On Living Outside The Bedroom

By Jasmeet Dosanjh

eggshell crunch of a girl in waking

hair in staircase swirl and little elves

rising. Nipples tinged green with yearning.

Someone had loved, made love, felt love,

on this pinkish bruised atlas. Cellulite pinched

a no on your thigh. A no on your lips

and your armpits. Their bluish, deathish fog.

Ship tipped downwards outside your window.

Shops just opening their neon banners sending out first

kisses to twilight. The sky is not your body

yet you wear it lucent, your naked hairy green form

like a cell suspended. 

Ship tipped, mouth open. A motherly being in last call for rescue.

You collect your balms and lotions. Your candles.

   and ashtray

that is your mumma’s omelette mixing bowl. 

And the big knot of your heart. Your anchor.

A lonely cigarette- the last superslim smoked blurry into

the icy lobby of the waiting boat. You have waited

just a little longer.

Outside the bedroom you are always naked, always shapeless,

always just coming into form. 

The last sexy thing draped on your bare linty pillow

is a ghost from June. You leave the vision there, resting. Ceramic loins

and a flaming torso. You have kissed every star on it,

dinnerless, frail. A human jar of nicotine trapped. Weak and

beautiful in the lines left in the squinting, the scenemaking. 

Eyeliner does not stick in your crinkles. 

Gloss fizzles out from the lip-dents. 

Ship blinking, shops now closing. After your slow packing you

are in need of that last electric hit. Mond, grape-

Ionic lips feel their way into you. Like a blind child

opening to butterflies. Moth-scarf, your noose.

One strong arm, lucent. Cancelling the moon.

A kimberella-shaped you. simple as a prayer

you find each other in the sea. In the sea

you part.

Your mother’s pinched, moony face. She has inhaled

some faint ghost of cigarette air. Cola on your lips

confirms your addiction. You cannot

live outside your bedroom. You cannot

live without that history of war.

Octopal you whizz from apple-scented rolling paper

to the two spiders swirling down the lovelane

One body shop bottle, champagne toast lather,

in your hungry but timid mouth.

learned too little in asking. 

Jar of calamine, for the lonely pimples. They

sprout from too much dreaming.

Cigarette breakfasts crackling still

in some synapse, some fat-smothered, brilliant atom

where there is still the spin

of possibility.

By Jasmeet Dosanjh