Fifty Shades of Poetry

Monday 19th January

Milly Squealed when she saw my hair. She told me to leave the office before anyone else saw me. Apparently my hair would cause uproar. She gave me a tenner to go to boots with the hissed instruction “get hair dye.” As I left she said, “I’ll tell them you didn’t kick the muse and you’re still sick with it.”

I sighed at her ignorance and the fact that the muse has left me. It’s like a lover has come and stripped me of my underwear without bothering to finish the job. But instead of a bra and knickers, they’ve taken my soul. Either way, I am stranded and naked.

Tuesday 20th January

I decided to get henna to stop my hair becoming a frazzled lump of fuzz. I’ve seen Mother. I know what dye does.

Laura and I spent the evening dressed in bin bags, sitting on newspapers, putting mud in my hair. This was traumatising as Laura kept posting pictures of the whole thing to Facebook. Worse than that, nobody liked them, not even one like. Despite our efforts to keep it clean, the carpet still looked like someone had rubbed a load of poo into it when we were finished.

I waited two hours for my hair to turn brown. Hippies have too much time on their hands. It never turned brown. It went the colour red would if it was drunk and threw another colour up. I’m a ginger. As if being a poet wasn’t demanding enough.

Wednesday 21st January

Millie loves the ginger. She thought it was edgy, but professional. Which is exactly how she describes her lemon flavoured lip gloss.

I read Laura’s copy of Fifty Shades of Grey and it opened up my mind. This writer was obviously sexually repressed and needed an outlet. Despite my best efforts, I feel sexually repressed. The parallels are uncanny. I know now that I must scrap the vegetable poetry. It’s too last century.

Everyone writes about love and hints at sex, but where’s the blatantly sexy poetry? Where are the whips and the shackles and the perversions? It is time. I have found my calling.

Thursday 22nd January

I wrote several poems that will transform the sex lives of middle-aged frumpy butts.

Friday 23rd January

We had a review of my time at the company so far. This involved me sitting across from the boss as he twitched. He still thinks we have a terrible secret between us. I drank in his pain.

He said I was satisfactory in all departments. I said, “That’s not the first time you’ve said that.” He went a colour that only fourteen year olds should go. He is the sort of person that will truly benefit from my poetry collection.

Saturday 24th January

I submitted all my new sex poems to various online journals. I got immediate feedback from one. They said they would publish it if I went deeper. It was a site dedicated to porn poetry. It’s not the dream publication, but it is a publication.

Laura said we should go on a man-hunt, so that I at least know what I’m writing about. I’ve listened to enough of the stories behind her various venereal diseases to fuel my writing for at least a year.

On second thoughts, that’s terribly sad. It sounds like something a sexually repressed poet would say and I am now a sexually liberated poet. I will go put on hot pants and grace the night.

Sunday 25th January

Last night, I brought home a man with the face of a mule. This was not clear to me until I put on the apartment light. He swaggered into the sitting-room, as if he gets lucky all the time. I took the opportunity to lunge towards the bathroom and lock myself in there. I told him to leave. There was a bit of anger on his side, but really it was his own fault for not stopping me when I went to turn on the lights. One has to know their weaknesses and his was a great big Achilles’ heel of a face.

Our landlord called by without warning. He took one look at our apartment and said we need to be out of here by next weekend. His main concerns were the number of empty wine bottles and the poetry scrawled across the walls.

Laura cried a lot. She said she was going to end up living at home forever. She will if she gives up that easily. She was miserable, because she hates having to sneak men into her room and keep them there. Those are her mother’s rules. As long as she doesn’t see them she doesn’t care. Laura then said she loved our apartment because she can ravage men on a multitude of different surfaces. It took everything in my power to stay patting her back. All I wanted to do was disinfect everything that Laura has potentially propped against.