Fern Angel Beattie

Violet-haired, pure, honey-smiling Sappho

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One of my shortest, oldest prose poems has been published in the first issue of the online literary journal JUNGFTAK, thanks to Eley Williams, a talented writer I met at my first spoken word event who is responsible for lines such as "the world tasted of tired mint." 'Ave a butchers.

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Cherry Beer & Diamond Eyes

As a lover attracted by quirks I am not the kind to wax lyrical over aesthetics more commonly admired. “His smile!” “Her eyes!” make me a cynic. Give me specifics. When lips hook up with happiness anyone can be called attractive. I’ll find other windows to your soul. But as we stand outside on your Big Night smoking my cigarettes; you high off the adrenaline, me on cherry beer and your brief company, I’m forced to make an exception. The cut of your irises would make a diamantaire jealous.

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Morning Dew

How is my girl sweetest in the morning? She blossoms while she sleeps. Lips plumping into flower beds with each rejuvenating breath, pores sprouting unseen petals whistling their delicate fragrance throughout the night, only to dissolve into the velveteen of her skin by daybreak. Tulip shy, head tucked between two stalks. I was quite sure it was Winter when we went to bed, but when I wake, it is Spring. My eyes need not open for me to know. I can tell the by the sunrise dancing its crimsons and golds on the backs of my eyelids and the scent of her hair as I turn to bury my face in it, planting a kiss on her carpel. For I have remained a plant, but she has bloomed in hibernation. I hold her. Body all rose and peonies. Wonder how she can sprout so naturally beautiful in the dark. Perhaps I was a bee and planted those seeds while I loved my bird. I reach between the stems to feel my flower’s dawn dew as as a reminder, kiss her pillows with gratitude, and begrudgingly peel my leaves from around her body to start my working day allowing her to grow a little while longer in blissful solitude, bathing in the afterglow of moonlight love with no ferns to block her sunlight with their canopy.

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My new poetry account @glitteringlittleboy will be active from today if you fancy a follow.

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A huge thank you to everyone who came down to my first spoken word performance last night! It was the first event hosted by the Belleville Park Pages boys, who were also the first to publish me way back in Issue 5. The night was a definite success, with poetry readings, short films, an open mic, bar (of course) and a barber station, complete with on-shift barber if too much talent in one room made you think “Fuck it, I wanna get all my hair cut off.”

This is set to be a monthly occurrence so make sure you get yourselves to the next one. I left feeling inspired and absolutely buzzing.

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Fern Angel Beattie - Lapwing Store

My first poetry chapbook "The Trouble With Love (From Trouble, With Love)" is now available to buy! £10 hard copy or £5 digital PDF. If you love me or want to read my words, please purchase to help fund my Fun House rent and States savings. Thank you!

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Proud to be following in the footsteps of my favourite poet Megan Falley, by having four of my poems published in this month's online issue of The Legendary.

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Displacement

I feel sadder since you have spoken to me,

since you have reminded me of your uncompromising sunshine, of your natural aversion to darkness which allowed you to burn so bright.

It is not the way She drew a deep breath like she was filling her lungs with Heaven to find you, and upon succeeding looked at me with a compassion that was almost concern as she said, “This person loved you so much.” It came out half statement, half question - something I am used to; most are confused by who we are to each other. But those words never stop being the Open Sesame to unexpected tears, filling my eyelids like teacups for two and spilling over just as quickly, because you are not here to drink with me like She let’s me know you want to be.

It is not the way you assure me that when I reach to remove the invisible culprit of a tickle on my cheek in the night, it is not the work of a spider or a vagabond hair but you: cupping my face in your hands.

It is certainly not the way you laugh at me wanting you inked on my skin as a way of turning myself inside out, showing the world you are written on my heart. This makes someone (you don’t mention who) uncomfortable and you think it’s funny, marvel how you can be seen as a threat even when you are dead.

I love that. Any reminder of your importance is a good thing.

It is the way you don’t come forward until I ask for you. She tells me this is because you are so giving you let everyone else go first. But why do you wait when you know it is you I want? I comfort myself: you know I will ask for you; there will always be time for us at the end.

But you found your funeral so depressing you wanted to leave a second time, said you were surprised ropes were not handed out so we could all finish ourselves off. “I understand the odd tearjerker moment, but what was it about mine that made everyone want to pour out their entire soul?!” I see despite the reminders it is in your make-up to remain pointedly disinterested. Well, the answer is in the question, my love. It is the very fact that it was your funeral. And so I cannot help but realise you do not want to relate to the depth of my upset. Of course you are empathy and bear hugs, but you are also cartwheels and firecrackers, rolling eyes and sarcasm. The reasons I loved you in the first place now mock me. We were love and light together, so we must remain this way apart.

