The dangers of uncartographed land
We're marching into autumn,
and it seems I have forgotten how this works.
I found myself, yesterday,
unloading a van and gazing
ruefully, at my toes turning blue.
I am glad for this meander into cool,
for the sliproad from summer
becoming visible.
It is just that I seem to
have misplaced my compass
and have forgotten how to
navigate my wardrobe.
This I find myself stood, shivering
in a thin cardigan and bare feet.
It is of course, no matter.
For as soon as I find my map and the path
I will be herded into winter
and have to acclimatise
to an entirely new highway code.
The class of 2007
I find myself worried by these girls studying psychology
and their blonde impeccability.
By the sleekness of their hair
and the perfectly manicured nails
they tap the corner of science journals with.
I do not want to find myself at the mercy
of one of these girls, with their
lack of obvious flaws.
I feel reduced every time I see them,
made into someone I was three years ago,
and do not wish to be again.
In the future, therefore, when I
am dependent upon these representatives
of the class of 2007
I hope I come across the one with cracks in the veneer.
The one with a look in their eye
telling me I am not alone.
I do not want them to be as cracked a vessel as I,
but I do want them to understand my need
to bail out occasionally and the rough seas
I cannot navigate accurately.
I do not think that the lives
of these icy, competent girls
have left them equipped to deal
with those whose grip
on reality is as tenuous as
a buoy resting quietly on the sea.
One of the added benefits
to this high walled old city,
the chance to see,
on a dull Saturday,
half naked Roman centurions
proudly escorting
their tourist prisoners
past the iron railings
to the green slopes of
the Victorian public gardens.
-
When added to the rows
of high ceilinged houses
and sky touching Minster,
the streets echoing with
centuries of footsteps
and chatter
(and the way it seems
to glow in the sunset
and shimmer in the snow)
you could wonder
just why we were
all, so, desperate to leave.
-
Wonder what charms our
newer cities or campuses have
when these streets
and overshadowing buildings
have learned to thrum to
our newer busier heartbeats.
Why we feel the need
to escape these walls
when they are, already,
half in rubble.
-
And to tell the truth,
it is a question we have never
adequately managed to answer,
to define or quantify the draw
of these younger cities,
wide open spaces,
when clearly out comfortable
city existence has enough
diversions to keep us entertained and charmed.
Stories
I remember you telling me once,
about how you bunked off school.
Jumped over the fence, ran up
the ginnel, and played with your mates
in the back of beyond.
I was in awe. Had never
done anything like that.
Had spent my thirteen years
solidly working and stressed
to the eyeballs, and dreaming.
It wasn’t that you liberated me.
I had, by that time, descended
quite nicely thank you,
into the library-cosy world of sloth.
Instead it was that you made me
Feel more interesting.
Gave me a relatable back story.
Spinning under the sun
That feeling you inspire,
is the one I get
from standing, whirling around
in the corn fields by my grandpa’s.
The same feeling,
that the extra cup of
too strong coffee I just had to have
gives me at twelve am
on a school night.
The feeling
that brilliant words
on bound pieces of paper
make me feel;
and make me want to breathe, to create.
It’s like stepping into a Dali,
or the Van Gogh
you wanted to buy.
You know, all starry circles
and deep, deep blue.
And in the midst of the dizzy spells
and uncontrollable smiling,
I’m glad to hear
that I inspire something similar
She who wrought me
I returned to my old university this autumn,
my alma mater.
She that made me. That
wrought within me deep
changes. and helped me shed
who I was.
And I stood, in the overheated library,
and wandered the stacks until
PS 228 H66 - PS 53758
and then. Then I stopped.
And stood.
Remembering.
Because it was there,
amongst texts that dealt with
feminist theatre, that you,
reduced me. Sent me spiralling,
quivering home to sit, enraptured,
and talk about Neighbours with my housemates.
And perhaps, just perhaps
you had something to do with
all that change
as well.
But, I have to hold to this;
not as much as you try to claim.
Remembrance
November it seems is the month of Remembrance.
The month in which we
congregate to remember those fallen,
those who gave their lives unwittingly,
in the service of their country.
An enormous concept being fought for
in excruciating minutaie
on fields of mud.
The month we, a smaller we this time,
remember the birthdays of those
who died two months later,
in the cold of a northern winter,
and who were mourned with pints and pies
and traditional songs.
With long car journeys over harsh, looming, landscape.
This is the month of red poppies
and monuments, decked out
in defiance of cold winds,
brightly coloured against grey skies.
Monuments to keep the dead in mind,
to tell us every moment of
these men who left their lives,
for something they had always taken for granted,
and those whose lives were
never the same again.
The smaller remembrance we observe
has no link to this. The person
we gather to preserve in our memories
was not on the front line.
When these children were leaving their homes
and marching onto foreign soil
he was turning an existence from
these mountains and fields
we visit once a year, in order
to appease our hedonism
in the big city's bars.
But it is this man I think of every time
I place a bet on the horses,
that I remember when I see the draughts set
in the corner,
and whose funeral I sat and cried at.
I buy my poppy and give my thoughts,
dutifully watch part of the service on television
and bow my head during Mass when
the Priest calls us to think
of all those who have fallen.
I am, at some level, grateful
for these sacrifices I wear on my coat.
It is just not the same level
as the emotion I feel for
this man, who though he was not connected by blood to me,
has a place in my soul
that cannot be torn away
or vandalised and graffitied.
I do not light candles for those
who lie in Flander's fields
or those whose bodies are buried
in so many other European countries,
or under oil-rich sand.
Instead I light candles for
the man I called Grandpa,
the man who looked through photos with me
and who I visited in hospital
as he lay dying.
Relationships, like the military
We are complicit in our silences.
Plan attacks in the arch of our eyebrows
and midnight raids in the sly twists of our mouths.
These young boys have no hope,
lost in the mires of our maps
misled by false information,
by the lies our bodies tell
and our voices back up.
We are capable of hiding everything,
and foiling them with the flap of a duvet.
Have learned, over the years, to use
our bodies and our intuition
to manipulate situations.
These boys are learned in the ways of
orienteering, and semaphore.
