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[delilahsworld]

The Father's Daughter

My brother has always had

My mother's arched nose.

Her has her bright eyes,

He has her sharp tongue.

He has her warm smile,

He has her kind heart.

He has her quick mind,

He has her in his very soul.

He has her clever wit,

He has that spark that everyone loved in her.

He has her awkwardness,

He has her cruelness.

He has her whole being,

And by God does she love him for it.

My mother's son.

My mother's twin.

I have always had

My father's crooked nose.

I have his cutting gaze,

I have his silver tongue.

I have his disarming smile,

I have his stone heart.

I have his dangerous mind,

I carry him in my very soul.

I have his sharp wit,

I carry his sins that burdened my mother for so long.

I have his charmingness,

I have his fickleness.

I carry his wrongs in my doppelganger body,

And by God does she hate me for it.

My father's daughter,

My father's mistakes.

Mama's boy.

Daddy's girl.

Why was he enough for her?

Why wasn't I enough for him?

[delilahsworld]

Too Young

Your arm hangs loosely around my shoulders,

The most attention I’ll get while we’re out.

It’s heavy, uncomfortable on my bare skin,

Your sweat mixing with mine as your bones

Dig into my own,

Yet you barely notice.

I sit, a stupid smile on my face,

Because it means you love me

When you show me off like this

Amongst your group of friends.

You tell me I stare too much,

But think I’m mad when my eyes are on the floor.

Your smile makes my heart feel full

And I dread the moment it leaves your face.

When your friends are gone I worry what I’ve done wrong

And you don’t understand why I want to go to sleep when we get home.

You tell me I must hate sex,

That I never make an effort.

How can I explain sleeping with you once a month

Takes all the effort I can give.

When you’re eighteen,

You think love is expensive meals, sex toys and heat.

Love is the feeling of sweat on your skin,

It’s secret kisses when you insist one day you’ll be claimed to the world.

It’s being told you’re so much more mature than other girls,

It’s waiting until you’re eighteen,

It’s promises that you’ll have more from him, one day.

It’s ignoring the rages,

Ignoring the sinking feeling the silent treatment gives you.

It’s missing your friends but being given no time for them.

It’s feeling better than your friends because you’re mature,

You go for lovely meals,

You have fancy clothes,

You go for weekends away

And you use sex toys because you’re liberated,

Not because you don’t want to be touched.

He’ll never admit what he did.

He’ll never understand that I wasn’t a cruel person.

I was a child,

Dressed up like the perfect woman

Yet never meeting his image.

I didn’t get to be angry at his wrongs,

And that felt fair.

A child does not get angry at their elders.

He could scream, he could rage,

And I’d apologise for daring to express myself.

I was always wrong,

He was always right.

But that’s not fair.

It never was.

You weren’t fair.

We weren’t fair.

And it hurts even now,

Though it wasn’t me you hurt.

It was her.

That baby girl, only eighteen.

She thought you were her happiness,

But you only tore her down.

She deserved better.

You never deserved her.

[delilahsworld]

Escapism

I never understood

The idea of a story

Being an escape,

Not when they were my everything.

It wasn’t until reading

Became a hobby,

Not an identity,

That I enjoyed

my own reality.

It is only when your true

Life doesn’t feel worth

Living,

That the lives of others take precedence.

When you are alone,

And the world is against

You, it takes opening

A book for another

To welcome you with

Loving open arms,

Like an almost forgotten aged grandmother after

Months apart.

It doesn’t feel like home,

Like so many people insist.

It’s better than that.

It’s freedom.

[delilahsworld]

My heart screams autumn but the calendar says July 

[delilahsworld]

Rage

When people envision anger,

I think they often picture their fathers.

Middle aged men full of frustration,

Regretting the choices

They made,

Taking it out on anything around them.

They see anger as heavy footsteps,

Warning you to scurry away like mice from a prowling cat.

They feel anger as heaviness in the air

After the assembling of furniture,

The tension that makes your stomach twist uncomfortably,

Flinching in fear of every little sound setting off the

Bomb which is ticking away silently

On the sofa,

Remote control pressed tightly in hand.

Historically, anger has never been granted to women.

We are given goddesses of Marriage, Love and Spring,

Images of sweetness and song,

Perfectly composed expressions that give no inkling of the simmer fury inside

As these beautiful arts of work

Depict the stories of their husbands cheating, raping and kidnapping them.

