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Trepanning

She was a child once,
Pulling the heads off dolls;
Pulling out fine pink nylon hair,
Exposing the trephined holes.
 
She’d pack up heads in a bag
And run across the road;
Run from the woman who’d made her
Run on bare pink soles.
 
She’d regurgitate her Christian sins,
Expunge them one and all;
For boys to touch her fine silken hair
And augur at her ohs.
 
She rented a flat above a bookshop
And worked nights in a nursing home;
Removing pans from mothers and nans,
Their necks lined up in rows.
 
And when her dura mater came calling
To put her life back on hold,
She married a good Christian soldier
Who’d hit her when she’d not be told.
 
He’d hit her when she’d been cavorting,
Balancing in the middle of roads
With high heeled shoes in one hand,
With a bag holding heads full of holes.
 
She left him for another
Who could’ve broken the mould;
Who, under the wave of a siren call,
Sunk beneath the scaling fold.
 
She left him for another,
Left him in frozen words:
Words to melt into memory;
Like a patient erased from a ward.
 
She’d spun so many verses
The necks she’d lined up by the door;
Drilled into brains like curses:
The synthetic lines of a bore.
 
She carried a score of faces
In the bag she held like a load;
A face to suit every fancy
And a bore to carve every hole.

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