Have spent years as Scouts and
played at intrepid exploring,
but they have yet to crack the code
of our heads tipping sideways
and our necks arching, gracefully, back
as we rest our heads on the chairs.
They do not understand our
quiet signals of impatience
and that our restless fidgets mean
we would like to get them alone,
that a terse journey upstairs
means we would like them to follow.
They do not understand us,
just as we are marooned by their short conversations
and ability to convey sympathy with a
slap on the back.
We are equal in our lack of comprehension
and our fields levelled by the
complicated and intuitive guesswork
we are forced to employ
to ascertain position.
It would seem, however,
that we are winning.
That our tactics, silent
and uncommunicable as they are,
have given us a knife's edge.
We keep them at our borders, because
we are the holders of the keys.
We reveal the codes and the symbols
as we see fit,
and have ceased to care about equality.
We fight on our own front lines.
Really, I should
I should be reading
dense sentences, that turn
my world to counterpoint with
their erudite and exotic discourse.
I should be debating their
way of showing parentage, and
how they pun off, riff off and tell
to fuck off, all the other thousand pages
I have read.
I should be reading these
important, ground breaking,
highly eloquent and disciplines,
words by misaligned women.
Should be applying all I know,
all I feel the the dissection
of these neurosthenics and
their brave new words.
I should be doing all these things.
And yet I am not.
Instead, I am reading poetry
about dislocation. Which
jars with its strict schema, and
tight rhymes. I am
envying these sentences their
existence on the page, and imagining
my words written in black ink on flesh.
I am sat on my quilt, an heirloom,
with black coffee (because,
I believe, it complements the theory)
and Battenburg Cake (because,
surely, Charlotte Smith once
dissected its structure whilst
categorising rhymes) and I
am using these texts as stands.
Not for opinion, or idea,
but for tea mugs and my whirring printer.
Unfortunately it seems I am too taken
with ideas of opposition and
loss, to be separated from
these things I should be doing.
They surround me like comfy sweaters,
and insert odd words into my mouth
at opportune moments.
But they also strand me, on an
island, away from others.
And have never yet taught me how to
build a boat and row myself back.
I want to tell the woman
down the street, going
rat-a-tat-tat on the front door
of number four,
that there is no one home.
That the dark windows and
lack of response, indicates
that no one in the house
is there to answer the door.
That she will be left outside
in the cold, to be seen only
by those of us stood
smoking by the light of
the streetlamps, and the glow
from the close chinese takeaway.
That, whoever promised to
be home, has lied to her.
Is out, having fun, or
visiting a sick relative
in the hospital.
That they are food shopping
or watching their daughter's
star turn in the school show.
But, somehow, it does not
feel like my place. For I have
never met the people who live
in number four. Have heard
them chattering, in some other
language, and avoided
the children on their bikes.
I have smiled in that dispassionate
way, that we greet our neighbours with.
I have probably annoyed them,
when coming home after a late night out.
But I have never passed the time of day with them.
And so, I leave her.
Leave her to the rat-a-tat-tatting,
and go inside, to watch tv with
a housemate and to avoid some
more work. Because that
my dears, is the English way.
Quieter Streets
There is a frisson of
excitement, associated with
walking the streets at night,
she thinks. These are not
the city streets so
bedevilled and populated
with all of Nietzsche's worst interpretations.
But are quieter, more
secretly sinister, streets
of a quiet spa town.
These streets conceal
well-dressed ghosts, and
the presence of long unsolved murders.
Have books of history as cobblestones.
And she feels, are not enhanced by her
presence. An interloper as she is.
She will, however, continue
to walk these streets, when
the hands of the clock
have moved to just past
"Safe" and into "Risky".
She will feel that tingle
of fear and heightened sense
coalesce into shivers down her spine,
and when she climbs the stairs
to her room, will undress (slowly) in
front of the nets,
with the light on.
Problems with Medication
I am bad at taking tablets.
Find their plastic shiny coating
vaguely worrying.
Have to swallow them in a gulp.
This is something you once found amusing.
Asked why they posed such a problem
when I have taken so many for so long.
I shrugged your question off,
and reached for my tea.
Placed another capsule on my tongue,
pushed it back with my teeth,
gulped.
In truth there was one time
I excelled at this.
Almost perfected it,
but was found.
And stopped.
Now I battle with this image
and its presence when I
pop the seal on another tablet
and place a drink down
as I would polish a sword.
Believe it is none of your business.
It would compel you only to more fussing
and that I truly believe I cannot bear.
No doubt you will, one day,
find out and confront me.
Then and only then,
Will I explain that one day
I sat down and swallowed countless tablets.
But failed at the last,
choked and alerted my housemates,
to my distress.
Explain that now, every new tablet
feels to be that last.
Paying For Privacy
Sometimes I wonder at my willingness
to pay two pounds twenty
for a cup of coffee.
To sit, blocking out the piped music
with my iPod headphones.
Could I not do this at home?
At home, where I could relax on my bed.
Make coffee to my heart's content
without checking the state of my wallet.
Of course I could. It would be
no hassle at all, to walk
down the street and
lock myself in my room.
But here in this designer-comfortable
space, I am paying for privacy.
Of the kind that doesn't come
from housemates and
the constant hum of my computer.
That is banished from regular life
by its constant state of action.
We are locked in an action movie.
One made for tv perhaps
as nothing really happens.
Our days fill with object
and desire, and pathway
and courses of action.
We are becoming bees. Or ants.
Are all these coveted ideas
of activity our parents instructed us in.
And so here I am sat,
watching others dash around
and earn their wage.
I am thinking about heading home
and readying myself for work.
Our City
One of the many charms
of this walled and ancient city,
is that, on slow summer Saturdays
when work is slow, I can
watch a parade of half naked Roman Centurions
go down the street and across the bridge.
Can serve Dr. Pepper to German barbarians
and real ale to prisoners of war.
And with attractions like that
it is sometimes difficult to comprehened why
we all left.
Why we felt such a desire to rush
out as soon as we could.
To go live in newer cities,
in patches of grass in the middle of nowhere.
To leave these protective walls.
For we did. We took
our memories elsewhere.
Our upbringings in these walls
with these leaning houses, and ghost stories.
