Pretty shiny girls

All the pretty shiny girls are sanded and buffed and filed and polished.  

They’re forever sparkling, with a storage unit of cleaner on speed dial.  

My cleaner’s nowhere to be found.  

I can borrow their clothes but they’re always returned and always for a ransom.  I cannot swallow my ugliness for she is bottle-topped with no opener.  

If I smash open my head will glitter pour out?  

I have a sponge, mop and bucket if not, to use – scour – scowl – through misty eyes.  

Oh to soak up a person, gorge myself on prettiness, glittering bodies, ribbon limbs, until I am as  fatty as a marshmallow reeking of summer’s morgue wheeze and daisy womb saccharine sweetness  splashing my tongue sit on the throne of all of you to love the physical stars with pointy edges but  with all the shine kebabs your religion my bleached brain drink you in your perfume wafting from  your skin in my doll’s house of grief.  

A skinny fairy with gold ribbons, glacial pool eyes, elfin ears and chin, a burrowing mole and a  lifetime subscription to fairy dust.  

I remember when you started chewing grass, your gap-toothed smile as wide as an orange slice.  That’s when I knew you had to live under a polished red toadstool.  

If I could exist in the gap between your teeth.  

To be that, your green embroidery. I could be a tooth fairy and keep not kiss keep not crush.  You brushed rose petals but my flower was forever I love you not.  

I marvelled at your helium voice making you float and fly with sparkly wings sunk into your back.  How easy it must be if you’re a fairy.  

Your magic lasted years later with your baggy blue jeans, trainers and a graphic tee with your dad  (step-dad?) in a suit.  

I decided to buy a cauldron and potions to rid me of this spell;  

I thought I could stop believing with your too-short skirt, flare trousers, tight puffer coat, spaghetti strap top and dyed black hair;  

I thought I could erase your wings.  

But my magic was kindergarten, the shop-bought kind.  

Your haphazard makeup only made you a prettier shade of rosebud.  

You tucked your wings to one side when he had his arm around your waist and they dragged on the  floor and got loose at the hem when he said the flower was prettier but you graduated with flying  colours.  

One day I learned you were daddy-abused but you were still a fairy just battered and bruised.  The fairy dust might not have been so pure nor insured behind your garden gate piped with barbed  wire but I’d take that I’d take all that to be a fairy, to be a fairy with, like, you.  Allow me some of your magic, or tell me how to make it from scratch.  

Don’t tell me it’s genetic.  

I’ll go out and buy supplies to be a fairy.  

I’ll strap wings to my back, to be a fairy with, like, you. 

You crash-landed your spaceship and waltzed down the catwalk as someone so glittery.  You honeyed that your bus was late but that was just a cover.  

Your rays gave everyone whiplash.  

You were a Mancunian offspring jewelled with a voice as cool as pearls sporting a James Dean lean  against pallid skin.  

A smoker’s cough and a laugh as bitter as liquorice, your body Paradise and a graveyard.  Hair that absorbed platinum from the sun.  

Pretty fairy rosebud flush.  

Impish fivehead.  

A face that was smiling even when she wasn’t.  

Barbie’s legs living in a sugar-sweet dollhouse.  

Your human phone always waterfall gushed with notifications.  

With your foreign drink Red Bull in hand, you gained access to the benches.  They became your new planet.  

Some said you weren’t as nice, not as benighted, as you seemed, that this wasn’t all a whirlwind  adventure where there were different rules pertaining to toxicities in couples so you invaded the  land and had it decreed as your own so your friend would forgive you when you disappeared at that  party with boys you knew from here before you arrived on the runway.  

Never wearing a party dress the following day to pretend to do the walk of shame from fucking in  the bathroom.  

You were just distracted by your own glitteryness with your bones calcified with diamonds, blood  rolling with rubies and tears saturated with sapphires.  

That belly button piercing was a silver-laced composite.  

There are different rules where you come from, different time zones where time is a halter neck top  you tied around your neck with your bake a cake not write an essay, watch Jane the Virgin and  kidnapping stories at 3 am, it’s too late to eat lunch at 3 pm, flashcards under your pearl for a  pillow, nightlife central question for Cambridge, social versus work questions and answers out of  this world in your unashamed honesty and curiosity.  

