“Freedom is written in the trees, we die we die.                We grace our palms with leafs.”

-extract from a poem I have since lost. But I like this line.

Pesticide

Pieces of orchids are strung across the floor, rumpled like band aids, left behind by the girls. You know you have to pack now, the rats will be here soon, caught up in the chase. They will burn down this house, just like the last. Flames squeal with joy at the prospect of being allowed out to play. They will smoke you out of your ‘writer’s world’ and the next to come.

You leave the orange case open on the floor, you gather up all their little clichés and repeating, repeating metaphors. You cram them viciously into a jar too small. They cut themselves, again and again, just to fit. You want to take them. You want to leave all these people behind with none of their nagging security. You will leave them empty, as you fill your case.

Falling for you.

The sky hung heavy and clear as it strolled down King’s street. In this form it is a she but I wouldn’t get hung up on that with her type.

Her wings were lavish in such a vivid blue; of course every desperate man or women would trust her. If an Ethiopian goddess with long soft curving features and dense green eyes came to you. Proclaiming the love of a guardian angel with the wings and skill to match, how could you possibly have the fortune to see through it? These days are filled with desperate men and women, all wandering as children, always doing the same wrong things.

She is swaying as she walks, her wings tilting and swishing prompted by the wind in the trees. She reaches a bright red door and in she goes.

That is that. An angel no more.

Once inside she strips her wings of the stitched and glued feather cloak, that simply mocks the real thing. Her ‘wings’ are bare; they are thick reapers of bone protruding from her shoulder blades. She sinks back now in her home. Dwindling down from her goddess glow.

Her hair is now a nest for the rats on the floor. Her eyes are eggs lain sleeping in the nest, her fingers talons and her face this empty soul. With no eyes and sharp, glass shards of teeth in her mouth. When closed the teeth slip through the gaps in her cheeks and slip soundly through her face.

She slips off her fair white robes of the guardian. When the last stitched and stolen emerald falls her skin is nothing but withering grey with jutting red and blue. Her talons snap at her cloak, its ‘day’s work’ falls from its pockets. Fresh baby skulls roll and she slips them into boiling water, like sugar cubes in her tea. Children have the best ways to sweeten the soul.

The people she guards spend each day confiding in this disturbed saviour. As she floats from here to there, she is a goddess in the daylight and a splintering horror in the night. Each day they pass with her, is oblivious to the last, and she preys on the bones in despair or lacking. All her helping hands are never without consequence; she may ask for a lung, just one and leave you a wheezing bag of dust. Next she’ll have the padding around your joints, so when you walk you feel the bone crunch and crush through the pressure. Maybe she takes it all, just to have it.

She sinks further into her red door cave. A small batch of plump arms rest over a fire and she waits for her midnight feast.

In the day she puts on her face and wanders again. She helps the desperate loveless lovers and takes away their hearts. She helps the childless mothers and takes away their wombs. She helps them all without helping. As she may have been a guardian once, twice and again.

But when angels fall, they fall.