These long rows of houses, replete in their magnificence
and smiling benignly down.
The green spaces, and specialty shops
and the benevolent and beautiful presence of God, right in the heart of the city.
And moved to younger cities. Those with
more obvious buzz and life. To dreaming spires,
to green campus universities and to
other similar cities, with their similar feels.
Returned only to our city as visitors, but
visitors with the right to complain about the tourists
and to partake, just for a summer, in the day to day working life
that this city enfolds us in, as the bus goes through the bar.
One death makes many
I do not think I ever truly believed
you would die.
That I would have to stand by your bedside
and watch the display show me how far
away you were drifting.
I, throughout your prolonged agony, clung
onto the idea that through blind fear and faith,
I could save you.
Wondered if I could barter
with death, and swop my soul
for yours. I could do nothing
but remember. Remember
all the nights I crept into your bed
the nights you held me as I sobbed,
the advice you gave me,
the way in which you would have done
anything you could for me.
But you couldn't not die.
And that broke my heart into a
thousand tiny pieces, as the cancer
broke you.
My faith and fear, was ultimately,
not enough. Yours had been.
Your faith and terror had kept me alive
had brought me into existence, and kept me there.
But if my faith could not save you,
then I do not know if it will keep me alive.
On Leaving
You once asked me,
"Are you good at leaving?"
My reply was an untruth,
a misdirection.
"No. I try not to do it."
And that, in itself, was true.
In part.
For I do try not to do it.
Leaving and I
are too complicit,
too complementary.
I prevent myself
from doing so,
in fear that I will never stop.
On being incapable
Do not, please, expect me
to become your confidante
in those craftily given looks,
those expressions of disgust,
directed at fellow passengers.
I find myself incapable,
genetically perhaps, lacking
the requisite common feeling.
Cannot in fact, express
empathise and console
with any degree of believability.
I will give up my seat for you,
and lend 10p when you are
short on fare,
but cannot, will not,
join you in this common mass
of shared voice
and mixed bag of emotions.
New Shoes
Your resistance astounds me.
Not only to death and war, and
to the dissolving threads of
family you tie in ever
more complicated knots.
That is, indeed, astounding
but it is also human.
It is a different resistance
that leaves me breathless
in wonderment.
This resistance is
to too hot tea, and the
handles of cast iron saucepans.
To new shoes, and their edges
of steel.
Where I cringe and fail,
wear the old ones, one more time
and again.
You, stride out, displaying
nothing less than
complete comfort.
I let my shoes win, pad around
in old flipflops and
disintegrating boots
rather than face that pain.
You, are undefeated.
Buy shoes, wear them, rotate them
and, I envy your steadfastness.
Your refusal to be beaten.
You will be the one to walk
the wreckage of Europe
with dignity. Your feet
encased in gorgeous pink leather.
While I lag, mired in rubble,
my soles torn to shreds
as my ankles are now.
Mother, Daughter
Mother,
It is not that you and I
are so different.
Indeed we are remarkably similar.
It is just that I find nothing,
to rejoice in,
in this similarity of thought
and our mirror image bad posture.
That I smile at our toes,
and wish to compare the behaviour
of our hair in damp weather.
I would like, instead, to
celebrate our differences.
Those things that set us apart,
strand us with our native tongues
and lead to these struggles.
Therefore I shall call you tomorrow,
at six as you sit down to dinner.
I shall tell you about the day
and who in my house had sex last night,
whilst you ring me at ten
when you know I will be watching the mysteries of the dying,
and tell me about the garden
and just what she who moved in three doors down
said this morning, as she mowed her lawn.
Neither of us will listen,
but we will both hang up
and pretend we did.
We shall estrange ourselves further.
But rest assured, dear mother,
that I do love you.
It is just that I wish to discover you,
Daughter.
Loving large
This love is large and hopeless,
is the love of children,
and of parents.
Is the love of emperors and courtesans.
All encompassing and all redeeming.
Could bring children back to life,
and create rest where
before there was only disquiet.
This love is careful and precise,
delicate in all its actions.
As cautious as that first time
gardener, coaxing plants
through the first frost of winter.
As nervous as the parents
on their childs first day of school.
Hoping above hope,
that they are enough. Have been enough.
Hoping that they have given and will receive.
This love will guide throughout a life
sustain itself even when the
original seed is dead and gone.
This is the kind of love
we all yearn for
without even knowing it.
And the kind of love that springs
only from one place.
Lover’s caress
I’m watching the curve of your arm
the caress of that drop of water
as it makes its careful, lover’s way, down.
I feel its progress
as if it were on my skin
almost as if we were Siamese twins,
not lovers,
joined all the time
not merely when your
subtle presence and pressure
moves my thighs apart.
I watch your lips part,
the glass raised to them;
those red, soft lines.
And I envy it.
It’s too hot for human contact
and I am reduced,
to the envy of a toothbrush, your cleanser
even the dishcloth.
And so I am praying,
for the return of the winter wind.
For then I can take the place
of a sweater.
Lie in bed with my arms around you,
to provide that, welcome,
warmth.
Love to living
This love is large and hopeless,
burns out lightbulbs with its ferocity.
Could power libraries
and workshops
and create a genius. In its spare time.
Is the work of soft hands
and biting words, of large
dreams and larger
acts of daring.
Would end worlds and
create new galaxies.
This love could, in fact,
perhaps lead to more.
To life and loss and
above all, most importantly,
to living.
Love is seasonal
When I say I do not like winter, you
must take it to mean that
I dislike the amount of clothing it enforces you to wear.
That I do not enjoy being
unable to touch your skin at will,
and feel the heat radiating into my fingertips.
When I say I do not like summer, you
must take it to mean that
I dislike being deprived
of the chance to undress you,
and of those evenings
in front of the fire, when
we would keep each other warm.
It is not that I am especially enamoured with
waking up to your cold feet tucked between my calves,
but I far prefer that easy, cosy, closeness
to the separation of skin that summer brings.
To those nights where we sleep, on top
of the covers, and as far as possible from each other
within the confines of our bed.
