Sunshine

Melissa Lee-Houghton

• Publisher: Penned In The Margins
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781908058539
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

Sunshine is the new collection from Next Generation Poet Melissa Lee-Houghton. A writer of startling confession, her poems inhabit the lonely hotel rooms, psych wards and deserted lanes of austerity Britain. Sunshine; combines acute social observation with a dark, surreal humour born of first-hand experience. Abuse, addiction and mental health are all subject to Lee-Houghton's poetic eye. But these are also poems of extravagance, hope and desire, that stake new ground for the Romantic lyric in an age of social media and internet porn. In this new book of poems, Melissa Lee-Houghton shines a light on human ecstasy and sadness with blinding precision.

i am very precious

I see all the black marks on the page, the lines

hallucinations falling off the edge of the world — my tongue

we haven’t talked about desperation,

yet you tell me about pornography, girls with death wishes

attached to their libidos, little warm arrows

aligned to their supple bodies, inside where the parental hole gapes;

do you understand that when the day breaks

semen in the body turning over like a silk belt, slashing

the way the poetry aches like it does when fantasies

abate and leave beds turning over like guillotined heads

and my eyesight’s killing the words as they fall

into the blinking retinas and all the images burned inside

tearing the cloth on your body with wide-eyed

longing. My darling, you write, my darling, my love,

reach into the glove compartment and pass me my map,

and my scissors to snip your underwear, to snip at your heart,

little buckles undone to reveal the muscle torn

and purple and ermine and the little black-leather-

buckles. When I used to wear my fuck-me boots and walk

the streets at night I could feel men looking at my melancholy curves.

I felt hot and I wanted to call home and say my death

was not only imminent but simply a scar that never healed —

crying in my sleep, my chest heaving and my body fastened

to every shape ever thrown in the bed in June

when Nature told me to no longer be pregnant. I’m a big girl,

I said. Roomy in the hips like Buffalo Bill’s victims

in The Silence Of the Lambs. I oil my skin

so the desire will slip off me and onto the floor and crawl

around and get carpet burns and I will glow

like a cigarette burn on the arm of the whitest smack-head

in town, I will glow like the face of the girl who loves him and is willing

to watch him die out, slowly, and with no flames to fan.

I was that girl. I made him listen to a song I loved

and he cried like he’d never cried in his life that this girl with cuts

on her skin would have liked to hold him, crawl into his

psychiatric ward bed and breathe all over his damp, white shoulders.

Some people don’t actually want to be wanted.

Some people actually want to be harmed. I used to fantasize

about being annihilated. About being so completely overwhelmed

the dark would rush in on me and fill me up inside

like whiplash in the back of a Ford Estate.

Wanting to be loved is not the same

as wanting to be fucked is not the same as wanting to come last

is not the same as wanting to be married. Not wanting to be married.

Wanting not to heal up inside and the tears

ruby, glowing tears in the skin just sting in the morning

and are easy to cover up. I told you last night about the baby

that died, you told me not to talk about it and I was glad

you were so on my side that talking about dead babies was bad.

Dead babies. I tried to explain how they don’t stay with you long,

and you told me how your sister went in the wrong grave —

I’m gonna have to pace myself; that’s what men tell me

they have to do when they’re with a woman;

it’s easy to get consumed and the main thing is to hold out.

Death has come out of me, before love has wound its way

to my thigh. The things I have lost fill my toy-museum heart

and when you take me all the dolls get wound up and the bears

start barking. Handjobs just don’t do it for me, I’m sorry —

maybe if I really like you, you can tell me about it. I like to hang on the line

and when the feeling coos in my mouth for an outlet

and I want the voice of someone with a heart that knows about hearts

that know about hearts that know and can give me their thumb

to suck and say you can’t handle the way I want you;

when I don’t know if I can; and I only do it with men

with really clean hands. When I am rubbing my heart against

the sofa like a sexed-up cat, rubbing up against the bedclothes,

rubbing up against the fictional thighs of Northern Goddesses,

pull me in all directions. I want to be told.

Tell me. My sense of abandon is an alcoholic, and you’re

co-dependent. In the night I dream of Adolf and the fictional

loins of Northern Gods and the vacant lane to the abattoir

where the boys hang out looking for pussy

at five a.m. when the girls come on their shift in their shitty jeans.

I want to hang on the line and get all torn up.

I want to stare at women in shops when they’re not even that attractive,

just look expensive. And the perfume they wear isn’t so tempting

but it covers the sex they had hours before and how they

don’t want to smell of it anymore. Being ravaged is like

someone howling your name so it vibrates in

the caves of your sex. You want to ravage me, don’t you?

Don’t you want to ravage me? You want to ravage me so much

you don’t even know where to start, you haven’t

figured that out, or maybe when you’re alone and no one is there

the plan remains the same. Start from the top and work your way down.

This is no longer the poem I expected.

Being rejected has always got me hot — being turned down,

being wanted and turned down for no real reason, being desired

and being tormented, and not having what I want

gets the blood...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Also by Melissa Lee-Houghton
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• And All the Things That We Do I Could Face Today
• Videos
• Z
• You Can Watch Me Undress
• The Price You See Reflects the Poor Quality of the Item and Your Lack of Desire for It
• Loneliness
• Letter to Dr. Ali Concerning Our Suicide Pact
• Letter to Dr. Moosa Regarding My Inconstant Heart
• Hangings
• Mouth
• i am very precious
• Woodlea
• Cobra
• Sunshine
• My Girl
• Blue Prelude
• A Good Home
• Love-Smitten Heart
• Wishlist
• Beautiful Bodies
• Last Trip
• Hella
• Elm Street
• Samson Beach
• Mad Girl in Love
• He Cried Out To the God of Austerities Who Said On the Seventh Day You Shall Tax, Pillage and Burn
• Hope