Martha's Moved On

Gold cherry

By blackjack-davey

Mon, 17 Mar 2014
  • 7128 reads
18 comments
 

Bloodshot eye of the answer-phone

Unwinking tells you're home alone

She caught a cab to Marylebone

I think she's gone...

 

Eating alone feels like death

Should have gone to Little Chef

Lonely four-eyed Findus breath

Martha's moved on

 

Home to an empty bed and hungry fist

You scratch a little at your wrist

The pain's too much so you desist

Martha's moved on

 

Here's her paints and vapour rub

Toiletries stacked beside the tub

Daughter of Beelzebub?

No,YOU were in the fucking wrong!

 

In London Fields

She yields, she yields

To costermongers

With jellied eels

Must you go on?

 

The day is always in decline

Kneeling at her votive shrine

Objects once so anodyne:

Hairbrush and Neapolitan songs...

 

You shave your skull at 4am

Pop sleeping pills, a pack of ten,

Crave her furry diadem

It's fair to say she's gone!

 

In the dark the whispers start

How many fucks? How many farts?

Desire-lines stamped across your heart

Where she treads the grass alone

 

One black hair left by the bed

When last week you clasped her head

Now you kiss the stains instead

Get along, get along!

 

In Tottenham Hale

Her snail trail

Sent you clean off the rails

But friends say you're strong

 

In a café in South Ken

She gobbles dates with Arab men

Who stare and spit out gloops of phlegm

When you ask, 'Is anything wrong?'

 

You copy-edit her book at night

Dressed up in her sequinned tights

Debauched, hairless catamite

It's very,  VERY wrong.

 

In the pub black-eyed men

Say 'forget the bitch...' and 'same again'

Bore you stupid at just five to ten!

She's really really gone!

 

Now she’s shafting all your friends

From Rayners Lane to Ponders End

When she comes the texts she sends.

They shouldn’t but they turn you on

 

In Trellick Towers

Golden showers

Pour through the lift

Where you bring flowers

But they die before too long

 

She called you weak, ‘lacking a core,’

Spat her resin like a sycamore

Enslaved you as her Troubadour

Bang fucking on!

 

You’re unlovely and depressed

Overweight and underdressed

You cajole and are caressed

By all her other men

 

In Wathamstow

She sucks his toes

The contortions she undergoes

From Highgate to Hong Kong

 

A sweet disorder in your dress

Leads to a pre-dawn arrest

Constabulary are unimpressed

By your blonde wig and leather thong

 

If she’s out there reading this

Grant me one more crystal kiss

To drink her bathwater would be bliss

But I don’t think that’s on.

 

Certificate 18
Poem
Love
Autobiography

Comments

Submitted by MJG on

Reminds me of TS Elliot's Prufrock, really brilliant, tightly held together imagery, very strong and daring 

 

Submitted by blackjack-davey on

Prufrock-- the last gasp of romanticism-- the mermaids, the comb-over, the male menopause...MJG that is high praise coming from you!

 

Submitted by Canonette on

I love this SO much.broken heart

 

Submitted by blackjack-davey on

I love your comment! especially since you're real and write great poetry. You aren't a cyber-elf or a pixellated avatar, you are flesh and blood-- I saw you tucking into fish and chips at The Wheatsheaf.  Every stanza is true.

 

Submitted by MJG on

There's only the canoe missing in Cambridge..x

 

Submitted by VeraClark on

I understand seduced, shagged, bent over backwards and robbed, emotionally tortured, romanticised, loved, adored and utterly broken-backed in high hilarity plus crafty use of mythology about this poem. I like your work big style.

 

Submitted by blackjack-davey on

Vera, thank you-- all those verbs,action verbs, you've written in your comment. you have nailed something there-- the course of a love affair but do we enjoy the emotional damage? I've often noticed I can get homesick for horrible places... thank you for reading!
 

 

Submitted by andrea on

Really excellent, love it (although I'd be tempted to lose most of the exclamation marks. Not really necessary, the force of the words does the trick imo)

If we could score, I'd give it a 9 ;)

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Submitted by blackjack-davey on

Thanks Andrea

I think I might agree-- I know the general rule of thumb is no exclamation marks unless you're portraying an excitable correspondent: 'I am so over Jeremy! Totally! his silly little button mushroom nose and his habit of snuffling in my ear as a prelude to foreplay!!! Poor little thing. He's simply allergic to everyone and everything. To put it bluntly I'm a threat to his immune system! I simply can't have that on my conscience.'

But here I was going for enforced jollity, the ineffective self-reprimand, the hollow emptily clanging phrases of a billion agony aunts strung out on fair trade coffee and nasonex. Buck up messmates! Best foot forward. Worstward ho!

 

Submitted by andrea on

Yes, I understood what you were aiming for but, imo, the message was/is powerful enough to make them (!!) redundant. 

A great piece regardless :)

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Submitted by Jewel Serpent on

The format is stunning and very, very effective. I want to know about Martha, and yet it's perfect that I don't know one shitpatch about her. Again, very effective. 

Submitted by blackjack-davey on

I am glad you enjoyed!

What do you want to know? I can give you her phone number but I think I might I have dialled it wrong. What a girl! 

 

Submitted by Ray Schaufeld on

I do not want to know Martha. I think she is a very bad lady to get the narrator into the condition he is now in. Poor chap is all over the shop he doesn't know Arthur from Martha smiley

Submitted by blackjack-davey on

you're right about the transvestitism, elsie

 

 

Submitted by prettyrose on

Hi Blackjack-daveyyeswell done on cherries againsmiley. Just simply brilliant, you captured all that needed to be told and made an impact and expressed it perfectly.

 

Take Care

smiley Keep Smiling

Keep Writing xxx

Submitted by blackjack-davey on

thanks Pretty Rose

I am pleased it resonates with you and i like the emoticons

be handy if we could hold them up in relationships to signal how we feel (like judges holding up numbers in the olympic gymnastics) it would save  alot of bother.

 

Submitted by Stephen Thom on

Awesome piece, I am a novice when it comes to poetry but it was full of personality and life. Ive not really read anything like it tbh, maybe elements of hunter s thompson. Great work :-)

 

Submitted by blackjack-davey on

thanks Otto!

I didn't see this comment, there is a third party-- an observer who is dismissive about all the mess, the predictability of a broken heart. good luck with your transvestite  and keep me posted about the competition entry