Every tread was filled with dread,
marching through march alone,
desperate to get it over with,
unable to get you on the phone
always heading for a street called summer.

Crowds envelop,
a thicket of people,
arms like branches reaching out greedily,
like barren trees in winter.

A forest of faces,
I searched for yours.

I only feel now,
You will return.

I imagine you with elephants in the jungle,

The teacher told you to stop pretending to be an elephant,
the other kids thought you too loud, too enthusiastic,
unhindered perhaps you could’ve been one by now.

Everything’s taking from us, giving to us,
I can only breathe.

Shouts and screams,
bangs in dreams.
We shuddered in the bunk beds
of our sea themed bedroom
like tiny fish.
They didn’t even try to restrain
the noise
or pretend everything was fine.

We hid.

Do you remember when
they were each going to have
one?
Acamera flash of broken moment,
vision torn, my head screamed.

Every cell in revolt.

Hot tears steamed the windows
as we drove away without you.

Memories blur,
but the car
stopped.

As suddenly as it had started.

A return, to what?
She was always too cold and the house was too hot.

Angora on cashmere
our parents have never been in love,
and you make me feel so smug
I wear the smile of the cheshire cat,
an emblem declaring you my own.

I cried for them in a jazz bar in Dublin.
Told each other stories
new and old.
I feel older than them.
Decided you only get one chance at love,
you blow your chances away
like particles off a book
in the sunlight of spring.
So cold, that winter;
left the ***** six euros
under the hood of his sleeping bag
like Santa’s elves
or is that vanity?
But I kept on looking back
and soon I will forget
because we are always looking forwards.
Wonder how long he’ll carry that sack
of bones?
It’s all we had,
I won’t think of misery until it is my
turn.

Your huge hands,
a pool champion’s sausage fingers
carving roast dinners.

I rarely think of you now
but memory lingers.

It’s leaves return every year;
they rustle in the rain.

The walnut tree
with the swing.

You’d push me so high
rush of wind and air,
chunks of cherry bough
caught in my hair
and I thought I would never come down.
Your skin wrinkled in the sun
like an apricot.
And me and Elisha would run
and race electrical jeeps
in the garden fetching you walnuts.

I was afraid of your pond,
you said there was a shark in it,
dangerous like the
cancer in your body,
I was afraid of
the pig skin patch on your arm.

Considered too young for the funeral,
my memories look like the photos I look at afterwards.

Sublime sun, no socks and cigarettes,
concrete jars each step.
My finger strokes the trigger aimed at a perfect fullness,
targeted to smash smooth surfaces.

This shooting gallery also houses art.

Sparks of adrenaline fuel blood, hot lead flows through veins.

Like a toast has been raised by a crystal tapping,
the scene lies in focus.
Every melon visible,
I choose a victim.

“Every dog has it’s day”.

An ******* squeezing,

as splatters land upon tatters,
a cold slime slick of fresh pink flesh.

I lap it up.

Second on the list:
I’ve always wanted to hurl
a pumpkin from a third floor window,
watch the flecks of orange explode all over the grey concrete below,
a bulbous bursting of gourd upon ground.

An exuberant exhalation of at last:
I have got something done.

Limbs littered the earth, her negligee no longer lay in his soldier’s
world; he would do anything to smell her perfume
once more. What day was it? Ahhh…Monday,
the perfect first date, a moon-
lit walk on a beach. He felt like a train
about to crash and nobody was dancing.  

She felt alien alone in their home. Dancing
was impossible and she stared at the photo, a soldier’s
face, not his own. Limbo was a train
journey that never ended. Billboards advertising perfume
and the never ending sun, the never ending moon.
The name of the days changed but Monday

was no different from Tuesday or last Monday.
She wondered if disabled people thought dancing
ridiculous. He could return disabled…the moon
was full tonight, she wondered if he in his soldier’s
uniform would be admiring it remembering her perfume
and not side stepping dead bodies feeling like a train

wreck. How many poor driver’s of trains
were haunted by suicides, faces looming out, the Monday
blues? And some women will never afford perfume
and would never be taken out dancing,
it did not console her. She was one of thousands of soldier’s
wives all gazing wistfully at the unhelpful moon.

She dreams of werewolves howling at the moon,
of him passing through a dark forest on a train
coming back to her, having thrown his soldier’s
gun, stamped in the mud, rejected. But she was the gun, Monday
and no letter had come and her nerves were dancing,
she knocked over her most expensive bottle of perfume.





He was dead, she would never replace the perfume.
She would smash bottles sticking her tongue out at the moon
throwing herself around in life, dancing
like a boat in a storm, occasionally consider suicide by train
but she would never do it. Saturday, Sunday, Monday
all days trooped past like the heavy march of a soldier.

The word soldier stank of cheap perfume and
everything was mundane especially the moon.
People hurry her by like late trains, only a few whirl past dancing.

In tea shops your skin is like cinnamon
sprinkled over chai,
every separate part of you.

Your kisses are a leaving.

Rain pelts pedestrians,
the sky is falling.

At breakfast you crack an egg for a smile
and the yolky richness unfurls on the pink of your
rosebud tongue.

We pass old women hunched over,
their eyes are a starving.

******* bags rot,
we’ve always made waste.

In bed your eyes are a frozen lagoon
flecked with clouds of grey.

I wade you to the ocean.

You call me the bed bug, patient insect
as you hunt down pizza
and gather strepsils for my cold.

How far are we from the cave?

I roll in the duvet.