It is unladylike to act in anger,

To show our frustration with a world set up against us,

With the slow moving pace we must march along for change.

You get Ares, god of war,

His face painted in blood,

His mouth open in a roar.

We get Persephone,

Happily being carried away from all she has known

For a marriage she never wanted.

Her power came later,

When we finally saw the strength in a goddess

That fears neither the light nor the dark.

But by then,

The damage her archetype created

Was long since done.

How would the painters centuries ago paint the scenes so common today?

The women, bloodthirsty as they march the streets,

Demanding the right to control their own body.

Would we be weeping,

Clinging to the arms of our husbands as we beg him not to let us die in childbirth?

Would we be bowing our heads demurely,

Accepting our fate as it is?

Or would they show us in the midst of a fight for our own lives,

But will we be perfectly painted,

With no real emotion on our face?

For a woman cannot be ugly,

Even in anger.

What point is there, to a woman,

If she is not nice to look at,

Even as she marches for the sanctity of her own bodily rights?

Anger is a man’s game,

Rage his gods’ given right.

Leave the true vengeance to the men,

Ladies,

They’re better at it anyway.

[delilahsworld]

The power of a girl’s hair

sometimes a haircut feels like the revival of a

phoenix, what once was dead revived

from the ashes, a ghost

Returning to its shell.

You see yourself again

Recognition flashing in the shop glass

as you pass this unfamiliar person

who couldn’t be the person you left

Behind in the hairdresser’s chair.

My mother would change

her hair when her thoughts were too loud.

The sound of the scissors snipping

made everything slip away

In a rational person’s attempt at a drug trip.

She had long hair the day my father left.

It’s never been below her shoulders since.

I used my hair as another accessory

To slip from personality to personality.

Every version of me staring out from the

mirrors in the salon served a purpose.

Short red hair showed my courage

long black hair showed my fear.

Partners and friends held influence

the way the wind carries dandelions.

They whispered suggestions

that I carried to the salon

but only I had the autonomy to decide which

Took bloom.

I don’t know how to cut my hair

for anyone but me.

I try but

it never quite works.

There are few things of myself

I would not give to another.

Partners have come and gone

taken pieces of myself I didn’t

know existed until they wanted them.

But my essence seems woven with my hair

and I wonder if that is shallow

If I am a bad feminist

For so much of my personality to be wrapped up in my hair.

But I think of all the cultures and religions where

Hair is sacred.

I am not shallow for protecting it

from men and women

who take all they can

and leave me with so little.

[delilahsworld]

The one who never wants to be alone

The first time I tasted my own blood

I had bitten my own tongue.

The wet fleshy muscle darted back from the pain,

And I winced.

My heart recoiled in my chest,

With the realisation I had stupidly harmed myself.

He didn’t notice.

He carried on talking,

Smoke and mirrors,

The room pressed with the heady scent of sweat

That clung to my skin

Overpowering that cheap perfume I hated but always wore

Because he had complimented it just once.

I wonder how her neck tastes.

Is she a Chanel girl?

She looks like a Marc Jacobs Daisy girl to me.

There is a choking sensation

Wrapping around my throat.

I didn’t speak.

Not once.

I only watched,

Continuing to bite my tongue,

Focusing on the metallic flavour coating my mouth.

We came together,

I tell myself.

We have to leave together,

I insist as I am jostled away from the bar.

He won’t go without me-

(Why is he touching her shoulder)

-because I’m his ride home.

He won’t leave me alone-

(Why do they never look like me)

-unless he does.

Saliva heals cuts quickly inside the mouth.

Try as I might,

I can’t trick my brain into making the same mistake twice

When it comes to my tongue.

I wish it could adapt

To use those skills elsewhere.

(She’s so pretty

She makes me feel like nothing).

[delilahsworld]

Generational trauma.

I inhabit space I do not want.

I fill this gap,

Overflowing at the edges,

Water sloshing over the side of a kitchen sink.

My mother never said I love you.

Sometimes I wonder if you ever will.

My body is my own

But I never felt at home within it.

I have only ever connected with women

But I will never be enough for them

(Or perhaps I am too much,

That familiar overfilling of the washing up bowl

Persistently following me since childhood).

