Flashback In Traffic

I drove through a red light,
Like shrapnel slicing flesh
It happened so fast
I didn't notice until the driver
In the other car, the one in my path,
Swerved and mouthed,
Moron, or something,
I won't pretend I can lip read
I saw her pupils dilate, glassy,
Mouth, trembling, catching flies
In the desert, with her red cloak,
Leaving behind a trail,
As I sailed towards her,
In silence, dreamy,
Then, bam, bam
The gunfire,
Horns, blaring
Then she was just a memory
In my rear view mirror,
There is violence in Syria
I caught the end of the news
I was someplace else,
Trying to figure out how to tell you,
That I can't cope with
Reliving the suffering over
And over again,
Then all of a sudden
I almost didn't have to.

2012 © LH

Curfew

You beat me frantically,
And I was a mute for three days,
My screams woke latent birds,

Like black bats, scowling,
At my pitiful face.

I disturbed the sleep of earth worms,
And neighbours,
Bothering the mellow moon

I appeared as suddenly as
The freckles that bridged my nose
That summer.

Later, caked with my own recipe,
Of salt and slime.

As suddenly as my unripe breasts,
Beneath my Frankie says Relax
T-shirt

You just kept beating,
Three days of silence,
In the bath

With my colour changing toy
My buttocks,

Red, blue, purple
Brown, green, yellow,
I hated you

You cherished me, it terrified you,
Both of us terrified, of each other,
That boy! That boy!

We were just holding hands,
On Kirby's lane and listening,
To the crickets sing, Daddy. 

2012 © LH

The Monsters' Bowl

Ten pins on thin black strings,
Dangling corpses lacking limbs,
Their necks adorned with bloody rings

Infected bowls, three elfin holes,
Gouged eyes and vacant nose,
Roll like headless phantom souls

The waxen lanes, that entertain,
Howl and screech and squeal with pain,
As heads roll time and time again

Eyeballs, in darkened stalls,
Delight in echoed wailing walls,
As legless torso's maul and fall

A spare, a split, a gutterball,
A strike is what they're braying for
It's the moan of slaughter they adore.

 2012 © LH

Hide and Seek.

I don't dream of you anymore,
Where did you go to, are you hiding?
I wander the corridors,
With their white washed walls
Opening door after door,

Each room hollow, as a whales belly
The removal men in their white coats
Took every scrap of furniture,
With their rubber block,
And conducting jelly

Except for the bed!
Rattling metal, leather straps,
And the sweet smell of ammonia
Are you hiding under there?
Like when we played hide and seek.

Ready or not here I come,
Come out come out wherever you are.

2012 © LH

Anxiety Attacks.

I have throat cancer, I think,
I smoked some cigarettes,
Four maybe, in a week,
And I don't smoke.
That was weeks ago
I keep waking up,
In the middle of the night,
And I can't breathe,
Like the time you put your hands
Around my throat and squeezed,
Then you slapped my face, hard,
And I saw stars
I had never felt so alive before,
So close to the brink of death
I can feel it climbing into my brain,
Wrapping itself around,
Like a bittersweet nightshade,
It must have crept into my mouth
When I inhaled
It's arrow burned a path to my throat
Now it's suffocating me
With its tumorous tendrils
I'm paralysed
I need you to slap my face
So I can see stars,
So I can feel alive again,
Because right now it feels like
I'm dying.

2012 © LH

Birth of a Poet

Don't read my notebook I say,
I have nothing to hide..

But this is me, totally naked,
Spat out, raw, from a deep wound
Flailing, my lungs,
Taking their first breath,
A gulp, a high pitched scream,
And fat tears.
Little fists for hands
And screwed up face
Witnessing my birth,
My thoughts on paper,
In all this commotion,
Then words, delivered,
Like afterbirth.
Confessional poetry?
If I wanted to confess,
I'd visit a priest
Ten decades of the rosary
And I'll be saved!
No I bloody won't!
Confess to God? Where are you?
Where were you when I was on my knees,
In the darkness, pregnant with anguish,
Groping for my pen?

 2012 © LH

Arthritis

Why do you fail me?
Cadaverous claw,
Fourteen flaming phalanges,
A fire breathing Chimera,
Gnawing through bone
With your primitive saw. 

2012 © LH

The Stigma

I never knew you,
Half an inch, with webbed feet,
My lungs forming,
Yours, giving up

Buoyant in amniotic fluid,
Whilst you were drowning.
Silent.
Enveloped in darkness,
Both of us, with no voice.

You wrote her a letter
On paper, the colour of the moon,
Delicate white lace,
Her wedding dress,
Never worn. 

She held it,
Hands like nervous butterflies
Fearful a breeze would steal it from her
Unknowing,
She had already been robbed.

Then she carried it with her,
She carried me,
Carried the burden.
She was slowly drowning too.

A bastard child,
A shipwreck on the ocean floor,
Casualties of the war,
The three of us. 

2012 © LH