writings

Beyoetiful

We live in this city
but our hearts belong
to somewhere else.

Slumped in our bedsit
forgotten by the world
two sad little astronauts
sucking memories
from a pipe.

Months ago we had hopes
and dreams and we stroked
each other’s feet but now

an empty balloon
shrivels inside my chest
a dead thing that still
asphyxiates progress.

I’m going to Amsterdam
all by myself
and I look forward
to doing something without you.

I’ll dye my hair blue and get a
tattoo, a Heidegger quote, the one
about death because death is the only
thing that’s truly my own.

Deep down in the belly of the
city I’ll find someone who is less
fucked in the head and he’ll tell
me I’m beautiful
despite everything.

http://www.abctales.com/story/maggyvaneijk/beyoetiful

Bad Habits

Slurping on water
a mouthful of memories
a bubbling conscience
that I try to drown
in flashing images
on screen.

Someone once told me
that life is a sequence
of hotel rooms and I
wonder what I will leave
behind in here:

yesterday’s to-do list,
a chunk of heart
or dirty underwear?

A rapid turn of events:
limbs shoot out of sleeves like they
knew this would happen. Violent
red across my cheeks: I forgot
to shave. I wrap myself
in your duvet until
credits start to roll and I think
if not now then when? You’re not bad
to look at and I don’t know you
well enough to judge your
personality.

Night turns into day and I’m naked
and afraid. A scented spray
a cover-up
and it occurs to me that
perfume is the destruction of
a thousand flowers, slaughtered and
stuffed into a pretty pink bottle.

I know you want me to leave but
if I do that I’ll feel cheap so
I lean across
and press play
when I really want to say:

I’m not very good at this, I’m sorry.

http://www.abctales.com/story/maggyvaneijk/bad-habits

Resting my head against your bedroom door

We are drawn to each other
our wounds are magnetic
our wrists together
form train tracks to
your bedroom

where I undress you
like a nurse. Each item
of clothing is a bandage
to unravel. The darkness swallows
our exposed parts. Our beating hearts
remain sealed in a catatonic
state, a tupperware to be shelved
for a later date
for never.

When I hear the noises you make
with others, I wish I could be
that brave although I can’t figure
out if you’re having an orgasm
or crying over something
they said.

I once told you, you were lucky
to have many eyes adore your flesh
you tried to make it better
by saying: “It’s all meaningless”.

Then you shook my Disney Souvenir:
“See how fast the glitter falls?”

I could have said several
things in reply but struggled
to shape the right sounds

Caught on my own breath
like a story, trapped in the
middle of itself.

http://www.abctales.com/story/maggyvaneijk/resting-my-head-against-your-bedroom-door

Jerome

There are three layers to your face:
the top is a masculine sheet of skin
it’s thin but deep creases
around the mouth and nose could get
you a part as an action hero.

Sometimes it flashes cherry-red
like the time I let you see me
naked. Streetlights revealed strips of
my flesh and a corner shop sign
glowed between my legs.

The second layer is one you
don’t want people to know
about. It’s still damp from the time your
kids said goodbye and your wife looked
on with a crooked smile. It bobs
beneath the surface like a jellyfish, pulsing
softly, stinging you with patches
of purple; a bruised melange
of fights and fall downs. It sheds
when you give yourself away after alcohol
or drugs or when there’s nothing left to
say apart from this,
this is my fucking life.

Finally there’s a layer
I don’t think you know about
because it’s too deep for you
to feel and if you did
it would coil around you
like a silvery noose.

Unless one day,
you manage to admit
that you’re lonely and you
want somebody to love you back
and it could be me or maybe
it couldn’t but if anything
I think you should know, I often
dream about you Jerome and in
that dream I pull my hair
over your head and I keep us safe
in my dark blonde tent,
I keep us safe.

http://www.abctales.com/story/maggyvaneijk/jerome

Space

A kiss spreads slow like mist and I almost
forget the reason we were crying
as tenuous sheets of rain cloak our sad
little flat and echoes from last
night are caught in drops of water.

If the Chrysanthemums could speak they’d tell
us to stop screaming but sometimes
I find it hard to reach you without
raising my voice.

Your body is wrapped in a high
voltage fence, if I come too close
I’ll burn and fizzle like a moth.

Our better moments come undone
by those that follow when I call you
names and you spit in my face and suddenly
that smile I love on the pier in Brighton
becomes an awkward muscular contraction
that seems to tell me:

we are both planets, when we hoped
one of us was a moon. We orbit
and collide, time and time again
repeating mistakes in a big black bowl
wishing on a celestial fire
to set us free.

http://www.abctales.com/story/maggyvaneijk/space

Cowgirls in Oxford Circus

This is the part where a Dutch girl
loses herself in smoke only
to find herself again in the
letterbox eyes of an Iranian
woman at the back of a bus
heading two stops away from
where she really ought to be

This the part where a librarian
with a pierced nose and fifty percent
shaved head chases a rude boy down the
poetry aisle after he slobbers
milkshake all over Ginsberg’s
Cosmpolitan Greetings
he forgets to note its location
as he runs runs runs to

The part where a Portuguese filmmaker
pretends he’s asking for directions
and slides a phone number into the
Dutch girl’s pocket as she tries to
emphasize she’s new here and she
has no idea where she’s going

This is the part where a Chelsea
local vomits her muffin into
a Starbucks loo whilst her friend scoops
whipped cream like she’s
shovelling yellow snow

This is the part where trench coat men
with funnelled eyes plot and plan their
way through the Gherkin like worms in
and out of rotting fruit

And this is the part where teenagers
from Texas rodeo their way
through Top Shop past smart trousered women
with clipboards who tally up wide
eyes and stuck out hipbones.