My mother will never say I love you

But perhaps it’s because I never said it first.

I look for your approval in all I do,

But I know I shall never earn it fully.

I was never enough for you,

An overflowing vessel of dirty water

Spilling messily over the edges.

Too much.

My mother never heard I love you

Because my grandmother could never form the words.

My mother looked for approval from the men who chased her,

Because my grandmother only ever had sharp words.

I follow my mother’s carefully trodden footsteps,

Repeating the mistakes she once swore she’d never make.

She will never say I love you,

And I shall always search for the words in the wrong mouths.

Your hands are warm when you hold me,

But you never hold on long enough to thaw my frozen heart.

My mother deserved more,

Like her mother before her.

I shall never be enough,

Forever just a little too much,

Soapy water overflowing in the kitchen sink.

My mother never heard I love you.

I wish I could scream it to her now.

[delilahsworld]

Losing hope

The lives of famous people have never interested in me.

I don’t care what they do,

Though I usually hope they are happy

Because to wish otherwise would make me a bad person,

And truly that is not why I could not care less about celebrities and their children-

I just see no gain in me learning anything about them

That they will never learn about me.

However, the day I learnt of the fate

Of Nicholas Plath,

Son of infamous poet,

Sylvia Plath,

I cried.

I cried and cried,

Until I felt I had extinguished all the years of loneliness

That had been welling up inside me.

How cruel this world is.

How unfair it can be.

Sylvia,

I’m sorry.

Nicholas,

I’m sorry.

I’m really so fucking sorry.

[delilahsworld]

I adore you but by god how I wish you weren’t so stupid.

The worst part was,

You didn’t understand what

You had done.

You still don’t.

You don’t understand how

My body aches for the company of

Yours, how everything I see has

My mind racing to find a connection to

You, how all I want to do is tell

You about my day, to hear about

Yours.

You don’t understand,

And the worst part is

Even with all

My hopeful longing,

I pray you never do.

Because I’d take

Your soft rejections

(Those that you cannot see in the same painful lighting as I do)

Over the reality of losing

You.

Any day.

[delilahsworld]

A sense of self

I’ll try to set the scene.

There’s a girl, we’ll call her Red.

She has a slightly too bouncy walk,

Battered doc martens carrying her through the doors of her favourite place-

A slightly dodgy bookshop on the high street of her shitty town.

Her hair is the brightest thing in the place,

Her clothes outlandish and ugly to match.

A girl who dresses like this,

With hair like that,

Has no right to glance around so nervously at the other patrons,

Ducking her head to avoid the accidental meeting of stares.

What a contradiction,

To want to be seen so badly,

But to hate the feeling of attention.

She winds her way through the shelves, coming to a stop before the back of the shop.

It’s full of stories she’s already read,

Because she’s here every week,

Treating the bookshop as another part of her routine.

She picks up a thick paged classic,

Knowing she’ll never read it.

She grabs a horror flick-

It’ll be done by later that evening.

She piles the books into her arms,

Holding them awkwardly so they cover her stomach.

She knows there’s a boy her age hovering in the corner,

Hope rising in her that he might look her way (he doesn’t).

She is a romantic,

Even if the idea of romance and affection makes her cringe.

What a contradiction,

To be so in love with the idea of love,

But for the reality to sicken her so.

She’s a walking contradiction, this girl.

Red.

She thinks one thing,

But does another.

She claims to hate the beach,

But she fantasises about disappearing into the sea.

She claims to hate herself,

But still questions how somebody else could ever dislike her.

She’s vapid, too shallow,

But she’s drowning in her own depths.

I mean, what sane person needs to use a poem to work through their own insecurities.

[delilahsworld]

Morning Commute

The amber sky is burning over the head of my train carriage.

The fire is above me,

But it feels like it’s raging inside my skull,

An incessant pounding overriding the noise of the screaming child behind me.

If I close my eyes,

It’ll ease for a moment.

Not long enough for me to want to return the smile of the woman opposite me,

Trying her best to seem friendly

Although her bag is ramming against my knees,

But long enough that I can breathe a little softer on my next shaky exhale.

I don’t want to be here anymore.

This liminal space between home

And destination.

Give me one of the other,

But do not trap me in this limbo.

I don’t want to be here anymore.