Your Daily Meals

Long story short, I went to see Gillian Anderson talking about sexual fantasy and desire following the release of her new book 'Want' which explores female sexuality through a series of letters submitted by anonymised women from around the world. I wondered 'what would my submission (punny...) have looked like if I had written in?'. This was a very quick 20-30 min piece of writing I did that night meaning it really isn't very well developed but I do love the idea of exploring nourishment in conjunction with writing and sex. What I wanted to do here was explore how sex can be understood as a creative act between two people, in which the self can be extended beyond time and beyond its typical boundaries (hence the references to religion, poetry and myth) That there is something imaginative in the act of desiring someone else, and how desire actually begins to write that other person into existence. I also quite like the tone of this one - it has a certain swagger about it in which the speaking 'I' is both dominant and yet paradoxically submissive. It's a challenge, it's a game - it's saying 'here I am, eat me whole, I dare you' marking that typical sense of sex as an annihilative act (captured in what the French call 'la petite mort'). Anyway, bit of fun really.

Your Daily Meals

I: Breakfast

You want to swallow flames and eat chaos like toast

just to feel something more

than half-alive, 

so, butter me up buttercup,

toast me from my frost,

make me golden on both sides,

like the winged shoes of Hermes,

for I’ll be the message to the masses:

You can toast to that!

II: Lunch

Hungry again?

Martyr me like Isaac, I dare you and won’t spare you,

for I’m the last slab of lamb on the rack,

so, sizzle and griddle me

massage the flesh of me,

yes, seven times salt me and spice me,

slice and dice me,

then pray to an effigy

in the wake of my renewal.

In your hands I am more real

than the real of the now,

and the shock of my spice

thrice times as nice as hollow faith  

so, I needn’t be served on the rood,

but instead eat me off

the plate of Poesy’s cave,

dark and deeper still than blackness.

III: Dinner:

Do you want the comfort of home cooking

and all its side-dishes:

the pretence of a happy family,

bibles and twee sexless beds,

shelves of verse, untouched, unread 

or do you want a take-away? I’ll be it.

Devour me and savour my abstraction,

like it’s fish and chips

seeping with the oil of inspiration.

Yes, yes, in this oozing desperation,

you forget I am written by the bodies before you.

Yet look how you scrawl me

as new lines of rhyme,

until I stretch like palimpsest through the flood of time.

Written to this lovely piece which feels like a million tiny touches on the skin: