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Likestarlings is a place for talking in poems. We pair poets with poets and they write a sequence of six new works by responding in turn to one another. Our palaver blog goes beyond poetry to discuss collaboration in theory and in practice. Please take a look, and feel free to add comments, opinions and suggestions here. Read poems here
 

Chrysalis


Our job is to watch them. We are deliberately bland.
Our training gives us tolerance and the slow smile of compassion.
Off-site we practise the techniques: a hand on the shoulder,
a verbal deflection, some small banter about lives
we have created for ourselves out of fantasies
that we know to be theirs.

They are grey and still in the jackets we provide.
They think our jackets become them, consider
the tightening laces as evidence of future beauty.
Colour obsesses them. We dare not plant flowers
outside the windows, only geometrics in khaki
decorate their rooms. A rainbow is a disaster.

We feed them with restraint and patience, watching
their small mouths open and close.
It could not be said that we love them
although every one of our actions
mimics that strange attachment.
We know how to quieten their needs.

Our strategies fool their escape.
They think contentment while under the jackets
their bodies rebel, weave fantastic parachutes
packed against the cords
concoct terrible reds and blues and yellows.

Here we must always keep the windows closed.