These are parts
that spin so fast
and do not stop unless you catch them
with a piece of paper and a
ball-point pen and even then

they might disappear, like that man you saw
crying on a Camden bridge.

http://www.abctales.com/story/maggyvaneijk/cowgirls-oxford-circus

OK Cupid

My hecatomb heart
beats a sacrificial rhythm
for boys who do not care
about a flick of hair
standing out of line.

I do not want to lend
my hair drier to you.

I want to roll around in creasy sheets
and tickle you
into hysteria.

I want you to hold my hair when I
vomit and I will reward you
with a flash of skin
on video chat.

I want to surrender myself on the
hood of your car, whispering secrets
under an indigo ceiling
secrets I have no idea
how to tell.

Please don’t
iron out
my insecurities
with a GHD

or spray them into
oblivion with
the help of L’Oreal.

Take me
swallow me
acknowledge me
and perhaps, if you dare
love me
and I will apologise
when I leave a bitter taste.

If your blue eyes drain
I will fill them
with laughter and clumsy
strumming on my dad’s guitar
and we will surprise each other
like a snowdrop in April.

My love,
my happy pill, my boy
with messy hair.

http://www.abctales.com/story/maggyvaneijk/ok-cupid

Nola Darling

A sparrow flaps through our carriage

frosted meadows reflect across
espresso skin

her lume-blue hoodie glows like
graffiti that etched the station
some stops ago.

She sits so self-assured
not like me
boxy and downcast
hiding from iPad guy
whose pupils climb
up my tights.

If I were Nola I wouldn’t allow this
I’d gorge on his extricated eyeballs
like marshmallows on a stick.

And then, as a Tarantino heroine
I’d slice his neck and blow into
his severed head so he bursts
like bubblegum.

If I were Nola I wouldn’t have been at that
party last night, where tequila swam through my blood
and placed my hands on a boy who didn’t want them
there and if I were Nola I would never cry
I’d hiss and march and Max wouldn’t sling
me over his shoulder like a sack and put me
on a train so I don’t cause more damage.

Nola gets off and I’m tempted to follow
hoping my feet imbibe the shadowy imprint
of her steps but this is nowhere near my house,
her neighbourhood would surely eat me up.

I slide back down to make a bird’s nest
out of my purple hair tie.

My fingers weave over and under,
I give iPad guy a guilty smile.

http://www.abctales.com/story/maggyvaneijk/nola-darling

Lonerism at an underground dance festival

Tell me lies about compassion and pride
whilst emails fly behind my back with doctor
this and doctor that and doctor please help
us please because she’s broken
but you see,

it’s easy being alone in places
like this, anonymous and hidden
I hear
Whose got a cig?
and shuffle my Pall Mall
under the sand

music takes me away, I close my
eyes like the beautiful mdma
monster next to me but
I can really feel this –

string of beats spun around my neck
reeling me in, so tight, a laser-lit
cataplasm to nurse my solitary
wounds that gape and gawk in quiet nights
but are soothed here amongst electric sherbet
sand scooped into the air by glow-worm girls

– someone presses change
my spell is gone, vibrations dampened
I am reminded
that I am here, alone

before the sky falls into my open
awkward mouth I approach a fire
encircled by green pools of bile - a flash
of limbs - a shriek - I sit, playing with
my phone pretending to wait for a
boyfriend to come back from the loo and I
stay there, for a while
back-lit by a ball of light
that passes as the moon and
lays me bare against the world
but they’re all too drunk to see

http://www.abctales.com/story/maggyvaneijk/lonerism-underground-dance-festival

Bandages

I need you

to squish my face between your
hands and push out a breath

but you left

and the dust that follows destruction
swims through my body like smoke

there’s no exit here, in our place

where even the walls seem to bleed
and tubular snakes cry rusty tears

your tarred jacket lies splattered on
the floor like spilled ink over hop-scotch tiles in

black and white and sometimes blue
when we had no money left

and it was only last night that we

unpaged our Ikea constellation
our dream-home, lime-green and a bunk-bed slide for the kid

my toes curled around the idea of
matrimonial bliss as you drove my hips into the

cold checkered floor before these shards circled
my body, a broken halo of crystalline flakes

from grandma’s vase aimed at your head as
I buried you in words that did not know

where they were going, sad little bullets
led astray by a buffeting tongue

perhaps your heart is too small for my mistakes?
because I really need you now, I have something to share

so I share it with myself and cradle
my secret into tomorrow.