It is in the autumn that I am most happy with you,
for in that season I can revel in the chance to
peel the layers off you, when you enter the house
and I can stand enraptured as you change for bed,
no flannel pajamas or thermal underwear necessary,
and we can sleep curled into each other,
with no inconvenient cold feet to wake us at two am,
and no need to turn the fan on in order not to dream
of deserts and endless camel journeys.
In autumn I can walk hand in hand with you,
feel the calluses of your hands without the cushioning
of the gloves I bought you last Christmas. Can
feed you mulled wine, and apples. And look forward
to another winter, of fires and the heat
of our kitchen as we cook. To another season
of frosty fields and the look in your eyes
as the dog chases across the white expanse
and you remember the fields of your childhood.
I love this season, because you love this season.
I am incapable, even, of hating the spring,
with its muggy days and constant showers,
because on your face I see delight.
Delight in the sun warming your bones once more,
and pure pleasure at the sight of the blooming flowers.
I have seen one entire year with you,
and the turning back of our clocks reminds me
of every day, and all the things we have shared.
Layers
She is tired, all of a sudden, of
this world and its machinations.
Of the stock characters in the wings,
waiting patiently to come on
say their lines meet their end
and disappear once more.
Of the distinguishable plot
and its careful predictability.
Tired of all the accusations
and hidden motives. Of these
moments, drops in time, of dazzling illumination.
Under the skin of the lake, she
can, fleetingly, see the mill
and the wheel it used to feed.
In the boy pouring Fanta on the
heads of the ducks, she
can see the overseer and
his measured punishments.
Then, as quickly as it came,
it is gone and replaced
with the utter harshness of snow
and a lonely discarded mitten.
Invitations
A casual acquaintance asked
why, if I wanted my father at my wedding,
so badly, I did not just invite him.
And I stopped. Wondered
if the world all knew something
that had passed me by.
If the Royal Mail had issued
whilst I was busy, doing something else,
a statement that they were
pleased to announce the commencement
of their new extended service.
That they would now deliver to the dead.
We had, after all, once proved
that as long as you could get
a stamp and address to stick to it
you could post anything.
A hiking sock, freshly washed,
we tried. And succeeded.
I doubt, somehow
that post addressed to the dead
would make it.
We are reduced to prayer
and pleading.
To the streaming messages of tears
and the tearing of clothing.
My father's invitation to my wedding
in that small country church
was included, tacitly understood,
in the best man's speech.
The mention of "those who wish they could be here tonight",
and in the way I gave myself away,
and kept my name.
Insomnia
It is one of those nights
and I kick, turn, scratch
toss, the covers,
off.
And give in.
Meet my mother
as sleepless and tired as I,
in that bit of hall
where one misstep is dangerous.
Feed the cat, tidy the glasses
we discarded at dinner,
away
and once again climb the stairs.
To kick, turn, scratch
and drift into restless sleep.
In memoriam
I’m dreaming of a boy’s hand.
Its soft soft palm
and deep spider web creases.
It smells of royal blue ink
of burning the midnight oil
and late night net connections.
This hand moves
swift and sure as a tidal wave;
delving beneath eiderdowns,
trousers and cheap cotton knickers.
With practiced ease
and all the right gestures.
It is this hand I kissed
over dinner whilst the owner
talked of rain filled nights in foreign cities.
This hand I held tightly
on station platforms.
It is this hand, his hand, that I miss.
All I can feel is its ghostly presence;
gentle as Chopin, on my thigh.
In Low Moments
In my lowest moments
I turn to religion.
Ask for a rope
of thought, prayer and hope
to be lowered.
For this much vaunted
idea, to save me.
For a kindly shepherd
to guide me from the wolves
I stray so easily towards.
In my darkest moments
when the world is full of menace
I recite the prayers
of my childhood, with
as much fervour and
faith as I once
recited reasons for the lack
of any divine existence.
That I once saved for
declarations of my solitary
existence in the universe.
These moments, when the dark
is crowding in and I can feel the
monsters of my mind, made real;
these moments I would take
even the smallest of signs
and seize upon it gladly.
It is as if this depression
creates its own hell and
populates it with its own devils,
and takes me full circle.
Makes me a child once more.
Able to believe, but susceptible
ohso susceptible, to the encroachment of fear.
Unable to exist
without a father figure
and a saviour.
And thus when the creatures are close
too close
and threatening,
I hear my voice
whispering
"Our Father, Who Art In Heaven ..."
and all the while I
am hoping you are,
that this is not a con, or delusion,
and that the angels,
the ones who surround me as I sleep,
will not take me away.
But that I will, instead,
manage sleep and a brand new day.
I do not, however,
feel that my thrice yearly appearances
at Mass, have placed me high up on your list.
Am, in fact, resigned to languishing behind
the good, the sane and the innocent.
Perhaps, just perhaps, however, my whisperings
will reach you, and strike some chord.
Perhaps that of genetic memory,
for this feeling of loss, uncaused by actual deprivation,
must bear some resemblance to that you felt
on that dreadful day, as you watched
on high
and felt, heard and saw every violence we inflicted.
It is therefore that I ask you to save me.
I do not promise that I shall attend church or convert
but I do know that I would rather be alive than in your kingdom
and that I need help for this.
And stuck as I am, in the tar pit of this hell,
it seems that only your help is the one that can.
In foreign cities
I like to wander around foreign cities.
Whereas in my own I am purposeful, direct -
In these places, with their exotic names,
I am content to drift.
To personify aimlessness as I wander;
From corner café to market,
From souk to patisserie,
And from gelaterie to kasbah.
With the noise of my sandals on the ground
I mark the passage of time.
No hasty snatches at parking meters,
But the gentle ‘clack-thump’ of leather.
The quarters of the hour
Replaced by the quarters of the city,
The quarters of the population.
My progress is not marked
By an obliterated list, but by
The scents my skin absorbs
The paintings I am touched by
And the stops of the metro I find myself at.
I am a different person in foreign cities.
I remember asking
I once asked you,
in a roundabout fashion,
how you wanted to die.
We were baking bread, I recall.
And as I kneaded and stretched,
with your arms around my waist,
me thumping to the rhythm
of your heart on my shoulder.
You said you didn’t
that you would live forever.
each molecule of your being
moulded into something else.
