longly hiding
popback
~hello wulfstan, my friend
OH?
your writing went.where?
ooOO…… mine too
poor mr.charlie
sillybilly
i am lotslaughing
and glad for the lesson
to lessen your obsession
stopsulking
pickup your bow and play
see
i knew you look-peered
like you do,
hoping to catch me out so you can
scratch.me.out and shoutabout~doubt
so fullawords and yet not even 1
will do
foryou
here are some ways i love you : shhh
do you hear scurrying? worryflurries?
[never to mind, where were we?]
ah yes.
there are no easbys in the chambers biographical dictionary and the dog is going mad
eating its own leg
because it misses you so fucking much
so i shout at it and feelbetter
and it smells~ ; so
i know all the time
that it misses you
i am sorry that there was not enough petrol in THECAR
strangely, a red admiral
skimmed the slick-slope
squelch-grass pitches;
sideways and papery.
No, I’m not coping. I am not coping at all. I drink too much, I sleep too little, I bury myself in teaching, offering to do extra work, putting myself out to help make life easier for others. I skip lunch break to differentiate work. I can’t sit in the staff room and not shout out, not cry and tear at my hair and bite the flesh on the insides of my wrists. I want to be held up, to be asked what can be done for me, to be handed a tissue and held, just held.
I told someone today “I’m a single mother of three boys, their hearts are broken and It’s my fault”
“You’re doing brilliantly now though,” She said “How many years have you lived apart?”
I’m fed up of coping. I wanted to pull her hair, to scream, to roll on the floor and never ever ever get up ~ less than two weeks, ten days really. I say nothing.
I checked my bank balance today. I didn’t buy rice. I didn’t buy apples. I didn’t buy butter. I went home, chatting to my boys about the height of the river, and the flocking starlings and who gets the money we spend in charity shops. We waved to the fire-engine and I smiled and smiled and smiled.
I am roasting a chicken in the oven, slices of lemon pushed between the breast.flesh and the skin, piercings of rosemary sprigs. He is coming for dinner.
Daddy is coming for dinner, I tell them cheerfully, deceptive spangles glinting fraudently from my words. Do you know what they say, do you know? So many guesses as I tear out my eyes each night, leave them rolling about the floor like tipped solitaire, gathering fluff.
Oh, says one Oh dear, says another When is he going again, asks the last.
so for all my doubts, I know I am not alone. Even with this second.dwelling ache, the near~nausea of each breath, even with the genuine urge to break myself with things, just to see how it feels, even with all this, they, tiny toed, feel it too and I am growing slowly. I am Harry Potter, when he got the bones removed from his arm and had to regrow them. It hurts, but it has to hurt to grow. I am cooking roast chicken, I still make brilliant roast potatoes, I am smiling, falsely, but still not destroyed.
Even just ten days ago, i truly believed I would die from a broken heart. Yeah, my heart is broken, but my determination is only slightly cracked and my spirit is as tough as old boots. I will speak my mind. I will speak out for what I feel is right, and if I have no money I can smile and remember that the frost didn’t touch the carrots still hiding in the soil. Carrot soup is lovely. I have flour and yeast and a little fat. I have warm water. Freshly baked bread and carrot soup. A bowl of summer, and it’s free.
I am scared.
He will be here in an hour and I am shaking.
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
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.
[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
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.
