I am Heavy-lidded tonight,
Heavy-lidded
and inscrutable in my childhood.
My childhood that was spent hysterical in airing cupboards,
Where I wept unashamedly to the fixed God
And the stained glass, rose-hewn Angels of churches
That reeked of oak and holy water.
Where I sat in the trees, high on life and vanila-blue ice cream
And with knees skinned by the ****** pathways of woods
Or the safe gravels of playgrounds.
Where sunbursted mangoes dripped with musky-sanded chlorine
And the sun-hot metal gates clanged shut in the holiday winds.
Where rocks were thrown by fated children
And paper-cheap candy wrappers filled up plastic trash cans.
Where strange, money-minded housewives gaggled and giggled
With their ******-white teeth
And reflected my mother' s bipolar poverty
In the lenses of their plastic sunglasses.
Where my self-hemmed summer dresses were stained
With green and brown and red finger paint
As the days outside grew warmer
And the inside self grew older,
Colder.
Where I was punished for expression of the self
And confined to the sanatorium
Or the offices of Moloch's servants
On a sun-stippled day in May
Where my scrap-bruised hands
Were bandaged by the words of the Real World
And threatenings of expulsion.
Where I hid behind felted display boards
On a landing somewhere near Neverland,
And lay and listened to the friend-fuelled ramblings of lost boys
Who sat and smoked in dormitories
And hallucinated Peter Pan.
Where I wrote self-indulgent fuckery in toilets
And drew crude artistries on mirrors with lipstick
And contemplated
Amo
Amas
Amat
As I sat and stared at my own disassociated hands.
Where paper aeroplanes flew and were thrown
By hungover kids in threadbare jumpers
With chewed cuffs and prefect badges,
Where holy Evian was poured over my head
After a long last day under a white marquee,
Where I disassembled pencil sharpeners with iron-smelling razor blades
and violated erasers at an exam hall desk in a stormy June.
Where I contemplated death;
Sang hymns in the darkness of my bedroom,
Took a blade to my flesh
Like the soulless piece of meat
That I believed myself to be.
Where I fell in love;
Hurt myself
More than anyone else ever did.
Where I read,
Where I wrote tear stained elegies
To my idols under the earth
And prayed that I
Would last
Just one more day.
Poets have sucky childhoods.