That you would live on paper,
in bread,
in thought, in memory, and in deed.
Become new, renewed, infinite
And then I thought, I would
be happy to die as we were.
Stuck in that one
achingly, perfect moment.
I Know You
I never know what it will take
to convince you that I know you.
That I know you in the hollows
of our love.
That I know you, even in
the long dark ice hard nights
of anger and resentment.
That I know you and your
restless nights
just as you know me
and those long days
that I exist through
sustained by too little.
That we know each other
in the never-ending dreams
of destruction.
That I know you without condition
or clarity.
That I know you as I have
never known anyone.
Than I have known myself.
I Fell in Love with You
I fell in love with you
in the launderette.
I sat on the spinning machine
and watched you.
You, with your look of concentration
carefully folding shirts
and trousers and my underwear. As if they
were made from finely spun gold.
And you reminded me
of poetry I read aged eighteen
and dreamed about,
subsequently, for years to come.
And then, as your face furrowed with
all the worry of spin cycles
I realised.
I realised that I would happily
spend ten thousand nights like this one,
with you.
With you alone.
With your dancer’s grace and utter absorption.
I Fell in Love With My Lover
I fell in love with my lover
when I saw her
dark-eyed with fatigue
making tea at midnight.
When I realised she was
unable to withstand a breakfast
where nothing was available to read.
When I saw her tying the straps
of ridiculously complicated pyjamas
and when she would appeal
to me to fasten her into
evening dresses.
When I would gently run
zippers along their course
and allow my hands to drift
upon her sides.
When I saw her in the mirror
all long hair,
with that fringe like a birds wing,
and crooked smile.
And then I realised
that she is I and that I love
the same things about her
that I love in myself.
And that she is, in some ways,
almost more myself, than I am.
I fell in love with my lover
As she and I fell in love with I.
Germinating depression
You wrote about depression
as if it were a contractable disease once.
The image caught my imagination.
I began to imagine the forms it could take.
A slow onslaught, lots of slow-moving
yet deadly germs for clinical depression.
Little waves of germs
here today, gone tomorrow, for bipolar depression
and that most deadly, chronic depression,
steady persistent worker bee germs.
But you also made me think about
happiness as a communicable condition.
For the e-mail about depression,
put a smile on my face,
and enabled me to put a smile
on another pair of lips and eyes.
A poem for those I left behind
Those I left behind
be assured that I did not
forget you.
In fact I may have thought
of you even more.
At a removed distance
you were closer to my thoughts.
I wondered what you
were doing, who you were, and why.
I daydreamed about conversations
we might have been having.
But for all that
you were left in my wake.
Then, what is life except
for the leaving behind of people
And a reliance upon memory?
Far-Flung
We are the products of cheap air travel
and desire to live in far flung places.
Spend holidays split between countries
and appeasing disgruntled parents.
We contend with guilt and desire,
and the wish to see those we know.
Know at a level deeper than
shared experience, those in fact
we would ask for as we lie in hospital beds.
As we wish for new blood and the same genes.
These are holidays spent on planes
because we have spent eighteen in one place
and some balancing force seems
to require that we make this
better with one christmas spent in another place.
Falling.
I never meant to fall for you.
For your rather obvious charms.
Your echoing and bettering sarcasm.
But once, we were drunk; not that bizarre a thing
We were eighteen and at university.
But once we were drunk, and you stood that bit too close to me
as I washed my hands at the sink at three am
and I felt you harden against my thigh.
And those little shivers ran through my stomach
and my blood.
I felt myself start to get wet, and my breath came
as raggedy as your fingernails.
The rest in my memory, happens in a drunken haze
where time has no real meaning,
and ten minutes pass in three seconds.
Suddenly we were facing each other and your hand was
running up and down my thigh.
Under my skirt and over my tights,
I had my lips locked on yours
and your tongue was fucking my mouth.
We were pressed tight together, creating friction
I felt that we could have powered the national grid.
There was movement only when we heard the front door
and the rest of our housemates.
In silent accord I went to my room,
and you followed a few minutes later
to find me standing waiting for you.
Waiting for you to shut the door, and press me against it
so I could feel your cock on my thigh.
You reached under my skirt
and my tights slid down my leg
you followed them with your mouth,
leaving me gasping.
And as you reached the top of my thighs
you rolled a condom on
and slid right in.
It was all I could do to stand.
You had me hard and fast
and as violently as I could have wished.
I would like to play the outraged feminist at this,
but I cannot. I have always wanted to be taken roughly by someone I knew.
To slap and push in the bedroom
where I know that ‘no’ is my safe word.
When we were done, you stepped back, but carried on holding me
so I could take to my feet properly.
And then we retired to the bed
where we did it nice and easy.
Nice and slow
and you made noises like a dog digging up a bone.
And then we slept.
nustled in together,
and the next morning.
Well then, we forgot all about it.
Didn’t we?
Various Existences
I am practising being bad at leaving,
have allowed the garden to grow
so its vines may entangle my feet.
I have let the dust settle on the kitchen
and the living room. I am hoping
that someone will come along in
thirty years and comment on how much
fun we must have been having to ignore it.
I have scattered possessions throughout
this house, and begun to refer to it as home.
I have populated my dreams with its corners
and my worries about it are domestic.
I try not to fear that its spirits and demons
will leave the walls and throw me out
as they did once in Santa Fe.
I am trying to believe that this house will
home us and our descendants.
That it will be a castle and safeguard
against all of the pressures I think
I may bow down under, and go to sleep because of.
I do not know how much of this
you have noticed. You seem
preoccupied with my health, are forever
asking me if I am alright. If I need to see the doctor.
If I feel quite right, and I wonder
if this is a subtle reminder that you
were not feeling well last week.
Or if you too have noticed that the reflections in the mirror
are not those of us. That the woman is far more pale and
somewhat translucent. The man more forbidding
in his fear and badly concealed worry.
They are not us, I remember us as we are. I am carefree
and you are not a worrying man.
You once worried we would split up, I had
done something. And I do not remember what.
For a long time I wondered why no one would
tell me, and then I decided that perhaps I
should not know. Perhaps it is something
that would compel me to leave.
