The words tumble into my mind, power deep inside like the machinations of some ancient mixing device, rumbling soft flesh until their honesty hurts me. But my memory is poor and after a frantic pen scrabble for just one blank surface, they are often lost. Clever wisps headed nowhere, ingredients which promised to add to or explain why are but elusive words, exotic birds that will never land on a capricious dolt like me. There’s a fine line between pain and profundity and I always fall on the wrong side of the tracks.
We fight like siblings and build our defences. He knows just which strings to pull until they are wrapped so tight about me I cannot breathe for frustration. On winding country roads, the air filthy with animosity I slam the brakes and refuse to drive: petulant and wretched unless he stops his picking apart in those superior hazing tones which send me into wild furies and I bang on my ears like a child owowowowowow, I’m not listeningI’mnotlisteningI’mfuckingwellnotlistening.
In the thickness of our contention his very presence offends me. I close my left eye so he cannot even touch my periphery and turn on the radio which he turns off because I WILL LISTEN TO HIM and I turn it back on again and so it goes, ad infinitum: two furious characters who viewed impartially could indeed be sitcom fodder and with a ruptured alienated eye, the absurdity doesn’t escape me.
But, I have had enough. Weary and saddened, not only about the failure of this half a life time love, but at my own unwillingness to make it work, to grasp at straws, to start afresh. Inside I’m blackened and rent, tarnished and disconsolate. In my minds eye I can already picture the crime scene, a broken body and blood red walls, in short, it really is a mess.
Each evening night repeats itself
Each morning day the same,
A grinding path in ridge and furrow
Solidifying pain as actions
Reinforce like ink tattoos.
When everything that leans to you
Leads away, away from this -
I want to come undone.
And at the kitchen sink
In soaped familiarity
I stare through steamed windows,
Black rook night on my face.
A framed reflection with Medusa hair
While a frigid stare replies,
Until I cannot bear to look
Back on brazen wild and petrified.
I texted him while I was in the bath even though I knew he wouldn’t have his phone on him. I just wanted him to know I was thinking about him. I used predictive text. ”Hello, I’m in the bath, I hope the concept is good, I love you xxx” is what came out, and I left it with the ‘p’ . I imagined him at the concert, seated alone, perhaps in the middle of two strangers. I wondered as the hot water covered me and the iron bath held me swaddled, if his neighbours would take sly-shy-side-way glances and see his shiny hair and sharp nose and strong chin and dark whiskers. I wondered if in the thick-closeness of the hall they would look at his hands on his lap and admire their length and elegance. Those beautiful fingers that had stroked my cheeks and held my hair in a bunch, those fingers that had fallen hard against my skin and plundered deep inside me. The bath was hot and I let in cooler water as I scrubbed myself wearing the scratchy gloves I got for Christmas. I felt polished like a pebble thrown from the sea and I shaved my legs and under my arms. I thought about shaving softer places and heard him saying ”between your legs” like he does and wondered if he would like that too. I sunk further into the bath with just my head out, chin breaking the meniscus, arms poked out at the elbow, holding my book, reading while my thoughts skipped alongside the words. I fell a little bit in love with Arturo Bandini because I also think ”these moments will run into pages” as I voice over my life and watch with a birds eye view. Because I too have a disapproving tone with myself that stands apart and watches clumsiness and sneers at foolishness. I washed my face with a soap from Morrison’s called ‘age reguvenation’. I bought it because I felt old and the word rejuvenation made me think of swollen petals in water. But I wouldn’t have bought it if it were expensive because my disapproving voice tells me such things are gimmicks. I like the smell of it now, conversely it reminds me of my Grandma who was old before she died, it has a powdery rose smell and I saw her soft thin skin, worn and fine. I thought the chatter inside my head was sometimes annoying, but that right now, in the bath it was keeping me company and that as soon as I had finished my bath I would go into my bedroom and try and write down all the things I had been thinking about. I read some more and wondered what buttermilk tasted like and thought that it was a strange thing that in all my life I had never tasted it and that perhaps I should. That made me remember the