is this the moment i feared for three years December 29, 2007

as I wake to an empty house at twenty past six
and the fucking sun is shining as to mock the arms off my body
and i bang my knee so very hard on the corner and fall-half-crawl and the screaming sound is me, it is me, it is me still with some grasp on here and now and i get to the window somehow.

the car is still there
the car is still there
the car is still there

where are my children? 
Where have they gone, and now I have to clean up here too
because there is black mildew around his window and a man smell.

he has left a calm calm note, so thoughtful and grownup
                                 gone to the library, get yourself on the council list before I get back

but it is twenty two minutes past and
why has he gone to the library because
it is not open yet and

 Ro has such small feet and he has left his blue shoes here so he must be wearing his doodles, but they are too small and will hurt his feet.

and what
can I possibly do
about that
standing here naked in the kitchen
in the sunshine

guts and the stench of it December 28, 2007

strewn splatgushed all about the place
but mainly on the stairs
and in hidey places like the bottom drawer beside the cheese grater
and everywhere where air is.

this part aches, oh, and this part here, and all of these parts stacked, teetering topplebound
glob-throated
huuurghhhh  ut

I know a little about bees, i said, and passed him tea
but he wants more
He wants to know who i am giving my body to, as what else can there be?
and i say bees, bees, busy and dancing and no one else
but notyou,
see.
and he cries in the tea and the children run to comfort him and
where else can he go
but a little further into my cells,
bursting through membrane and chloroplast,
making leaf slurry from the perfect air hidden carefully in vacuoles so deep.

you’re a funny one, said my friend,
brushing a tear from my cheek, lifting me from the floor outside the fish and chip shop,
making me as light and hollow as tiny drum
come on, let’s get you home.  he carried me

half hours are carabina necessary, one last twist between me and the drop
but all this vomitting and shaking leads somewhere, at least.

she should have been polishing diamonds December 19, 2007

but rather she palm-cradles tiny pebbles

                                  [not the imagined :chink:
                                  but something altogether more]

her right hand feels the weight
her hollowbody feels the wait

     -somehow everything comes back to the exquisitely slow
      moontide, the ripening and rotting of other seeweeds
      so EXOTIC and unknown and all together not her.

some other bones hinging
from some other spinestack.

clatterbacked

pea.on.a.drum 
raT a Tat Tat

the sand blows in from the marshes, brackish and testing
                                 

                                 here the oystercatcher                               
                                 spoons through the silty shallows

                           

islander

slimed causeway

S O S lined neatly in stones

and a sea so flat and wide as to stil her blood

time and things like that, tapemeasures, scales and upturned palms, guessing weight by pulse and blink December 10, 2007

so he turned from the naked-page books, peach and bile green and english-book red and said ‘i hate you’ and I hugged him, and all the fists hitting went on and on joined by little feet and squirming like a fork-pierced slow-worm, writhy, bubbling brown guts slowly beside the photocopier.  So airless in here, in these bookstacks and wordpiles, dangerous numbers piled hap-hazardly jumbling us together with no windows flung open.  they miss all these gulls, spewling, mew-turning for it is so windy today.
It calmed, and I signed us out in the feint-ruled sheets, lies about ed-psyc, sackable lies, should-know-better lines of newspaper reports and stolen child. 
I hate him as much as he hates me, patience that reduces me to tears for my own sons, but pushing his feet to the clouds, brazenly in full view of school panes and head swivel chairs…He just screamed, screamed, screamed and clung on and worked his body to force forward through the air, another battle, another day.  Swinging makes me feel sick now.  and roundabouts for that matter, and the clouds weigh my head these days, for the little I can do but let him scream.