Poems by Abigail Parry

The Man Who
I was frightened stiff by a lot of my characters.
                    DAVID BOWIE


Wow boy you’ve got some nerve –
bitten down,   a sliver of live line,
stuttering filament,        blown,  
wired up all wrong, strung out
and going like a striplight, too
thin, I tell you, you’re too thin!  
A shock               a finger-in-a-socket,
blue, electric blue                  and fine,
fine like cocaine, fine like flickknives,
scissored-out, snuck out the back of the
catwalk, fine like nail files,
            first live birth
of the space age,     dead in the wreckage
but always climbing out, always stepping
through a door 
        into the new, new
white-hot new,
cut in acrylics, crystalline, 
one hundred thousand miles    
of chrome and foil, 
       or wicked in pinstripes, drainpipes, 
slick, tooled up               
                                 but kid, 
what happens when the mask sticks?  
What happens when the ice stays stuck?
Leaving you
hollowed out like a flute, like a pinion sunk
in the heart of boy like you –
                  then you’ve got to burn out – 
down to the fingers, down to the quick,
to the quick quick heart of a white-hot
boy like you
who could strut and preen, burn up
              and then roll over
who stitches catsuits from his ogres, 
on first-name terms with all the scary monsters –   
SCUM   PERVERT   WEIRDO   FREAK   
nothing sticks to you, 
        but fuck, weren’t you 
everything we feared, and all we wanted?
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About the poet

Abigail Parry spent seven years as a toymaker before completing her PhD on play in contemporary poetry. She is currently Poet in Residence at the National Videogame Arcade. Her poems have been printed onto mirrors, scattered over London from a helicopter, translated into Spanish and Japanese, and published in a number of journals and anthologies. She received an Eric Gregory Award in 2010, and won the Ballymaloe Prize and the Troubadour Prize in 2016.

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