Therefore I do not wish to think about it,
instead I will wonder where the past three hours have gone.
I am sure I sat down for ten minutes, and have not moved
since. Perhaps the clocks are wrong. The dust
may have got into the workings.
Time it seems is leaving us.
Early Light
The unexpected joys
of cat ownership are many.
And I count among them
that clear bright light
of true early mornings.
The different view I
get of my kitchen and
front garden,
relaxing in its gentle existence.
This simplicity charms me
far more than
you batting my sunglasses
or chasing shadows.
I adore that, and the way
you sneeze into my hair
and tunnel under the rug.
These too are charming, in
their own ways. A way related
only to you.
But an appreciation of
early light
has become bone deep
and, thus, even when
You or I are absent from
the original kitchen
I still rise early
to stand and bask.
Defence Mechanisms
You were my defence mechanism.
The way I balanced out
all the war, carnage, death
on television.
My break from the media.
At least, that’s what I told myself.
In truth;
well, in truth
I paid very little attention
to you. to us. Even to me.
I laid down with you
on your hardwood floor.
And we moved to the rhythm of the radio news.
Until finally,
you fell asleep.
And I stared with a longing so deep
I felt I needed a heart surgeon
to delve inside me
with his latex fingers, and save me.
And I cried.
With heaving,
long drawn out sobs
to the comforting prayer-like
sound of the shipping forecast.
Conversations
I would like to speak to my father.
Well, no. That is what I am doing,
what I am always doing.
I would like, above all else,
above that new dress
and above a new boiler,
to have a conversation with my father.
To see his eyes alight with fervour,
and feel the movement of the air as
he gesticulates.
I would like, once more,
to hold the phone to my ear,
drink a cup of tea and attempt
to feed the cat, whilst keeping
up to speed on the events of his time.
For in retrospect that felt like life.
Whereas this is mere existence.
This bears no relation to the previous movie.
Is as absent from it as
hope from these winter dusks.
I would like. I desire. I wish for.
I long for.
I exist for
the phone to ring this evening,
as I sit and read, and
for it to be that voice that
I hear all the time, in every single thing.
In the chiming of the church bells
and the cashier as he hands me
my groceries.
For it to be that voice,
crackling with distance
and telephone exchanges.
I would like to tell my father,
that I love him.
Coffee
Every single cafe on this campus
seems to revel in bitter coffee.
To purposely brew it just those
minutes too long.
It reminds me, as it goes down,
of that cheap cafe on Finsbury Road,
where we sat with that ever growing silence
between us,
of separate trips to the back door
to smoke cigarettes
and an atmosphere that swallowed words.
The cafes delight in this overpriced
weak willed and throat clenching coffee
that makes me think longingly of
the turkish mud coffee you would bring home
on sundays, along with breakfast.
Blood
To close your eyes
And see the gashes.
The red blood, dripping
Steadily out,
Down,
Along.
Staining the gravel underneath
Your foot.
And to not remember how
You got there.
It is then that it hits you.
That ‘alright’ will never
Again apply.
That it is another continent
In your geography.
And that nothing you can do, say, think, feel
Will bring you to the past.
To the place where crossings are possible,
Because the blood has fed
That ocean,
Created its deeps
And you. You are stranded. Forever.
Being bad at leaving
You once asked me if I were good at leaving.
I lied, told you I
wasn't. That I had had
too little practice
and held my tongue.
Hoping it would not split,
that my nose would stay
as it was.
I have never understood
why you believed me
when I was so blatantly lying.
I have been practising leaving all my life.
Have imagined countless endings
for all sorts of lives
and packed up more rooms
and relationships,
than you have ever considered
believing me privy to.
I remember, vividly,
the nights of laying awake in rooms,
half packed and half pretending.
I would lie once more
and tell myself I do not know why
I misled you so.
But I cannot bring myself to.
I did not tell you the truth
because I was scared.
Scared that you would believe I
was planning another escape.
That I found this life as airless as
the one I led aged nineteen.
And that would never do.
For this life, as of yet,
I do not want to leave.
I am practising being bad at leaving.
Beds that smell of boy
I seem destined, to spend
my hours in this place
in beds that smell of boy.
In cold colleges, with
noisy corridors and
narrow beds.
To claim clothing as mine
and wear it the next day.
As a form of bolster
against the floods of
images that this place gives me.
I expect to see certain faces
when I turn onto streets,
to hear familiar words
and turns of phrases.
This place has layers
and layers of history.
Is the midland equivalent
of my northern cities,
but for me, the layers
are of boys.
Of exploits and hours
spent hiding;
in bookshops and cafes.
Hiding from conversations
and from unwanted touches.
And so I will burrow into
these sheets, with their
comforting smell.
For they at least, belong to
one boy whose name
does not cause me to flinch.
As I Lay Me Down
As a child I found it hard to understand
that when I smiled at your reflection
you do not see me.
That that image of you does not have
the ability to recognise the quirk of my mouth
and crinkle of my eyes.
It is the same desire, I think, that
leads me to sitting at your grave,
every sunday, and relating all
my inconsequential news.
I find it hard to understand,
to believe,
that you do not hear me, that
you are not wet because of my tears
and that you will not
respond to my self involved
burblings, with that familiar
rise of an eyebrow, or slight smile.
I find it hard to resist the desire
to rest my head, on the shoulder
of the man sat next to me on the bus.
To let my head fall against his comforting presence,
and feel his arm wrap around my shoulders.
I do not know his, have never met him,
but he seems grandfatherly.
As if he would know the right words
and would be content to let me cry
on his blue fleece
with never a murmur.
We could become a snapshot of familial comfort
and I would be able to rest my weary head
and aching back on something
that has withstood more years or this torment
than I can endure living.
Instead I crane my neck the opposite way
and watch the pavements and
the people hurrying home.
I wonder, idly, where my socks
have disappeared to
and where all these people are going.
I am getting used to providing my own comfort,
and to my lack of relations.
And I Find Myself
And I find myself
bereft. Standing
gazing
from that window.
My eyes, ostensibly
fixed upon the
landscape.
But, truly, I
see nothing.
Nothing but your face.
