"Won't Let You Come To Nothing" by georgë kear

I am particles.

Mist. Smack. Ice flakes. Grit. Ash. Floating fur.

Loose and moving you can put your hands 

Through me

Snag on hard places that hurt more to shatter 

Where I should have just drifted apart.

Born blue and yellow

Cyanotic. Jaundiced

The colour of bruises

Pain is always metal

Steel spikes in soft skin

Bullets bearing bald gifts

Blunt blades biting bare veins

Cars carving up carcasses.

Anger began as I swang

Upside down.

Not the erupting volcanic sort.

The old, cold withering waiting kind.

Moving slower than erosion.

Writhing under the blood transfusion

Nervous new Mother.

She needed me to behave badly.

To exonerate her as she mixed glue in the kitchen.

Happy over the congealing pot.

Ready to stick veneer tiles of acceptability all over me.

But they slid off, dropped

The glue weakened by her tears.

Every time I jumped off a roof she would catch me.

One long meandering jump.

Evading her forays into the forest.

In her red cloak.

To find the wolves with PHDs.

Who prescribed the Thorazine.

That would keep me still,

While she sank her teeth into me.

Hoping the saliva in her bite

Would turn my bad bile into good behaviour.

Let’s see who'll crack first?

Always losing my asthma inhaler.

Stealing my own breath.

To hand back to her.

Dancing on the edge of death.

A delightful Snoopy dance of joy.

Head back, nose up, ears afloat.

In a smack serrated voice.

I could tell myself,

'Shut the fuck up willya,

I'm heading out in headlines.’

But 

You won’t let me come to nothing

Willya?

Whatever the price.

georgë kear is an artist and writer exploring in poetry, modern fiction and digital collage how personal history shapes us and ultimately encloses us, juxtaposing the medieval and modern, rural and urban. She currently lives up a Welsh mountain and is not sure this amount of isolation is healthy…