before the first time I would ever
see your pale and puzzled face,
call you by name or absorb your
surprise-laden, whirlpooling words.
Tita the Peruvian clairvoyant, her
mascara garnishing her scrunched-up eyes,
gripping crystals over tarot cards
like an extra-terrestrial gripping
a spaceship steering wheel, proclaimed:
“I see a girl who’s always on your mind.
You’re thinking and thinking and thinking about
this girl, but she’s not right for you.
She’s depressed and my god, she has problems!”
I was twenty-three, fresh out of university.
You were fifteen and about to begin
your second year of supervised,
pill-stuffed, couch-bound,
injected captivity.
You scratched your head until it bled,
you swallowed those pills without stopping to count them,
you poured out:
“Broken glass, broken girl.
Useless mask, useless world.
Fighting temptation, fighting knives.
Numbed sensations, numbed goodbyes.
Maybe rope, maybe trees.
Dying hope, dying me.”
I thought I’d never drink your words again
once you’d flushed them down the online plughole,
but there they are,
splashing across my computer,
intoxicating me.
You must have thought I understood.
You must have thought you’d pushed enough
cuckoo’s nest-shaped hints in my direction.
You must have thought I’d soaked up every single poem.
You must have thought I understood.
“You’d have to be prepared for me,
I am a bit strange.”
That was your warning sign.
“No problem, I see you’re a couple of pips
short of a satsuma.”
I only thought you were
eccentric.
If someone’s a “borderline fishing enthusiast”,
what does that mean? That they toss the odd hook.
It doesn’t mean they stink of haddock
morning, noon and night.
You hid below your bedsheets and illusions,
you hurtled from reality as if it were
a lion in hungry pursuit,
you pulled your sleeves down over freckly, scissored arms,
you poured out:
“To write what needs to be written
would be to face, to think,
maybe to run to my own brink,
yet to go with my flow,
let passing thoughts go,
may be more risky than to delve
and resign myself
to a mental age of twelve.”
I don’t remember that one. Jesus.
Twelve years later, you’re still twelve.
You’re thirty now, but still, you’re twelve.
Your parents are seventy. They’re still twelve.
Is everyone around you twelve,
or just tongueless? It’s like
‘Lord of the Flies’ in your bit of the universe.
Am I a paedophile, is that it?
No. If I’d known, I would never have kissed you.
I’d never have gazed in your crazy blue eyes
and sighed, “I love you, ginger kitten.”
But you were home and youth to me,
you were London and you were the working class,
you were Dorothy Parker, not Sylvia Plath,
and you were my rebellion partner,
the childhood sweetheart
I never had
in this world full of nothing,
schools and colleges of nothing,
universities of nothing,
bars and pubs and clubs of nothing,
offices, canteens of nothing,
studios and banks of nothing,
galleries and halls of nothing,
towns and cities full of nothing,
nations, cultures full of nothing,
brains and mouths and hearts of nothing.
You were something.
We were something.
We were the poets of
a gasping breed, the final Cockneys,
the remnants of working-class London,
the remnants of a shrivelled culture.
you elbowed me, blindfolded, into a swamp,
you lied and denied and you cast me aside,
you poured out:
“I don’t want to get better,
I’ll be fine as I am now.
Stop writing me letters,
stop spinning me around.
Why are you doing this?
I don’t need your eyes to see.
Why are you pushing this?
Stop it, stop hurting me.”
I don’t remember that one either.
Christ, If I had, I would never have
chased after that mirage called hope,
would never have sprayed half my youth down the drain
by battling your poetry-moated
castles of silence
with my broken little catapults of love.
What fun it must be to be sick.
What fun it must be to inhabit a planet
where nothing is ever your fault,
nothing’s ever your responsibility,
where problems are buried
a hundred kilometres under the ground,
not solved,
where no-one’s feelings count but yours,
where silence reigns supreme,
where you may not be criticised,
you cannot feel a drop of love
for yourself or for anyone else
and suicide’s your only hope,
where you’re twelve years old until you die
and the truth eats away at your brain
like battery acid.
That’s right, love. Don’t get better.
You’ll be fine as you are.
It was fourteen experience-buffeted months
after the last time I ever would see
your seething, puzzling face.
Tita the Peruvian clairvoyant, her
earrings swinging in the mystic air
below paintings of Jesus and Buddha, proclaimed:
“There was some kind of problem that you didn’t see,
something you missed.
Now there’s unfinished business between you,
a strange situation that hasn’t been sorted.
She’s gone, but she’s still there.”
