You've been staying rent-free
in my mind for a while now.
Shuffling through my brain
and moving things around,
like it's your right.
You were always like that, after all.
 
At first it was soothing, to
have you rattling about up there.
Thinking I was grounding myself.
Trying to understand you better.
Telling you what I couldn't down here –
the things people say to themselves. 
 
But, years later, I'm still here,
still dragging myself back – only,
struggling to place the face
that's just skulking about,
still taking.
up.
space.

After the rain, the heat breaks and dissipates,
and the air sits lightly on my skin.
There is space for us to breathe.

For some time, our nostrils wistfully recall the
pavement's sweltering heat as fat droplets
hurled themselves to destruction.

Show me the workings of a
world rapt in-news
in-fear
in-side.
What are its mechanics?

What are the mechanics:
a single, sterile globe.
All closing doors,
all shouting to be heard -
engulfed in digital vacuum.

Show me the workings.
Give me something I can touch, something I can taste,
something I can grip
between my teeth and bite down.
Hard. Just to check.

To check the mechanics of navigating the blueprint
of a blueprint
of a home with a sky frozen in a window pane.
The mechanics of a curtain closing.
– there was, in the end, nothing to be done –

Show me the workings.
Lay them out in front of me,
tell me their weight.
Let me know the numbers add up.

Let me know the mechanics of how that scale crests and falls,
heaves and gasps
its decision. Its desperation
to deliver the bodies of evidence in
grams, digits, days, weeks.

I want to see the workings.

Show me the workings.

I think of you on warm summer evenings
when our slowly setting sun coats
dappled oaks in more shades than I can count,
and every leaf is framed in greengold.

I think of you as sleepy wind
lingers in my hair,
strands dancing on a moment,
before laying to rest by a collarbone peak.

I think of you when the warmth settles on my skin
so easily that I see myself
spill out into the dusky air,  
finally weightless.

I think of you.

When evening comes, warm light floods our living room and
bounces off all the quiet angles of your skin.
The rays drink deeply from your pores
as all the gold in the world fills our little home,
and we’re the richest people alive.

But the view's fine from here,
they say, all carbon copy cloying concern.

They don't know that the sun doesn't rise
and set quite so exquisitely
when your sky
is on fire.

But the view's from fine here,
they maintain, as unsaid words skulk in the throat.

They don't notice the skin that burns and crackles
and stretches at a breaking point
that's been broken
for years.

But the view's fine from here,
they confirm. And then turn away.

They don't see what shouldn't be seen,
what eyes can't afford to shut
even as glass splinters
edge closer.

And they are right, really,
because their view truly is fine from here.

#BlackLivesMatter i

I'm trying to get better at sitting with my self
(we’re in this 'til the end, after all).

I'm trying to listen and not judge,
to ask her (kindly) where those thoughts came from.
Whose judgments are being repeated.

It's not that it's a comfortable journey.
She hurls words in poisoned darts,
with wild eyes of blistering flame,
so sure of my faults that
I believe her more than I've believed anything
in our whole life.  

But I know what it's like to be in her body.
So lately I've asked her to sit next to me, quietly,
just for a moment,
just for a pause.

I think it's working.

She's taken to sitting beside me more often these days,
arms wrapped around hunched knees.
She speaks gentler here,
tells me I am scared we are not enough.
But she lets me place a hand on her shoulder,
and remind her: We always have been.

We breathe slowly as we soundlessly observe
the cosmic traffic of shooting neurons.
Of clusters of clusters of memories
and half-said things.

And I'm finding that, after all this time,
I am sitting well with myself.

And so, she chose to reveal her heart.
Tore her ribcage door open,
and flinched as she waited for
the rays to spill and burn her up.

Instead, she was stunned to find
that the sun warmed even the darkest corners.
That the dappled glow kissed every sinew,
and she was filled instead with the light.

And then there was evening.

The edge of our estate, a wire fence.  
We ducked under it, Cole's fat neck scraped,
he squealed.  
Older boys sniggered.  

Once buildings grew here,  
it now sprouted vegetation.  
We picked our way through.  
Here we built the world: a haven of ***** mattresses and wooden boards  
holding shaped rocks and bones found somewhere,  
that hint of death.  