Your face, not
as I knew it;
alive.
But. Phantom like.
Hollowed.
Your face, dead,
haunts my dreams.
My days.
My existence.
I cannot return
from this exile
you have imposed upon me.
I, have drifted
away.
Away from my
life. From its days.
Have half-joined
you, am trapped.
Gazing from the window
upon Elysium Fields.
Face PaintingSuddenly, in my house, this makeup
seems ridiculous. As if I am pretending.
Practicing to be someone I am not.
These carefully applied lines of black
and blue and purple sweeps
over my eyelids, look like
stage makeup. As if I have swept
pancaked foundation over my face and
am sliding into a character.
It mixes strangely with the ever-hovering
smell of porridge and lemsip.
With the pajamas I replaced my trousers with
and without my hat and coat,
memories of foreign cities and birthdays.
I feel like a child, playing with her mother's
eyeshadow and lipstick. Coming out
of the room looking like a clown,
and seeing her mother's entertained smile.
This makeup is incongruous with this student
house and its mess. With the piles of washing up
that need doing, and the scrawled notes on surfaces
reminding us of bin day and essays that need to be written.
I no longer feel nineteen, or nearly twenty.
I am reduced, by this face-paint, to a six
year old once more. A six year old who is
unsure as to who she is, and of what she
will become in the world. These lines will not
help me in this setting. When I am out there
they seem to be armour, but I should have swept
them off, just as knights would leave their sword in
the umbrella stand, were they to find themselves
in our front hall these days.
Confusion with timeThere are notices up, informing us the hapless tourists
that "The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
are closed for the foreseeable future, and will thus
not be happening this year."
I am wondering, as I gaze upon
yet another picture of La Virgen,
if this is merely a sign to keep us away
from vital repairs, of it
the curators are attempting to prevent us
relying upon history as a circle.
Trying to make us appreciate our time here
and make us proactive.
Neither La Virgen nor Philomel has any answers,
and it seems that wandering towards
the Venus de Milo, that
despite her faraway gaze and knowing stance,
that she is as lost as us.
And I am reminded, as I long to trace
my fingers over medieval weaponry,
of a sign I once saw in a cafe,
not in Paris, but Limoges,
that declared "We will see you in 300 years
on Saturday morning."
At the time I was unsure as to whether
it was a curious mis-translation,
and spent three coffees and four cigarettes
pondering what it could conceivably be.
Or if it was another reminder,
part of a clique,
that time obeys few known rules
and will play all sorts of games on us
if we let it.
dear dude who is stood outside my window,
hey. how are you today? good. i'm glad. now go away. yes, that's it. start moving. those legs were made for it. walk a little bit further. and a bit more. that's it. great. now stay there, or alternatively move even further. now you can start talking into your mobile again. oh wait, you aren't even doing that, you are talking into a little receiver thing and listening to the air traffic control thing in your ear. jeez. it's not like you're doing anything requiring hands, you're stood on the grass. this is a university campus not the home of a corporation. look around you. what do you see? that's it. students. most of whom are dressed as if we can't afford clothes. the other few are dressed as if they are interning somewhere. you are annoying me about as much as all the emails i get about interning somewhere.
yours, the slightly scared and angered girl eating a cookie.
Those ghosts we live with
When you died
and your ghost came back
to inhabit not only our memories;
but our living rooms and lives,
the one comforting thing
we found to say to you
when you were feeling so desperate
was; that at least
you would never have to buy another umbrella.
You laughed, albeit bitterly
and turned the t.v. on.
One more mystery of metaphysics
we proposed.
Was the decision of the fates
to make that possible,
when a mug of tea was beyond your grasp.
As strange and illogical as your presence.
But you were here.
cluttering up the spare room.
More vivid dead than alive
being a ghost gave you a vitality;
a mobility of face and of emotion
that you had lacked in life.
You became a reader,
Milton, Dante, Homer and Hornby.
This amidst the detritus of daytime television,
which gave you Carol Vorderman and Lorraine Kelly.
But what we said was true.
I walked down Camden High Street
hand in hand in the rain with you.
I became drenched, whilst you were bone dry.
And then I watched
the rain dissolve your fragile flesh.
Leaving your skeleton to crumble
in the rainbow.
The only reminder we were left with
was a note to tape some show
that clashed with Countdown.
And the memory of your grinning
like the Cheshire Cat you’d read of;
as your feet crumbled first
and you finally left us.
If My Father...
If my father was to die
cut my hair, frame my face
in all its haunted sorrow.
Let my red eyes, black rimmed,
be made round and haunting.
Throw my hair into the grave.
Let it decay.
Let myself be always part of my father,
as he is me.
Let ourselves meet the boatman
at the same time.
I will place coins on his eyes
and wish him bon voyage
Let him sail away from me,
as I collapse
rent my clothing, smear mud on myself
and paint my menstrual blood on
as eye-shadow. War paint.
if my father were to die
do all these things.
For I would be unable to cut
that dead, dying, rotten, rotting
part of me out.
For Nana
It was when you died that you returned
to the country of your birth
and of your mindset.
It was not, however, that you returned
corporeally.
But in spirit, in our minds,
we took you with us, in every thought.
You were there, as we
strode down the streets of Dublin
and stood in Temple Bar
holding back tears.
If they were for you, or because of
the disgust you would have felt
at this area, we knew not.
You were even there as I
watched the tee-vee you would most definitely
have disapproved of, in a small country hotel.
Because like you, we will never shed this country, as we shed hair and skin
and life.
These reminders of our being.
It, like you, is deeply ingrained in our hearts
in our souls, even in the accents we pick up and
Drop.
You are there in the religion we aspire
to ridding ourselves of.
Perhaps, in fact, it was us that returned
to that, old semi-discarded country.
You kept its values, religion, attitudes
and ways. Or at least, those of how it was.
for the world has changed radically since you were 21,
and you are still in the funeral home.
In a stoppered bottle. Caught between
the warring factions you bred.
Whereas we, we are returning
to this new country. This new
Glorious Ireland.
Unable, it seems,
to shed, completely or
finally;
what you invested in us.
About Disaster
I wanted to write about disaster
and selflessness, and the desire
to do good.
