The wallpaper in your grandmother’s front room
is appalling. Old bible yellow pages,
bevy of bubbles joining,
thickening like arteries beneath the surface.

And what is that? The daily brain teaser,
printed patio of letters.
Five down - ‘state of being alone’.
I think I know it. I am sure of it.
Pack of hard-boiled molar-breakers covers the rest.

I do not know why
you have brought me here.
We stand like soundless instruments.
Wrenched from bed so had to dress,
brush my lips ******, rake my hair.
Presentable? Presentable.

Your gran, almost ninety, concrete
cracks lightning strike on the cheeks,
specific smell that comes
with the accumulation of decades.
She does not know me, will forget me.

Syllables will stagger out
from the mouth, words, whole sentences
watery or gone. Instant evaporation.
A shuffle. And another shuffle.
A loudening shuffle.

Enter. Oh, how sorry I feel!
Hands quiver as frightened leaves,
cup quickstepping on the saucer.
You dash over, take control,
steady the shake of brick-ish tea.

My name comes, tinged with a lisp.
Your grandmother looks at me
with her eyes, jelly-rolled marbles,
a smile creaking across her face.
You know it. I know it. She knows it.
A woman caught in the icy fist of winter.

She sits. Sighs. I know the feeling.
I bend down, say slowly,
enunciate clearly.
Solitude.
Five down, my dear? Yes, correct.

and they are ready to pull,
   a crew of pinkish wands
sprouting from the ground,

clouds of green
   flecked with mulberry veins,
the soil quite soggy

from last night’s rain,
   grass tickled silver,
pewter-rippled sky.

I grab the first,
   press down, listen
to the burst of a crackle

like the spine of a book,
   tug it out
as if a tooth.

When I carry them
   to the kitchen I think
of the crumble to come,

the smell, the spoon
   diving in, exhuming a pool
of amethysts beneath.

you get thirty likes for one line

-----

love is banana pancakes and pyjamas

keep quiet in the graveyard, I say, for they can all hear us

falling is only falling if your head goes before the heart

breath is the unwrapping of a memory

your eyes are the rainbow kind of blue

I'd say I hate myself again but hate is a strong word

shakespeare, yeats, keats, plath and eliot laugh over breakfast

the clock cannot talk but tells me everything

sleep is the wicked playground of echoes and black eyes

do I like this what me you like me this

that’s what you said,
matter-of-factly
in the bar on the corner

where we’d drink
our Friday evenings away,
uncover our bodies

like the first time all over again
until the early hours,
a fingernail of light on the bed.

My bed, first. Then ours. Now mine
again. The space where you’d sleep,
spine facing me, dreamcatcher

on your back you got before we met.
I dreamed of you. I knew little else,
your words melding with mine

to form a succulent, secret language.
I took a sip of my drink,
spoke with care -

you want. to see. other people.
Not a question, a stagger,
the disintegration of something.

We parted with a pinch of tears.
That first night I became hollow,
head foggy with the feel of your skin,

your breath on my neck.
Now I think of your body
with another body,

doing the same things
you did to me.
I write your name

on the bathroom mirror
with a raisin-like finger.
It exists, like you did,

then runs, as if
your name is too harmful
to linger anymore.

You don’t choose to go into bookshops anymore,
you don’t read much,
you hear about calories and five-a-day but you don’t stick to it,
you say you’ll exercise but you never seem to do any,
you notice a blossoming paunch but choose to keep it,
you lose friends and rarely gain any,
you don’t make much of an effort and rarely care,
you don’t sleep as much as you should,
you don’t like the job you’re in,
you don’t know what job you should be doing,
you only work for the money,
you don’t have enough money,
you buy things you don’t need,
you don’t talk to your parents enough,
you don’t talk enough,
you spend too much time on your phone,
you care more about technology than your friends,
you don’t look where you’re walking,
you moan about the youth of today,
you aren’t as mature as you could be,
you still live at home in your thirties,
you see your friends getting married and having kids,
you watch too much *******,
you haven’t travelled as much as you’d like,
you are quick to body-shame,
you don’t understand what LGBTQ+ means,
you can’t tell the difference between Conservative and Labour,
you wear the same clothes day in day out,
you are not the best driver,
you have social media pages but aren’t sociable,
you sigh when girls you like get into relationships,
you know you never stood much of a chance,
you have too many fillings,
you don’t celebrate birthdays much,
you are getting lazier all the time,
you haven’t had a long conversation in ages,
you hate your neighbours,
you don’t know your neighbours,
you get angry playing video games,
you order takeaway food rather than cook,
you say this is my year when you know it won’t be,
you haven’t told anybody this,
you haven’t even told yourself,
you are not sure you need to.

So I give you a memory
made of water.
Is it malleable? Will it freeze?
Perhaps it has already,
a block of opaque white.

There’s a language caught in my throat
that isn’t common.
I think it suits you better,
phrases that rise like helium-filled balloons.
You can roll them out

to anyone willing to listen.
I shall continue with the clogging
of my veins, my pulse another
could’ve-been, thick on my wrist.
Bathe in the sunlight

in a place that isn’t home
but you could learn to call home.
The roads I know curve
into the next, where I started
the end result.

Her mouth was really
the one real thing I’ve ever known.

I knew her mouth better
than the alphabet, days of the week.

Every word that spilled from her mouth,
a potent, sparkling-new alcohol.

Often I thought of how her mouth
moved against mine, our private dance.

One kiss and we’d be drunk,
a love frothing from her mouth and mine.

Years pass. The taste of her mouth washed away
by toothpaste, a thousand coffees.

The one real thing I ever knew,
her mouth, really.