The Academi Cardiff International Poetry Competition

Jamie Walsh

psoriasis

No doubt it is braille. My fingertips read and train,
redraft in ignorance - nails relaying Scrabble tiles embossed
with letters from an alphabet no one knows.
A language without words, mute-blind,
less communication than viral code; a lout voice in the silence.
Only these games of midnight chess with my fingers interpret the dots. A mood manual. Instructions for self-destruct.

I read the bible hatred of my scalp. The nightwork of albino moles.
Cauliflower glaze of scales, florets laid on skin-scum graves.
Barrows of yellowing, friable scrimshaw.
The dead cells that cabbalise and regroove.
The runic music of the plates that threaten to pave facewards.
I read these skin tales told in knot-stowed storied knots scrawled on tight parchment - narratives of bleaching hatred
written in a tonal tongue. Itch tone, pain tone, dead tone. No tone.

I read as a king without the check of wisdom,
killing the messenger with my nails. I break the rules; probe to find plates of amenable scum and lever them up,
the salt whorls of my fingerprint in the opened pocket, finding comfort in pain and rain-thinned blood.
Beneath the braille, the scalp is cool and smooth,
the paving stone horn bone revealing unlettered fluid, supple as worms in the earth. The slickness of sin.

I read my way into the scum-ribbed barrows
and run fingers on the salt walls, roll balled bone in my palms.
I think of keeping the plates and chips in a jar.
I could look at it then as a piece of natural history, evidence of past extinction shucked from the soil.
This unlabelled exhibit caught beyond glass for your disgust.
Skin scum. Crystalline loneliness. Slate despair, gathered at night from a graveyard. Deadly - one cell blinding all desire.

I read a song of difference and take pleasure in freakhood.
The beachball asymmetry of it - one ear clouded in scales,
fungi-nooked, a nest of clotted eggs;
the other with a craquelure eyebrow and flint in the crease.
Within the hair there are islands edged with white beaches.
Plates stand proud of the scalp - the slide and slice of sharkskin.
If it spreads, I think, I will shave myself bone-bald and parade my cap.
The glaciers will slowly redraft, calve, capsize in full view. This wall of snow will fall, and I will look you in the eye and laugh.

Yet tonight, I am a fortune teller reading tonight’s crystal braille.
I see you - I see you old and stooped, steeped in loneliness.
I see a list of interiors where doubts bicker. Unmirrored rooms
and books everywhere. Your shrine of cream, white alcohol and baby soap.
I see you cooking- cannibal meals where your own snow is ever ingredient.
I see you seeking worth in the silk words of a cat.
I see you longing for the moments of numbness
where you hold your emotions in thick mittens and think how wonderful life would be if you could just remain this dead.
They call you, Leperskin. Your age is ice.

Jamie Walsh divides his time between teaching and writing, and is currently completing a novel. He lives in Devon.