But instead I find myself
writing about how
my lover likes to eat over ripe pears
at midnight.
How she slices them with
her grandmother’s knife,
drawing the blade,
slick with juice,
across and in, and then to her skin.
How she delicately places
the slivers in her mouth
and eats with a secret
almost guilty pleasure.
It is not that my lover
makes me forget the disasters
we surround, and clothe, ourselves with.
It is just that she gives
herself so completely to
those fruits, that I find myself
dragged under,
and consumed also.
A Letter to John Donne
John Donne, where are you now?
Do you live on through your poems?
Are you your personae?
Would you consent to join with
Marlowe, Shakespeare, and who ever
Else we can rustle up,
For a game of five-a-side football?
There will be no social advancement
As a result of the score.
But neither will there be social regression.
I will however provide orange slices.
And perhaps you will feel that
Fierce thrill that comes from
A good game played well, from
That moment when the ball arcs
Through the air and lands in the goal.
I posted a comment in Carol's blog on an entry about how she feels being a working mother. And it got me thinking about my mother and how I might not pay quite enough attention to her, or be sympathetic enough to all she goes through.
In fact I've been thinking about this lately anyway because she started having heart flutters, or what she thought was heart flutters - it turned out to be some kind of stomach thing, I'm not sure on the details - and suddenly I was faced with the prospect of her not living til I was fifty something and her not driving me up the wall all that time. And that scared me so so much because much as she annoys me, and she does, I love her to pieces and I don't want her to not be around any time soon. I've always kind of assumed my dad would die when I was still quite young; there's no reason for me to think this, he isn't in particularly bad health or anything, I've just always been convinced of it. I have thought about what would happen if my mother died when I was young, but I never came up with anything more constructive than collapse. I know what I would do if my dad died, at least in the short term. But for a long long time it was just my mother and I, and even when she remarried it still felt like it was her and me. And then there was a horrible divorce so it was just the two of us. And now she's back with her ex, but I still feel somewhat like we are the old team even though I've moved out of home mostly. I just cannot imagine my life without my mother. I'm travelling home two days before my first ever university exam so I can be there for her birthday.
My mother was a stay at home mother for my first three years of existence. She doesn't regret it, she had kids late anyway. She was 34 when I was born, and whilst her career wasn't over she was in a safe enough position she felt to stop working for a while. There is never a shortage of trained mental health nurses and sisters, so getting a job post time off wasn't going to be difficult. In fact in the end she went for something slightly different, and never regretted that either. I didn't mind being left at home on my own, yes I was a latchkey kid at a time when that was slightly strange still. But I was an only child as well and that is still slightly strange, I never thought it was though and it was only when I got to school that I realised there really weren't that many other only children in my class. There still aren't. Barely anyone I live with at uni is an only child and only a few months ago The Guardian ran a big article and a few followups about how having one child was only just really taking off.
I never doubted that my mother loved me. At all. And I know how infuriated and stressed and depressed and restricted she would have felt had she not gone out to work and done things in the evenings, and generally had a life beyond me. And that wouldn't have been good for either of us, because kids pick up on their carers attitudes towards their lives. I'm a lot more independent than a lot of the people I know. I can do laundry and cook and I like to be alone in the house. I know how money works, I can plan my time and I can tell when people are stressed. I love my mother a lot and I know that the time I did have with her was quality time. We listened to the radio together, she walked me to school until I asserted my independence and told her I was too old for that anymore. We played in the garden, we went for walks, we fed the ducks, we cooked, we baked. We had a lot of fun.
So yea. I don't have any regrets about being the only child whose mother worked full time. I'm happy she did. Because she was happy. Now she hates her job and wants to retire, and I am glad I'm away at uni. Because if I was still doing a-levels and she was at home all the time I would go crazy. It was hard enough when she started being able to work from home. But she's ready to retire and ready to do something new. I doubt she will spend all day at home; maybe she will finally travel, or she'll do some of the uni courses she has wanted to do for ages, or maybe she will move to spain or france like she has been threatening to for a while. Whatever. As long as she's happy I don't mind, because I know she's still there for me. Like she always was. Even when she worked full time if I needed her she would drop everything and come and get me. I always knew she loved me.
I'm grateful to her as well, not just for me being able to do all the practical things, but because I didn't have to discover at a certain age that women were 'allowed' to work outside the home. I always knew it. I always knew women were equal. My mother was an empowering force. We may disagree on a lot of political issues but she taught me that women were strong and powerful and worthy of respect and success. That children don't have to mean falling behind on a career, that you can have everything and cope.
Thank you mum. And I'm sorry I don't tell you that enough.
Well I haven't been here in a while. I'm not even sure why. University is university and not that different from when I was stressed about essays last time. I still have an essay due, this time on "the relation of people to each other is the relation of each to time" which I can either write on both The Heat of the Day and Waiting for Godot, or just on The Heat of the Day. I guess I'll have to see how far into the 2000 words I get with just The Heat of the Day. Exams are looming, which is scary. But so is my mother's birthday, which warrants a trip home and dinner in a Japanese restaurant which can never be bad. Then after exams it's a trip to london to see an old friend. And that is definitely superb. I'm big on London. It's a nice city, especially in the spring-early summer time period when the buildings glow in the soft light and there aren't as many tourists as the middle of summer brings. You can wander by the Thames and find space to look at the paintings in the Tate Modern. And there is enough room in the shops to do some shopping. So yes, that will be fantastic. And a nice treat post examinations.
i would have said that the uni residences i can see from my room have no chance of ever looking beautiful. but i was apparently wrong. looking out just now i can see the sun setting gently on them, and the glow that has appeared on the red brick is so beautiful. far more beautiful in fact than the 600 words or so i have of my essay. i'm giving myself til half four and then i'm going to the gym.
i'm no longer a freaker out-er
i have decided that i need to stop freaking out.
i'm just so good at it. but oh the crying and oh the being really bored with it all.
i don't care that i just realised how much freakin work i have to do, just how terrible my hair looks, just how long it is since i went to the gym, that i feel like i don't know anyone here, that i can't decide on a feeling for going home.
no, none of this matters.
because i am stopping freaking out.
