I was shy, my crooked-teeth, glowing front didn't fool anybody.
I was the type of awkward that made people run.
You were a typewriter: an electric storm sewing letters together,
ornate, pretending your weaving was something
that could ever be taught.
You wrote about all my wrongs.
Asked me to meet your mother.
Told me my drinks were too sweet, you were surprised I had ever
been drunk I wrote something cliche,
like how no sugar could ever match up to your coffee stained tongue,
to me you were so sweet.
I never liked poetry that rhymed.
I wanted to be someone without talking to other people,
hoped everyone would read me like a trans-Atlantic love letter,
understand every back street tragedy,
I am still learning that nobody
could ever memorise me like a paragraph. I am a closed museum.
I am breathing.
Once, I was a bundle, placed on my mother's chest.
She told me when I was born I didn't even cry,
just looked at the world like I'd been here before,
already figured her out. Carefree breathing.
She said she'd never seen anything so small
but so alive.
Sometimes I wonder if I've grown down.
I cry too much.
When I was eight my mother told me it was because I have sensitive skin..
I think about why we don't remember birth,
there are more traumatic things that happen than becoming alive.
My mother carried me nine months,
I wish I knew her reaction when she realised she was having a baby alone,
when I was six weeks old she flew us 8981 miles from my birthplace of Perth
to her childhood, a suburban, three bedroom house.
She bought a return ticket. Eighteen years on she still carries that
yellowed british airways paper around with her in her purse.
They left her job open for years.
I stopped asking if she missed the heat.
I stopped asking about half of my heritage,
I say the most convincing thing when people ask now,
I don't think I mind.
I haven't cried for months.
I grew up where the city begun to fall in love with the countryside
there was nature pulling itself out of the concrete,
like ignoring love hurts could make it any more feasible.
There was a girl, she never used to knock on my unlocked fire door,
just walked straight in every time, like she was a wildfire,
made me feel triumphant inside,
I wonder even now if that is how plant shoots feel when they break through the earth
praying upwards to the sun,
like she isn't a pin-*****,
do you think the sun knows how relevant she is,
just like some of us can't grasp how irrelevant we all are?
Have you ever thought about how many things are in existence that we can't see?
The distances can only be measured in time,
time is just a concept. We are more than numbers.
But nothing was built for us.
I wonder
if when my mother held her recycled baby against her reusable chest
if she realised that
either of us could have ever come to this.