Yet sometimes my longing demands that you envelop me in messages of a mutual loss. Instead you love me like a new puppy,  whose reaction to the thorn in his aching paw is so ridiculously cute that even though you ruffle his fur and kiss between his ears to console him you can’t help but be amused as you pull it out. I am the only one out of the two of us who was left with no choice but to push our bond into the realms of heartbreak. But this is alien to you. You are fine, you are fine.

So I thank God your parents made two of you, and the other feels the loss you don’t. Time tricks the memory, unique nuances are forgotten; sometimes I can convince myself you are virtually the same. The voice that sounds more like home than home does, a loveheart hairline, too-big smiles pouring from full moon eyes and banana boat mouths. She has done well picking up where you left off with her playful authority and tiny frame, letting me lift her when we cuddle and affectionately calling me an idiot on cue. But, unlike you she will be awake at 3am with a heaving hole in her chest to match mine. She will let us grieve almost like her pain is yours; I can hold her and be closer to you. Until I die, your touch is cobwebs. This is okay. Just remember that of all those in the waiting room with you, it is you I want to come and get me like you told me you would as I slept. Please be at the front of that queue.

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Tequila

You give me a kiss and tell me one of your lies, as the smile salts the wound that you cut with your eyes. The first one turns me sour as the second burns my chest, she might be in between the legs but you're in between the breasts.

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One of my poems has been published in Issue 5 of a Parisian publication called the Belleville Park Pages. It will be sold in bookshops around Europe including Foyles in London and Shakespeare & Company in Paris, and available to read in libraries including Mellow Pages Library in New York. You can also buy it online at: www.bellevilleparkpages.com. Please do, it’s only £2 and in years to come when I’m an immortalised writer you’ll be able to say you bought my first published piece! Everybody wins.

I don’t have a name for the poem so when I submitted it I told them it was untitled (as of yet) - et voilà they have published it under the name Untitled (as of yet)! But I don’t mind, it makes me seem mysterious and aloof.

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The Solution

I watch you interact with purest intent as though, if my eyes search thoroughly enough they will bore right through… I would say, your surface, but that sounds superficial; your very flesh mirrors your soul so I will simply say, “You” …and I will be able to learn by heart the size of yours, the width of your veins, the pressure made against your valves by each ingredient of your sacred blood. Holy millimetres of mercury. That way I might know the depth of your love, the percentage of your goodness. I imagine them bottomless and infinite - because for me, you are their definition - but I try to be certain. I live to know you inside out. I would leave this world to travel the map of your mind, to know the colour each wire of your brain lights up when roused. I listen to the nuances in your responses while scanning the contours of your face, so that even if your core is secret I might analyse the data anomalies of your beauty freckles, read between the wry curl of your lip lines to find more than teeth, prettier than an infant’s, making me long to kiss the warmth in the corners of your cat-like eyes. I recognise the cognitive tick-tock behind them as you select the perfect word, and although I might hesitate in the silence of those gaps, it is when you fill them that I realise my desperate desire for your science and attempts at mathematics are not necessary. I cannot solve you, because you are not a problem. You are every solution and my only need is to love you, even if the love I commit to you is the kind one can return only to their own child.

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Something Blue

"Let me have it, let me grab your soul away” You are the taste of the blood in my veins, the iron caught in my throat that burns the back of my nose and corrodes my cavity like cocaine until I choke. You are the scene in Pulp Fiction where Mia overdoses. But you are more than that because this time I can bring myself to watch it - I need to watch it till the end. I am Mia. You are the fatal snow and I must inhale you until I bleed. You are Poppers. Heart’s palpitation  of dreams’ Kick; missing a step; cartoon halting in mid-air; the moment I’m scared I’ve inhaled too many fumes from a permanent marker and if I take one more sniff I’ll die, but I have to continue because if I don’t I’ll only die anyway and what could be worse than death by anything but You? We’re deteriorating, and nothing matters because You are all there is and all I can feel is a chasm, aching doesn’t cut it it pierces it’s black and it’s white and it’s Hell and it’s Heaven and it’s Lucifer and it’s God Himself. You are God. You are God and I am desperate and how dare you have so much power when you’re dying? When you’re sad and you’re lonely and the agony makes you scream blue murder? When I tell you some nights you’re like a demon over me, eyes of erythrocyte, how is it possible for you to drag on that profane cigarette how I wish I was dragging on you and mock by asking if you have wings? How do you have the fucking nerve to be so devastatingly consuming with your dirty blonde hair and your breaking heart and your death warrant? What gives you the right when that’s not what you care about? It’s not fair that you’re being buried alive! When the fuel for my very existence lies in every cell of you - soul, heart, mind, body, your cancerous brain. So let it eat us both up like you do those pills you pop,  something blue blinding, obliterating, until there is nothing left. White hot history and creation erased.

