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.