Distractions

Remember when the boys discovered

that tearing off the pockets of cloth

from soft white shirts could briefly serve

to replace the further roaming needs

that stretched and tensed from knuckle to nail

before itching back to the wrist? Like thoughts

or feathers they'd fall and drift slipping

from palm to grit under tugs of laughter

and waving threads sadly reaching

back for the suddenly bare breast.

Stitched in the doorway I notice your white

and slender shirt its smooth cascade

exposed and empty serving as no

distraction leaving you; easy and open.

This Poem Is Not About Caving

There's no point in opening my eyes.

The water, ankle level down here,

laps into my boots making my feet swell.

The walls inch toward my skin,

stone encasing me entirely.

Breath bounces back

off the walls in front.

The slim space far outweighs

any effect of touching;

pressing with absence.

My eyes might

even be open,

I just can't tell.

Empty Pages

Soft and cracked your pages

sprawl with black significant

lines. Intertwining

brown stories of grease,

feathers-maps of clumsy

touches: the time you tried

to put me on your shoulders

even though I was getting

far too big to lift.

"You should play the piano"

you said "with delicate hands

like that."

Ladybirds

The scratching sound again.

It crawls into the walls

bringing in black ladybirds.

Forcing their hard shells

through the gaps, they brim

under the paper before

bursting out, into

the room. Just the sight of them,

little bubblewrap

collections in the corners,

makes me so embarrassed.

Finding them upside-down

on the windowsills, I know I am

the reason they are here.

I want to press their backs

to feel the wet insides;

I find them nestled in

the bristles of my toothbrush,

rooting out the legs

stuck between my teeth

I smear them on my lips

and taste a shame I've yet

to make. However hard I try

they will not stay away,

these black and staining ladybirds.

Lying Together

We started out the same. In equal rows,

straight and even lines, we sat. Men

on the left and women the right, shoes still on.

The dull background ache of bleach stained

the beds. Each of us divided, though

the curtains were open their isolating potential

severed us just as well. Except for the smell

the air feels more like a library in here, or even,

perhaps, a church - that nervous silence which

only the staff feel free to break; here

it's the nurses' feet, walking from bed to bed

that fleck the awkward tension with their busy,

punctual pacing. Yet even here, while I sit

alone to wait, I see your eyes have met.

By early afternoon you're sharing a bed.

It's chaste of course, in a room with twenty others

and hourly vitals checks, to fuck would be

more than impressive... or not, if you got away

with it. So instead you watch Sex And The City

and lie together on the single beige mattress.

"How novel you found each other there," I hear

your friends and family say, "that place of sickness

and death, it's ever so romantic". But as

the noise of your DVD fades to a silence

saying more than you ever could, my jealousy

fades with it, safe in the knowledge that you're

as isolated as I am, alone on my bed;

I've just given up your pretenses.

Aversion

I've spent the whole of my life so far

crossing the road and closing my eyes

just to avoid your rolling black-gummed

stare. With white-plastic fists and deliberate

breaths, I move to a point where I no longer

face your bent and twisted gape.

Strangely then, when I saw them lift

your flaccid corpse out of the road,

soft as a soaked loaf of bread,

I didn't feel the joy everyone

thought I would. As much as I fear

your unpredictability I'd be

nothing without your presence; your

empty passing reminds me of my own.

How To Succeed At Parties

As I shuffle through these tight, once white

corridors the air choked with yellowed smoke

and stale sweat flaking the paper from the

walls, arms reach up at me from the floor;

A hand or two grabs at my belt; clotted

red creams of their eyes rolling back,

craning to look up at me, but overshooting

the mark and ending instead in a dark bliss

in the backs of heads. I brush them aside and continue

on, heading in deeper; the hallways are thick

with people: a push of arms and hips, warm

mutters of stolen conversation, repeated

from one to another-pirated and parroted simply

for the sake of background noise. I should have drunk

tonight. The clammy press of social excess

is far too much without alcohol's gentle caress.

I decided not to drink, my own mistake;

I'd fulfilled that cliché too many days

running; but the salty air and toppled books

proved too much, my healthy gesture served

only to fracture; when we should have been fractured together,

coupled and whole, we were distant, apart, I even

felt a certain loathing for you as I sat

on the bed, my shoes still on, taking in

your awkward, elbowy recline and feeling vaguely

jealous of your tried and tested reckless abandon.

At home I conclude there's no such thing as sober

success at social events, always aim

to be a part of that writhing fallen furniture,

your upholstery pale and blotched, stained and torn,

but nonetheless at one, at peace: unified.

Repetition

(Lines on Derren Brown's Lottery Stunt)

The magician reveling in

his tricks made me think:

what if he's right,

life is nothing other

than iterated

functions, endlessly

repeated? I thought of

my mother's fear that

she will follow hers

through lonely dementia,

losing faces like

buttons from an old

sofa, before her

obsessions take her over,

shuffling cold, unrecognising

from room to room.

I can see a defense

in the straight lines

of her life, there

to stop the inevitable.

Maths aside, I know

the straight lines achieve

nothing in the end,

yet I see them tied

through my life

just as tightly.

Inevitability

Even now I feel the thick
press from his fingers and thumb;
with each nightly creak and bend
I see the figure climbing up
and over you, standing and using

you to gain his entry to you.

This must be how a father feels

at the side of the bed, tracing

a finger around faults and cracks;

wondering if he should have locked

her away, if he should have acted differently,

or if she's the one, really, to blame for this violation.

