The café rumbles like the belly of a fasting saint,
voices competing with the clanks of silverware.
In the tearoom a boy with a tangle of wires
leaking from an unzipped backpack
struts between tables, billing himself as a "human hotspot".
He wears the same glasses you do;
they slip down his nose as he leans over to flirt with the waitress
in the red apron, who taps her nails against the cash register
and laughs at his bad jokes, she tells me, because
he wears his pants too high, just like her brother used to.

A man with a soup-stained button down and a bald spot
introduces himself as Peter Ling, proprietor,
oracle of the inner city rummage sale,
advisor to the lost and hungry.
He doles out pithy wisdom and lentils into mismatched bowls-
"You want therapy? Try your ex boyfriend."
The four of us hide our grins, and flee
to his cavernous basement. As we go spelunking
through the puddles left by a burst pipe,
clambering past bloated books and warped furniture,
Emma Miller swears that she slept here once-
on a moldy brown sofa crouched like a hibernating bear
among empty Heineken bottles.

The expedition yields four boxes of acupuncturist leaflets
and a damp antique suitcase filled with seeds,
who seized the opportunity to germinate,
their tiny roots searching fruitlessly
in the mildewed silk lining.
Ling says he's going to try gardening this year,
serve up spaghetti squash grown out back by the garage.

We sowed pea shoots and salad greens
in glass jars pilfered from a claw-footed armoire
that lay on its side, defeated, like the last of the saber-tooths.
I named one for you, tucked Eruca vesicaria sativa
into potting soil, and set it on the balcony railing-
tempting fate and gravity, because you always liked a little excitement
with your afternoon cup of rooibos.
I didn't see the girl who knocked you off your perch,
saw only the sun's sharp gleam off the glass
as the jar plunged, graceful as a slow-motion train wreck
on its arc toward the concrete,
and Peter Ling reached up with his big, calloused hand
to break your fall.

A fortnight ago an Algerian masseuse anointed each note of my joints,
spread thumbed cursive over my shoulders and
back around to my chest;
she spelt out how I'd be shivering now knowing you were leaving.
And last week you led me to an acupuncturist where he said,
Rob Frost had quit his job on point duty to become a receptionist instead.
I knew it was ******* by the way you barked in the background.
I knew it was wrong from the rumble through the stud wall,
sound of timpani, of gusto's drawl ringing in my ears:
the resonance of windfall if saved 'in the best ISA for years!'
This has been the best February since records began
and I thank you for being a friend.

He would have been an artist
but that being was now lost
hidden beneath the folds of fleshy strata
hanging like a neurosis, soft as adipose
lost under his belly.

He may have been a father
but that too was lost under
the pendulous judgement of
his blunted dreaming state.

He could have been a sculptor
an artist as they would have said,
instead he now whittles archaic
spoons with which to sup from
his sad bucolic dreams.

In between aspirations, as a hobby,
he runs his fat fingers through women's
hair, a round eyed
would be Taoist, wending prayers
through lost valleys.

And for a living he pins tails
on donkeys calls himself an eastern
practitioner. A Zen mystic .
An acupuncturist.

Un-belonging
Undressed from teenage rhythm.
It’s a yearning for
The lost birds

Whose wings you rode
In talkless flight,
Til the silence got thicker
And woke up

Under the acupuncturist’s shadow.
And it needled it’s point as
Chinese wisdom, or as a well-meaning homeopath.
It dawdled all the same.

And you’re all sat right there.
Submurged. Happy as reflections.
Like an underwater photograph,
Mermaid’s song, gargles

Like the frog in my throat.
Almost Bauhaus, Picasso,
Almost watercolour, a mockingbird’s
Impression of a rock.

It was just
Undiagnosed sickness and I’m
Wading slowly into the sea with
my parents stones in my pocket.

Today crawled like a spider on a web with
thin, pointed legs like needles
in my skin, administered by a bad acupuncturist.
I find myself continually
continuing on an unmarked road
with headphones on my ears buzzing to the noise
of soft tin and electrical Umph and Ah; messin
with the thin little hairs on my scratchy head.
Today, I see the world spinning, replacing that
familiar light blue above me, a panorama of all
that I don’t reach out for, that I tell myself has
been stripped out of arm’s reach.
I sit by the tall tree and mope again and again,
hoping someone will pass by. Maybe I wish
someone would join me in this lonely forest,
more than I wish
I could leave.
Today, I end a poem like my eyelids,
with forceful and unconditional determination
and I wonder how heavy they will be when I rise
the next morning, weighed down by the force
of pain that has emerged, anthropomorphized,
from the depths of my body, my mind, my soul.
Weakness scares me more than death, because
it consumes me like a chill running through my bones
and suddenly I lose that all powerful
separation between you
and me.
Today, that separation sits as a knife in my chest.
Today, is not much different than many days.