of sweat and sex.

I leave her there. Someone will be with you in a minute. To give you clean clothes. The police have already been called.

Back at my station I make the call to the parents. I tell them the news. I’m very sorry. She’s safe now. Yes, the police have been called. At first they say nothing as is the custom and then, Oh my God, oh no, why? Our little girl? Why?

They do that. They cry, they scream and they always ask me why. They always do that.