Literary Cartography

Things I want: to shapeshift into a sea serpent, a gorse mother, ladybird, to run a shed on a beach selling porridge with a single spot of jam, and only ever sparkling water to bring customers some artificial effervescence, a hand to hold that doesn't ever do straight fingers, a Peter-Pan collared earth star, a few flowerpot parasols, a transparent rain blocker, kohl eyeliners with tiny glitter particles in, more eyelashes, to lay on a pillow and listen to [my eyelashes] blink on a pillow where a clock in the precise shape of my grandfather chimes a blue light deepening and bare fingers, a blue light deepening and bare fingers, blue light deepening and a stupid man purely to put up the umbrella to hold it still without any misguided attempts at him speaking, and three weeks of uninterrupted sleep in the white yawn of a hotel bed, some torn books about hedgehogs, some books about curiosities in love, some books about where to find perilous mushrooms, a spell manual about how to wither various body parts, some books about how to steep tea from the flowers accumulated from hedgerows, an audience to tell that the word foraging had a 15C use originally intending "to plunder, pillage" or to "gather food for horses and cattle", many books where it is underlined in Bic pen that there is no scientific evidence that cows lie down specifically because it is about to rain, a single balloon delivered for every birthday I have crawled to bed feeling glum in a curated order of over 32 shades of pink including muted tones like Blush, Pastel Pink, and Cotton Candy; bright hues such as Hot Pink, Fuchsia, and Magenta; and deep, rich tones like Raspberry, Maroon, and Burgundy. A mimi pink one, a cameo pink one, a dawn pink and, too, this well respected novelist who lives inside my leather hide rucksack, and I want much sharper knives, too many miles to walk with no signage, to be truly lost without WiFi, to have a shutdown without having to use words to o - th - I can’t the blue light deepening, I cant - blue light, deepening, bare fingers, and let me ----/ starfish, please, on the bed, and all the lipsticks in the colour of lung walls, the North Shore of intestines and the sword in the heart with tardy apologies for such silent violence, a reddening, the blueliness of it a bumblebee’s jolt, and to tell a certain story to a loaded milkshake and witness the sweet hyphen of its eyebrows.