Backhouse Ghost

By Jasmeet Dosanjh

My poisoned body, delicate

in the love lamp, your wrinkle

of a face, as lovely as a squid

with twinkly arms, hunting.

That is your million-mooned smile.

A boy-shaped satellite.

You get drunk with me, don’t make

a fuss about fucking.

Like your counter-squid, little and shapeless,

I am afloat. Saying a lot more

than can reach your simple mind.

Saying it in pixels of silver poetry

my starry night of a body, all black

under you. A gurgling, giggling thing,

my stars spots, all black, my teeth and claws

all black.

All this zooming at me

in my lonely pod.

My phonological loop playing the bad music of May nights

when we had one broke-down jeep and a

crescent speaker with static for bass.

Your blackened, quietened face

in my visuospatial sketchpad, losing

all its moonshine. I first loved you for your kind eyes.

Later I loved because I gave my May to you,

inevitably my June. I hurt daddy trying to love you.

I stole his white revolver. I scratched it

with my cherry claws.

I put it in my mouth. The bathroom mirror

numb as numb trying to hold the dead weight of me.

Like a callus you lived on me. You had your sting your note

your tonic pressed in some sheath, deep under

where a quasi-heart is affirming a little life. A little dragged

and jolted. Hair chopped in neat cliffs, black as black,

as claws, as teeth, as your memory.

You have compressed your crushed face in my

body shop bottle. Honeycomb glass, fringed where

your brow dreams open. And noded

where your sex rose when I was still fresh for you,

a pale pill with ringlets. A naughty, giddy, bursting thing. 

With pointy ears. Had your name on my lips

before the haunting.

Cigarettes rolling out of my mouth in eternal

discovery of how slender a thing can be

on a diet of cola and nicotine.

I fling a superslim at the backhouse

something catches it-

I don’t know, I have churned your lovely slants,

the parts of you I cannot unremember

into a ghost. Almost a living thing.

Your hands stay despite

my cutting out of your sticky cells.

Chromed into

my spiral ends. The last molecules

of a staring apple-thin nothingness.

Used to be a girl

once upon a dream.

By Jasmeet Dosanjh