Cain was bigger than the rest.  
He liked fire,  
pushed at the mattresses, unsettling dust.  
He picked up a stick and beat down the walls,  
eyes filled with that blaze.

Suddenly sticks flew,  
we thrashed with fury and rage and everything,
at our creation.
Soon our jigsaw walls were waste upon the ground.  
Then there was light.  
Cain's father, passed out, drunk,  
missed the silver lighter his son produced.  
Roaring flame which singed our nostril hairs,  
smelling bonfire for a week after.  

Cain's eyes saw everything.
We stood, in his image,
chests heaving, we looked at what was done.  

I was scolded when I returned home late with sooty skin,
and went to bed  
with tear tracks on red scrubbed cheeks.  

And there was morning.

Snow falls before Spring.  

Ice laughs amidst freezing air:

the sky’s confetti.



Or torn love letters,  

once smuggled under pillow.

Now bitter on tongue.

I love you.  



For the flowers on my bedside.

And the cat videos in my DMs.

A clear Sunday in early May, hitching on the back of your old bike, the sun blinking sluggishly through verdant, street-side trees.  

You locked up against some railings, pushed the door with a jangling bell. Our fingers found each other across the aisles.

The shop smelt of must and lost decades. Dusty sheets threw spectres over looted treasures from long-gone homes.

And the gems we found: two candlesticks winking from the corner at the couple – the final touch to make this thing whole.  

Ten months of us. Too soon to be playing house, playing adults. Bold and brassy, those brave turrets gleamed on our mantle with:

my wooden elephants,  
and your expensive speakers,  
and our broken radio,  
and my loathed incense,  
and your tacky books,  
and our pointless arguments,  
and my guilty frustration,  
and your resentful adoration,  
and our ******* mess.  

Eight months too long, staring at the bold brass and hating them, making them home in boxes labelled Yours and Mine and What a Waste.

[In which Aphrodite ponders monogamy, 21st century style]


She’d come far since that whole Botticelli scandal,

astride a shell, hair tumbled about her ******,  

sensuality and a taste for illicit thrill (a real wild myth)

but now the candid canvas only required a google by the Book Club’s prying judgment,

she’d since traded Olympus for a semi-detached.  


All his shirts were folded, perfectly pressed,

ham and chips congealing by the microwave  

and he should have been back before Hollyoaks.  

They met in their local, he bought her a pint and mused

over Milton of all people, his degree finally put to use,

justifying the ways of God to men.  

Impressed and tipsy his back was soon against the wall, no tricks needed.  


He kissed all over her divinity,  

admired the quote encircling her ankle, from a trip round Asia

to find herself, at age nine thousand and nineteen.  

As they made love a spell fell on her for once in a millennia

Married in months, too young, well he was,  

and her face had always been twenty-two.  

Then came the mortgage, the Labrador, the kids, the affairs.  


At the bottom of a wine glass she pondered on the irony

after all what was the point of an eternity weaving passion into the world  

with your husband’s ‘lunch meetings’ equating to rolls on Travelodge sheets?

Not her style at all, too tacky.  

She could work her charms, make everything rose-tinted,  

but the bitterness intoxicated.


On the sofa, her side, she dwelled again on Botticelli,  

spilling her beauty on a page,

passion and dexterity, a lost breed- this century was so unpromising.  

Aphrodite thought on her conquests- Ares, Poseidon, Adonis

gods between her thighs, making her mountains move,  

oceans boiling madly, bruised skies crackling with fire,  

tangled bedsheets,  

hair,

hands caressing skin and creating worlds, and…


…and on her mortal, a balding, a boring, a bland  

disappointment.


Off came the clothes, the wedding ring and the phone from its hook.  


Imagine the pizza boy’s confusion as the door opened to the sound of the heavens singing  

rays of ethereal light warming his pubescent, pock-scarred face.  

A naked, pearly goddess,

and those golden, flaxen locks snaking, seducing, ensnaring as he staggered into the rosy blur.


It was impossible, after all, to justify the ways of gods to men.  


But how clichéd.