Poem for a Dismembered Body

Poem for a Dismembered Body

Poem for a Dismembered Body

A man found the severed head wrapped in a bin liner
by the roadside, dumped somewhat haphazardly. Over the next three days
limbs and other parts concluded a lazy search for clues;
some parts were set alight and blazed along the highway
adjacent to the sad, hilly landscape
no-one but me ever loved. Each time we drove past
the spot where the head was discovered, on our way to school
I mentioned it to my mother, I said, ‘look, there!’ every day without fail,
she couldn’t take it away from me. The murdered girl
had her place and she inherited the spooky weirdness once reserved
for vagrant witches. I dreamt of her flaming hair, her flaming eyes
her white skin punctured and torn. I wondered
if the person who did it knew where I was, dreaming of her,
if it in some way linked us, our ragged souls.
I wondered if it was the same person had hurt me,
and sniffled in the night to the tune of The Crystal Ship by The Doors
and tried to imagine the murdered girl’s last moments – her life
giving itself most generously to the murderer’s psychopathy,
her little blueing hands coiled and curled around his diseased
desires, her Sapphic voice begging to be spared – don’t beg
I told myself. Let it happen. Let it come.
You won’t live, I told myself. You won’t feel anything. It’s painless.
Shoelaces, ropes and chains, paracetamol, razor blades, knives, bleach –
my suicide inventory spread itself as wide as it could and imagined
any and all the ways it might utilise everyday items
for maximum effect. I didn’t tell anyone I wanted it or how bad.
I wondered if the murderer might come for me, too
and save me the Olympic effort. I struggled to button my shirt.
I struggled to talk. My own hands often came up around my throat.
I tested my own pulse several times a day,
surprised at its tenacity. I learned all the parts
of my body the blood would spill fast and the thrill of it gripped me. I choked,
and burned, and death was present through the morning register,
and tucked me into bed at night with my headache. I was a whole person,
the fractured parts still knitted into my body, still trembled.
The murderer came every single night, into my dream, my sandman –
and I told him how to do it, how I wanted it, dreamt of it, how to dispose of me,
though he only wanted to kill me if I was afraid,
and because I was nevermore afraid there was no thrill in it.
I wished it was me found the girl’s dismembered body.
I wished it was me carrying her severed sovereign head
to the police station, to be pored over, examined, mourned, buried.
Her remains still cloy my blood and insist on calling to my irreplaceable bones
that survived, and didn’t deserve to.
She’s the sunset over Pendle, and the mist on the moors,
and I am pieced together of shadows;
the shadows split and hover over the ground
resembling dismembered parts, dancing with what will be my corpse, and I do not know
how I survived such disintegration when the pain still splits my head open –
I bequeath my heart to the traumatised land, and my head to the feral dawn,
and my little bloody hands to God, who doesn’t save the damned,
every part licked in my blood, and clotting, I speak from the depths of my ambition –
like me, she was already scarred. I still dream of her,
the black plastic over her face snapping in the wind. Her blood curdled
and her whole death a blot on the landscape, an otherwise happily withdrawn landscape
of future pain. My babies go into the soil and so does my brain,
and you can trip over me, pull me underneath, and mark with a headstone
an ocean’s depth before I fail to haunt you.