Inconsequential I know, all this
melodrama, but perhaps this birth
will act as warm catharsis. More
likely though, a stillborn, to be

framed and read and read again

before failing its purpose and achieving nothing.

Closed doors

In this division both sides look to
the other for blame, on the edge
it circles and swoops while you both
turn and loop, pacing and waiting for
the other's craving for normality to
outweigh your own. I'm sure though

that the blame rests squarely on the
door that you found yourselves
either side of. Strange how that white
rectangle drove a barrier of metaphor
and silence between you; an obelisk
that still stands even though the door
is long open and one of you is no
longer even in the room.

Roses

Standing in her garden as a boy
collecting blackberries in plastic
pots from overgrown and
interwoven thorns I turned and
saw a small pink rose, its petals
tightly wound yet breaking open
slightly to reveal a secret held
within. She turned and said that's
almost worth getting married for,
that flower, and I remember thinking
then that perhaps she wasn't happy,
in her garden there, married and old
with permed white hair and perhaps
she had wanted more, to be given
roses and to wear them in her hair,
to keep canaries and go out dancing
and not to bruise quite so easily. But
together we turned and went back to
the berries and the brambles and left
the rose and its secret silently sitting there.

Birthday Wishes

I'll never understand the sentiment-
June seems to me far crueller-a yellow
promise of summer that never comes.
It's not that I wish to seem ungrateful
I simply question this parade of gifts,
thoughtfully given, and ask what it is
we're celebrating? Each year I look down
at this fresh gut, with more blood on my
neck than before and wonder what I
did to warrant the attention? The coarse
hair is already breaking through my
skin again and the milk in the fridge
has started to turn, it made my cereal
taste of lemons-citrus is more my mother's
thing, not mine; even kettle chips can't
scratch the itch at the back of my throat.

This morning I showered with a fly and a
brown moth; the fat spider that sits in the
corner fell, weighed down by condensation,
into the bathtub and played dead at my feet
before drowning for real in the pool he'd created.
I guess I'll never understand the sentiment.

Grecian Fires

I saw you first in Crete; while the
mainland fires burned, dancing
out of control, you were standing
on the bar pulling up your black
silk dress, showing everyone your
lack of underwear. I saw deeper
into you then than you could have
intended, your vacuous hole exposed

for all to see. The islands were saved
from the flames by the sea; yet still,
in sex and bile, get burnt down regardless.

On Friendship

I often wonder if the reason I
stay with you is my own selfish
need to tidy, to stable those old
compulsions into straight lines.
I remember the time you came
over for tea and your deck shoes
couldn't hold the water anymore,
and you cried there at my kitchen

table. Was it sadness I felt at your
tears, or pleasure in those old
convulsions, knowing you had self
destructed your way back to me?

Christmas Visit

After two years away you
travelled 11,000 miles
to visit the capital of your
old home and to stay in mine,

new found. Your hair was
longer than I remembered it
and your girlfriend I'd yet
to meet, but you stayed for

a week while the streets of
London were slick with ice
under our feet. It rained of
course, the whole time you

were here, but we saw the
sights anyway, did 'the tourist
thing' in Westminster and
talked about the past over the

awkward silences. I tried to
show you the abbey, but you
had to pay, and the high gates
of parliament were chained shut

in cold symbolism. Behind the
iron fence a Christmas tree was
being erected, decorated in red
and gold. Later, when you caught

the train to Stansted, all I could
think about was that after two
years past all I could show you
glittered, behind tall black bars.

Showering

I don't sing in the shower.
It's not that I'm breaking
cliché like a good showerer
ought, it's more that I'm

too passive to do what I do
outside of the bathroom. While
others are singing, I am naked
in the steam arguing with my

friends and family, silently
shouting the things I can't say
when dry. Sometimes it gets
pretty heated, until I twist the
taps and the water stops running.

Relocation

The painting of you used to hang
in a shadow, the black as soft

as the brushstrokes on your
face. Despite this the colours

of the ball in your hands shone
through, echoing about the room;

your creased severity was undermined
by that sweet six-year smile.

The painting now hangs in my
parents' house, on new walls

of white; that impish smile peeking
in on a home you never knew.

Shelf Life

It's like that time we found
your dictaphone on the shelf.
Although you'd died several
months before, your voice sounded
in the kitchen then, it ran across
the walls leaving trails in the dust
before coming to rest on the table top.

A thin and crackling sound,
the analogue of your former self.
A fragment, an echo, ephemeral
and yet my mother was surrounded
then by memories stained with moss.
For now, living trails in your trust
before coming to rest, a headstone atop.

Winter Flowers

From warm colours and food
we set out, the air like feathers,
a break in the pleasant mood
we hiatus for mourning's tethers.

Cold grey landscapes slip past
the car window; silver painted
winter portraits sliding fast
the silence almost plaintive.

The soft clunk of car doors
lets stems of the wind grow
leaves against my pores,
my steps are soft and slow.

Crematoriums have their own
air, enclosed as snowglobes,
no shouts or voices thrown
in the stillness; silence probes.

Flowers, left with frozen care
hang in brackets, each petal
bowed from frost and despair
in vases of dented green metal.

On the grass lie a thousand
plaques, tears in a slack sail,
their touch chills my hand,
their letters fading to braille.

When we return for leftover cake
from this cold and silver place
the colours seem somehow fake.
There is no tear of mourning on any face.

Memory

The sun shines, warm and soft
and yet still I wake, empty
under the empty bed, with the wet
knowledge that you are dead.