Melissa Lee-Houghton Poems

Children who give into temptation and
eat the soft, white marshmallow are found later
to develop a severe lack of impulse control―why delay
gratification if gratification speaks back to you―suffering intense
desire for satiety, walkers witnessed me squatting in the ditch
pissing hot urine into my trainers then
staggering up the endless hill in wet knickers,
the dog lead around my neck and a crushed, empty packet―
acute chemical frisson―a text to myself read
don't apologise to anyone. Dizzy, I wrote back,
no-one deserves front row seats to this. I alone
and we,
give in as we are all voyeurs of our own
fluctuating, impermanent existences now.
I took pictures of the familiar landscape as it faded out new
on my cloudy, dying phone; I wanted to be spoken to,
not heard, and opiates made me itch until
my dirty skin was raised, red and
all over my back, my feet, my hands
the echo of unresponsive lovers―later, I sat
in the hospital bed making myself bleed ferociously,
unaddressed, unable to focus. When they discharged me
I scratched for three more days
and the scars added to an already extensive collection.
My veins hunger now. I need
a consciousness undeprived, twice removed
so I can see into it. The river swells
each year and we avoid the flood―sensation speaks to me
though I'm cataleptic on the grass before falling numb
over the stiles, unable to inhabit my white space and
vomiting on asphyxia. You only have to breathe in round here
to get high. Time unfulfils us. Temptation has dominion over us and
the junkies scour the car park in the early hours
for residue in used baggies. Time passes, fades and
God knows I don't need the dregs of anyone else's
unmastered proclivity.
The isolation of momentary lapses
created the conditions in which I choose to
close my eyes; I created free will and
the very idea that a place can become
an induced coma. Heroin shoegaze in my headphones
is its own genre and I tiptoe around the Easter holiday
broken glass and the passive aggressive workers and
the unleashed drug-deal dogs that
circle around each future murder. The air
has a whiff of blood saturation and A-grade skunk, a
self-gratifying notion that perhaps a minor bloom
or transgression wouldn't really hurt anyone,
least of all me.
...

A man found the severed head wrapped in a bin liner
by the roadside, dumped somewhat haphazardly. Over the next three days
limbs and other parts concluded a lazy search for clues;
some parts were set alight and blazed along the highway
adjacent to the sad, hilly landscape
no-one but me ever loved. Each time we drove past
the spot where the head was discovered, on our way to school
I mentioned it to my mother, I said, ‘look, there!' every day without fail,
she couldn't take it away from me. The murdered girl
had her place and she inherited the spooky weirdness once reserved
for vagrant witches. I dreamt of her flaming hair, her flaming eyes
her white skin punctured and torn. I wondered
if the person who did it knew where I was, dreaming of her,
if it in some way linked us, our ragged souls.
I wondered if it was the same person had hurt me,
and sniffled in the night to the tune of The Crystal Ship by The Doors
and tried to imagine the murdered girl's last moments - her life
giving itself most generously to the murderer's psychopathy,
her little blueing hands coiled and curled around his diseased
desires, her Sapphic voice begging to be spared - don't beg
I told myself. Let it happen. Let it come.
You won't live, I told myself. You won't feel anything. It's painless.
Shoelaces, ropes and chains, paracetamol, razor blades, knives, bleach -
my suicide inventory spread itself as wide as it could and imagined
any and all the ways it might utilise everyday items
for maximum effect. I didn't tell anyone I wanted it or how bad.
I wondered if the murderer might come for me, too
and save me the Olympic effort. I struggled to button my shirt.
I struggled to talk. My own hands often came up around my throat.
I tested my own pulse several times a day,
surprised at its tenacity. I learned all the parts
of my body the blood would spill fast and the thrill of it gripped me. I choked,
and burned, and death was present through the morning register,
and tucked me into bed at night with my headache. I was a whole person,
the fractured parts still knitted into my body, still trembled.
The murderer came every single night, into my dream, my sandman -
and I told him how to do it, how I wanted it, dreamt of it, how to dispose of me,
though he only wanted to kill me if I was afraid,
and because I was nevermore afraid there was no thrill in it.
I wished it was me found the girl's dismembered body.
I wished it was me carrying her severed sovereign head
to the police station, to be pored over, examined, mourned, buried.
Her remains still cloy my blood and insist on calling to my irreplaceable bones
that survived, and didn't deserve to.
She's the sunset over Pendle, and the mist on the moors,
and I am pieced together of shadows;
the shadows split and hover over the ground
resembling dismembered parts, dancing with what will be my corpse, and I do not know
how I survived such disintegration when the pain still splits my head open -
I bequeath my heart to the traumatised land, and my head to the feral dawn,
and my little bloody hands to God, who doesn't save the damned,
every part licked in my blood, and clotting, I speak from the depths of my ambition -
like me, she was already scarred. I still dream of her,
the black plastic over her face snapping in the wind. Her blood curdled
and her whole death a blot on the landscape, an otherwise happily withdrawn landscape
of future pain. My babies go into the soil and so does my brain,
and you can trip over me, pull me underneath, and mark with a headstone
an ocean's depth before I fail to haunt you.
...