31

27 Times came the knock on your door

Mummy answered

Alcohol on her breath, body black and blue

Domestic after domestic

Police turned away and your teacher never knew

4 times

You were sent to the nurse

They patched you up, swabbed you down

Patted your head

Noted their concerns

And never asked you

One more time

One more chance

They stepped across the threshold

Ready to help

Not from the school, not from the station

Unconnected to other and seeing as if for the first time

This filth

This degradation

The violence and neglect

The denying defiant faces of your abusers

The one who bore you and helped to take your life

Your sickly frail body twisted unnaturally in the corner

Disfigured and discarded

No-one’s fault but theirs

Still the questions beg

31 of them screaming in the conscience

Torture Artiste

Leather bound, yellow, distressed,
Tortured in a garden
That cost too much to bear
The distance cultivated by it's own inevitable logic
Bore fruit in the form of a sadistic neddle prick
Foreshadowed in jest
Piercing ego cloud and leaving naked flesh in the limelight
as the limbs writhe and the pulse pounds
Shrinking, shrivelling into shadow
No defence left once the invitation is inked
Permitting violence against the person
Different fabrics, different crafts, a silk scarve to strangle hope
The Torture Artist sees only products, objects, subject to the whims of the marketplace,
As his assets appreciate and cheerful buyers circle behind glass
The neon flares, the liquid pours, the flesh tears and the little bit of soul seeps out
A little part of me bleeds out and heals over harder in a flat line
Further discussion would be asine
The fetish for things that intoxicate, things that hurt
The hunger, the thirst,the discarding of spent carcass, the polishing of knee high boots
All render it absurd
To consider an audience with the torture artiste any more than an offer to populate his next installation; material, emphemera, expendable