Seduction’s in red velvet with your violin siren song where your absences always left a meteoric hole.  

Cat Woman’s patent leather dress hide from the devil willingly given why don’t artists use the blackest black?  

Dipped your nails in the life force of the devil, the twilit of crushed velvet stitched with sequins  from the bones of the dead, the obsidian pools of his eyes a midnight wondering pool.  Vodka slipped down your throat like a plume of silk from a magician’s trick.  I’d orbit you with your short skirts, grubby pink laces, oversized white skirt me and you sized,  leather jacket, Crybaby sweater, over-the-knee boots, too-short leopard print flares, fur-trimmed  tops tattooed with compliments.  

Let me climb into your WhatsApp profile picture.  

Cool to the power of 10.  

Guillotine me with the razor edge of your hair and Angela Carter’s Sadeian Woman.  Make me bleed – I don’t care if it’s blood. 

I’m forever in the observatory with a telescope only being able to watch from earth your Marilyn  Monroe stardom whose constellations were already conceived and savour your looks like licking  fingers soaked in Pic n’ Mix.  

I could never secure a ticket to your land.  

I had craters on my face which you’d never visit;  

I was only colonised by ugliness in a no return Swapsies.  

Your own muse, bad-girl pre-Raphaelite, fingers positioned in a tableau, deadpan beauty called  yourself Bambi, a Virgin Suicide no Snapchat filters needed, outrageously beautiful in such a sad,  mournful way, the type of person who makes you think of summer and death simultaneously with  your tear-stained makeup-streaked flushed skin blotched eyes sobbing as a baby crying pretty not  kept for home no one believed you when you said you accidentally used a tea towel.  

Looked at a forehead scab in the reflection of your phone, used rollers for your aubergine fringe  umbrella in hand, applied hair product at school not flinching when you saw your reflection,  considered dyeing your hair blue.  

Flirted that the Zoom lighting was your natural aura projected.  

Sunbathed on your lawn and called yourself a floral motif wrote a limerick about loving cows you  wanted to share with the teacher and then ate cheese the following day you were sent lasagnas by  the dozen tossing and turning with the decision to be a vegan.  

Constantly hot and cold being checked for a cough your mum moving a mattress into your room  spending Christmas with your brother at university.  

Standing at the front in all the photos, thumbs up.  

Arms around her neck, her’s around your waist whisked to a remote place in Wales.  Mum’s a sexual health professional during lockdown her advice in the background on Zoom and  you performed a history question and answer.  

Whispers about psychologists already the gay disappointment in the family exam breaks no mock  exams.  

Never a forgotten hot cold cup of tea.  

A prism a projector of so many slides.  

When I was in your light I was a scavenge sponge, soaking up what I could in my clingfilm flimsy.  Be your eyedrops be your contacts be the slug you kissed for a dare be your Iets Frans joggers be  your tome of a folder be your cup with the largest volume uptake be the nose ring you claimed  against your mum’s £40 counter form to not be your sticker collection be your Jonathan Harker  Halloween costume.  

To swim into your litre of coke.  

But you never came too close.  

I thought I knew more about you by the end of those two years than anybody else, not from any  slumber party chats but what you shared with all the elan of stubbing out a cigarette.  

But you never came too close. 

You were an illusion, smoke and mirrors blazing.  

I didn’t know if it was a slither of vulnerability, the whole damn self-consciousness case or  complete indifference – suppose places were laid out for all three at the table but who knows who  was served on the guest list or who would just turn up.  

Was it good old-fashioned bruised authenticity?  

All I know is that I wanted to line you up as a taxonomic species.  

Categorise you.  

Dissect you.  

Skin you with a peeler. Let your stuffing roll out.  

Prick you to see if you will bleed.  

Shear you as a sheep but you will always be a goat.  

The reality – yes, that old thing – was your father dying. He’s dead now.  

But I can’t quite quell those late night day time early morning thoughts that I’d sacrifice that that I’d  sacrifice that for – –  

Oh dear.  

Are the stars real if they are mine and false and made with glitter?  

She lit a flame but my cigarette would not be lit  

Tokens of affection is a sour term – slots for a machine with perennial chances but never an end