20070224

Last request

No I haven't lost it this is an excercise for the course I'm doing and I have to write a reflection on the process and things people said that made me change it so anyone's constructive crytic would be apriciated. The exercise was 'your last meal' it was supposed to use senses show not tell and to be 300 words.

Barbiturates, six, shiny green ones and four dry red pellets.

‘Do not break’, I laugh, who will shoot me?

Guinness! Oh how I missed you, your mettlesome smell, the click of the pump, cold, dark iron slipping over my tongue.

And whisky, Jack Daniels! A warm-golden kiss hugging the glass, a sinister sister for Madame Butterfly. No ice, no hangover. Perfect.

Caressing with fake red nails the single indigo plate flecked with cinnamon, sliding one finger-tip across ivory silk, honey by candlelight, a fine shroud.

Red glass crazed, gold filigree, a holy chalice to catch tears. Strangely there are none.

Odd to see my face floating in a windows, sallow so unlike itself. If I were my mother, I would tell me off.

Six years since I tasted it, real bread, not substances, pungent with stale mashed potato, plastic coated offerings, welded, and painted to create textures and flavours like bricks or polystyrene.

Such precious crumbs, I will not leave them. They fall from crust onto soft warm flesh. Yeast begging me to inhale, just to be tempted, just to stretch out the ritual, a last forbidden torment.

Butter in a clean white pot, businesslike too stiff to coax, yielding only to temperature. Then ochre liquid pooled on fingers dripping down dark lips on someone’s face, someone’s neck, mine perhaps.

The smile is not mine, Lover, squashed hard onto my lips, a tiny piece then.

No, not now, too late now, not salty or sweet, not iron or warm gold, just ash water and swallowing grit and ‘pip, pip pieeeeeeeeep’.

Bile for the ghost nurse swimming around me. The stealthy mortician’s slab following quietly. The white coated carrion who spread antiseptic, and tubes, and chalk lines. Only I can watch them, spinning round on the ceiling, on indigo plates flecked with cinnamon.

6 Comments:

Blogger Russell CJ Duffy said...

i am not sure if i am qualified to give a crtique. i usually react with a 'i like it' or simply say nothing.
however, this is full of wonderful and descriptive language. like a receipe it is mouth watering but i am not sure what judgements the people who read this, teachers presumably, will make.
sadly school and i were at log-a-heads and the ONLY thing i remember about Ehglish was that Dylan Thomas was knocked for being too wordy. now i don't have any faults to find with this at all but folks often say i am too wordy so just be careful.
xx

9:34 AM  
Blogger Roger Stevens said...

I don't want too critisize this = it's too good. And I LOVE the last poem.

Fab.

11:54 PM  
Blogger Roger Stevens said...

Hmmm...

critisize - now there's an interesting word.

11:55 PM  
Blogger iamnasra said...

Such precious crumbs, I will not leave them. They fall from crust onto soft warm flesh. Yeast begging me to inhale, just to be tempted, just to stretch out the ritual, a last forbidden torment.

I like the above line the most ...how is going with you , I hope you are well

6:55 AM  
Blogger DhiRAj SinGh said...

I see that you have aged (251 years!) considerably since we last spoke... and the wisdom of age is definitely showing.

Brilliant this one is :)

7:33 AM  
Blogger iamnasra said...

Happy easter come soon

11:08 AM  

Post a Comment

<< Home