But then you have to give it back to me. We have to get it all back.

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My Dreams Are Jesters

My dreams are powerful. They are jesters with big, mischievous faces; spectators of my every waking move. And when they’re bored of my storyline, they throw a curveball into the night time mix for their own amusement; the ends of their brightly coloured hats sounding alarm bells in my memory, and I wake up remembering how you kiss.

If anyone had told me a few years back that this would happen, I would have laughed. Because I was bored of you - you loved me well and I wasn’t used to it, so I wanted it to stop. I know I hurt you, but I didn’t mind because when we tried to stay friends afterwards you became so cold towards me that I felt my actions were justified. I helped to harden you, and I couldn’t stand the result. So I left you to it.

I’ve barely given you a second thought since, but the clowns have cackled and cartwheeled and played around with time while I sleep, and now I find myself smiling when I think of how you impersonate people in that stupid, posh voice they don’t even have. I know you still do it because the night after I dreamt about you, in keeping with the harlequins’ plans, you called me for the first time in four years. And even though we spoke until the sun rose, your conversation was in constant flux between the old, affectionate you, and the new you I have bred: proud, bitter and argumentative. You picked at everything I said as if a chat was a competition I couldn’t win. All too soon I was reminded why I had grown to dislike you, and I wanted to kick myself for contacting you. I have no one to blame but myself, you trusted me to lead you somewhere new only for me to show you why you shouldn’t have; I was the one who laid the foundations of your resentment. But you’ve continued to build the walls so high and I don’t care enough to climb them. I just wanted to see how you’re doing, I am not rethinking a decision I made when I was a child. Get over yourself.

You walked past me on the street today (told you those brats were powerful). You look really well - better than I’ve ever seen you, and now I’m thinking about you again. I don’t know what’s going on with me right now but this had better be something to do with my hormones and not an actual thing. I keep telling myself I’m probably just clinging onto a memory with no substance. I was never that bothered about you before so why now? I don’t know if I want to reach out to you and love you, break those boundaries I made you put up when you were sixteen, or to leave you alone. I’ve created a monster, but you’ve used it to your advantage, I’ll admit. You’ve grown up and into yourself, made yourself proud, transmuted into solid. And I know you’re stronger this way but I think that now I’ve been in your position many times, I’ve realised too late that I preferred you molten. I’ll keep this to myself, because I’m not going to be living proof of the phrase “They always come crawling back.” That’s one thing I was convinced I wouldn’t do and honestly believed I’d never want to. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I’m finally sorry. I hope those jesters are fucking happy.

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Message to a future you

There was a time I was so affected by you I felt like I'd been drugged. My muscles wouldn't lift a smile because I was too weak from craving your touch, and my body was leaden with need. I'd walk around with eyelids so heavy they were barely open. Like yours. You've been the biggest part of my last couple of years and I'm used to a constant injection of your presence. So all I could do was lay in my room with the lights off; I had no motivation for anything else. Talking to my friends on the phone was my only reprieve when I'd had enough of being by myself. I don't ever want you to forget that, if even one ounce of what you felt for me was pure. Because (if you swear there will be no ego in your reaction), all I want you to know is how much you were adored. And now I've cut you off, don't think that means I don't lie awake at night rifling through words unsaid, I just can't bring myself to talk to you while things are like this, so I commit my thoughts to pen instead.

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Self-Preservation

I never used to understand how or why people could give up on those they love, when Love is priority. But with experience, I am learning that after fighting too long yet remaining in No Man’s Land, it is sometimes better to go MIA and stay hungry from afar, than to be thirsty for water and clutching at straws for the dregs. There is something darkly honourable in leaving like you've fallen out of love, wearing the truth as scars from the battle of silence only in your heart, and to grow old with a beautiful secret. Than to wear that heart on your sleeve for every commoner to see, just for it to be ripped off like a badge of honour by the enemy, when that is not who they’re supposed to be.

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I want to tell you I love you. I am ready now but you are not - still tied to another. So I tell you with my eyes when we’re in bed, trail each letter down your flank with my lips play with them on your lower abdomen before sucking all the juice out of them until all that is left is the pure essence of three words and those I push inside you before letting you taste them on my mouth. And if you don’t know, even after that  maybe I’ll tell you in your sleep.