tiny milk bottles from school and how on summer days the milk was warm and when I lifted off the tinfoil top there was a layer of cream stuck to its underside. I had seen other children lick these tops and it had made me feel a little revolted until one day I finally tried it and the thin layer of creaminess was lovely, the best bit. I got out of the bath and dried myself and thought about how I always dry myself in the same way. Dry face. Rub along arms. Over belly. Down one leg , right first, then left, rubbing up and down and all around, then throw the towel over my head and around my shoulders to shimmy dry down my back and bottom and then, at the end , between my legs. Always that way. And in my head I said, ”actions reinforce like ink tattoos.” After I had dried myself I thought I would put some lotion on so I opened another Christmas gift of pure white cream which smelt like hay. I breathed it in deeply, inhaling warm grass off my arms with my eyes closed. My skin still felt pink and hot from the bath and as my palms ran over my hips I turned and saw the shadow of my bottom, the curve of my back on the floor and it looked like a question mark. I thought of those carved Georgian optical toys, an innocuous stick of smooth undulating wood, but when they are held up to the light their shadow casts a ladies figure in silhouette. I thought that when I wrote that down I would have to look up the word silhouette because I always forget how to spell it and how the ‘h’ in it reminds me of gossamer and a whistled sigh. I put on some striped pajama bottoms and an old long cotton nightie and thick socks and underneath it my skin felt bare and soft. I wondered if pajama was an indian word and how it conjured up a rag doll and how certain words send me mind pictures but not of the thing they are supposed to be describing and wondered if this was madness ? I went down the stairs and into my bedroom and sat on the bed with my back to the wall and opened up my laptop and thought that even though it was metal and plastic it felt like a well worn book, battered and soft at the edges, and I typewrote the words, ”hello , this is me” .
She said buy me hard honey
so I can watch it melt in toast and butter ,
so I can sweeten my lips to kiss your own
and take away the bitterness.
Feed me qalaqand and watch me
drip a sweetness to dissolve any canker.
But the sticky-sweet kisses were just a mask ,
a honeyed trap to soothe his broken eyes.
She did not love him
and she never would ,
her tooth was sweet, that’s all.
.
Today I’m in the shop with a box of old games. An assortment of colourful 1950’s cardboard boxes full of close-up pictures of everyday things. The world seemed a kinder place then, seen through a black and white lens , littered with shuttlecocks and plastic watering cans. It makes me think of cabbages and sealing wax, words to whisper and wonder where they came from and laugh to myself when I realise they weren’t from Puff the Magic Dragon.
David came into the jangle, hounded and wet eyed. He paid me for a fortune telling game and we wondered what it would be like to live, dice-man style. We swapped snatches of woe . At least his mental ague sparks slicks of colour, a gauze of black edged tenderness in oils and tracing paper. Mine is more of a festering wound hidden in layers of deceit, wrapped in obligation and fastened with a smile.
But maybe it’s not so bad in here, through high windows the street twists against the narrow belt of pavement and girls in clogs really do clatter by with a metallic twang in their step, remnants from another New Years Morris dancing troupe . And in these last few days I have walked for miles. First on fields of snow, today on frosted fields softening in warm mist morning. Finger tips cold in fingerless gloves but with blood pumping fantastic as I wrote stories in my mind. One time I tried to record on my phone. Ideas-words-sentences-feelings-running-together, but the sound of my voice in the outside world horrified me. Undercover-unspoken is best, inside whispers. Imagining nib on paper, scratching Diamine black with a scent that transports. The stories never stick, by the time I’m home the ink has become invisible, the words have disappeared.
As we lay
embedded in darkness
the air was thick
with skin stick skin .
I breathed him in
with closed eyes
and pushed out words lazy
I told him how laying like this was a poem,
his mind a calm sea
and as he held me
tranquil in his arms
he whispered yours
is like a beautiful garden
and then he paused…
with a swing in it,
and I laughed.
In that second
there were flowers and passing clouds,
I felt as high as mountains
in air-thin lightness.
Because I’m forever up and down ?
His eyes smiled indeed
and I loved him
even more-than
I did the day before.
.
