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.