Twenty or Thirty 1998

Poetry
Maria Heath Beckett

​They float before my eyes like planets I long to reach,
tiny white moons I want to crush to dust,
the sound of chalk grinding to nothing on a blackboard.
 
I place them on my tongue -
Satan's host -
the powdery taste of headaches.
 
You stride away,
lithe as a stork along the banks of the canal.
I call to you that they are not sweets.
 
You fling then the pills to the water.
They do not sink but float like the spots,
of a disease.
 
On Chalcot Square you cross,
as though I am a corpse you don't
want to touch.
 
On Arlington Road,
the argument hums
like the traffic between us.
 
You pull a telephone receiver off the hook.
It hangs on its flex like the head
of a dead snake.
 
I purchase another packet of paracetemol.
I go to a bar in Camden Town to be alone
and wash down the pills with cognac.
 
Maybe I took too many, I suddenly think.
Maybe twenty could actually kill me and I don't
really want to die. I could change my mind.
 
I ask the waitress to call me an ambulance and she
gives me water and salt in a glass and the salt taste reminds me
of Margaritas once in Paris in Montparnasse.
 
At hospital they make me drink charcoal out of a plastic
cup and my mouth is powdered with black dust.
I feel I could choke.
 
The last dregs I tip on the sheet. A crumpled sail.
I see Art in everything.
And in everything there is Art,
 
that dark black pattern on the sheet
like a Jackson Pollock abstract
as my friend arriving in the doorway of the room.
​

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Maria Heath Beckett was born in North Yorkshire and currently lives in London, UK. Maria has been writing for many years and is now finishing two novels and a memoir and collating her first poetry collections. Some of her writing has been published in magazines and anthologies, such as Tumbleweed Hotel Volume 1 (ed. George Whitman) and In The Company of Poets (Torriano Poets). She has recently had a narrative poem of several pages accepted for an anthology entitled, The Eternal Snow, publisher -  Nirala Publications.

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