Guide to Being a Grown-Up

buy a pumpkin. take out its guts. disembowel it. save the seeds for toasting and adding to a questionable soup-stew. cook porridge in the pumpkin, with milk and apples and cinnamon. spoon out the porridge-pudding when steaming, each eager feaster manned with their own teaspoon. scoop the semi-soft pumpkin flesh, making perfect circles. play with a sparker-lighter, throw shards of spiky light. burn plastic-coated business cards in the holey pumpkin-husk out in the garden. add lighter fluid and burn some more. add phlegm-soaked tissues of ill people to the flames to try and burn burn burn the damned plastic. conduct a voodoo ritual around the burnt-orange, orange-flamed pumpkin. sing 'Burn Baby, Burn' into the dark. smell satisfyingly of lighter fluid all night, the stench stuck to wool jumpers.

a pumpkin should come with the keys to a starter home. they are for grown-ups.

That Night

My bed in white sheets, strewn with jumpers not all mine. Laptop, notebook, neat-angled. Sock-toasties and balled up in pyjama bottoms eating rhubarb pie and reading all my theory and criticism. Go go biro: myth touch history, sift through whatever flotsam washes up.

Then Ted cuts to the quick.

My love-life grabbed it. My numbed love-life
With its two mad needles,
Embroidering their rose, piercing and tugging
At their tapestry, their blood tattoo
Somewhere behind my navel,
Treading that morass of emblazon,
Two mad needles, criss-crossing their stitches,
Selecting among my nerves
For their colours, refashioning me
Inside my own skin, each refashioning the other
With their self-caricatures,

Their obsessed in and out. Two women
Each with her needle.

I find nothing in my life that I can't find more of in books. With the exception of walking on the beach, in the snowy woods, and swimming underwater.

That is one of the saddest journal entries I ever made when I was young.

Mary Reufle

Iambic Pentameter

As I blow dust across the table top
and stack up boxes, counting to myself,
the boy, the gentle man, who hails from far
South Africa reads. He reads aloud, him to me,
from Romeo and Juliet. Sonnet.
The one with pilgrims, all about true love
and that. A bore but for his accent soft.
He counts the iambs and considers well
the metric feet. Oh, I confess I would,
and do, consider more than just his feet.

Two Perfect Two-Liners

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet black bough.
Ezra Pound


My mind insisted on words
having been promised the imagination
Thom Gunn

The Rape of the Lock and taxidermied moths make for insect eroticism.
The stuffed ones that once flew have beautiful names that spur me on to write again.
Victorian obsessions with death and biology and discoveries becoming preserved and pickled appeal to my darker side. Skeletons and stuffed specimens now molting crowd my head with moth balls. Write to get them out.