On Not Being Adult

There is a crucial point of engagement

I haven’t perfected.

The characters flake-up.

I am typing ‘friends’

‘Memory’

This is my story

I sit in silence

 I have something to make

They have ascribed my sentence, ‘writer’

Downstairs a ‘mother’ in role,

In grievance,

Shakes

‘Daughter’  and looks

Into the fire.

In flames

We see the possibility of removal,

She exhumed to grandmother instead

Thinking of the adult hunched over typeface, larger

Than ten year old she tucked in the same  bed.

She does not read the words, only looks

At lines as if they present a path

The grandparents ease the phrase of self-absorbed

Over the television’s canning laugh.

For their idea of definition  

The possibility still in hands

Is for ‘work’ to making a living

And yet I adopted the typist’s stance.

The lowering of the gaze, prepared

That to the old I shall never make a life

Answer to the pine of my own wrists

When all they want is space to cry

You've made it

When I lose the art of pretending, faking

Curl my mouth

And feel it – ache.

We throw nouns around

Like we know where.

I suppose you’ve done it too

Bursting into tears still in the stairs

Of your family home

Now just a house on an avenue.

Parts returned, but nothing there.

And in the night you lie alone

Note the space your palm occupies

Open, on the pillow

Caching cold

The look you will never see

In your own eyes

The Preparations She Makes For Age

I push the knife below the skin

The almost intimate secret of

No mark at all

Just the smile of slit, right

Where I dig my nail and start to pull.

Disrobing becomes a part

Of what is expected

Over marble, a slab indecent

Flecked, as if with ash

And parts, tip the units, surrounding

Watching

-          I hold the onion in my hands.

The skin comes away with residue

Birthed too early, slimed

Tinged blue - the hurt,

The hurt not on my hands

But in my eyes

The complete coming away

Of a facade

How many weep in the family kitchen

Where the knives are displayed

Like invitations?

I guide the blade to the bulbs head

The extent of parenthood

Released on pressure, reflects in rings.

I move the knife, like a touch

With deliberate speed

The translucent ties, shimmer and break

And something adolescent

Over the vision

 Shakes

Falls as salt water.

Seasons

I have spent, small

Looking up to the idea of adult

Only for the acridity of expectation

To bruise the knuckles

Like a root.

The utensils to do dirty work

After all

Look beautiful

Hung like streamlined game

Ripening with shine in the sick suburban sun

The kitchen’s fruit

Each one has a name

And I

Have one  -

Which bites my mouth as I begin to eat

Handfuls of raw onion, crave

For the confirmatory burn of defiance,

The anticipation of the others face

Entering the kitchen, the clatter on tiles

Of her heels she wants to make her ‘woman’

And yet seeing the girl crouched by the side

The onions

Ringing her as ‘mother’

Making her undone. 

I Eat and Drink Replicas

I eat and drink replicas

The paper cup, on the plastic dispenser

-          Small soldier

Upturned palms in the running river

Seem almost alien.

My face

A combination of hair shaven

And skin drawn-in

Floats between them.

I rise to the window

Confessing a morning

A stir the milk power

Through decaff coffee.

I taste

Energy

Falsity

They flicker like television

Where I watch jealousy

Not sure if channelled or true,

To cement the cracks in my hands with

Cream assuming youth

And pretty looks from the tubed screen

The reconstitute food stuff

To bend a smile over

Though never enough.

A Dictionary for Delinquents

Every day I  break for the same things

In different combinations

Rearranging reference

On this same shelf.

The files

For aspiration, family, health

Are inspired before I am

I look at my signature work

Beneath  pen grit, paper layer

Postage stamp.

Commodity has taken

Combinations of syllables

‘Computer’ – falls from my tongue

Like heavy equipment.

I am not  a social ‘life’ but a ‘presence’

I sit in my  sentence

Or bedside a promotion

The eyes

The glass lends its lenses.

I have made myself ‘open’

Like the physical file

Metal rings in the centre

Clasps which snap twice.

She was testing her tongue – in the least crude way possible. Well, all ways of ‘testing’ seem somehow shameful, like the tongue is a small animal only ever intended to lap at a certain level, peaceably domesticated. The process was happening, heavy in her hands as she took a lipstick like a pen and pulled the expected signature round her mouth. It added a certain emphasis then to words like ‘hello’ and no.’

The tongue endures its fair share of cruelty, she thought – brought to the edge of admissions, like a sport, then bitten back. All these, metaphors of course, and she knew that, creasing her lips over her teeth in an acceptable smile. She brushed her hair with a hiss of old bristles slowly breaking down something natural, using the television as a kind of mirror. 

It was 7.23 am, as the ‘News’ announced on the screen – emblazoning the digital time with thick white digits in a red bx. There was something almost angry about it, like teeth bared over a mass of mouth. Yet she tried not to think, but to watch the ‘news’. It is one of those word ‘news’ – now an idiom tossed like a vinaigrette for the public appetite; there is an assumption of a slight refinement to it. A TV show that not everyone watches. But everyone seems to have a conception of what ‘new’ is - original, something different. This screen wasn’t. Someone had been shot, a politician was involved in a sex scandal, and the weather was mixed. She sipped her tea which tasted more of the tanning of the tea bag than the leaves themselves. She had managed, after all, to convince herself that this was the form in which she liked ‘tea’ – like a kind of absence.

Though perhaps she was lying to herself. Would she lie to herself? Her eyes regarded themselves in the mirrored surface of the screen like one insect confronting another. ‘Lie’ was another one of those words; though there perhaps is something a little sleazy to it – it never seems positive. With the word ‘lie’, a kind of horizontal limitation comes to mind, of body plastered, side-down to a surface. Even to be accused of ‘lying’ with another, is deemed like a form of limitation. A ‘lie’ itself is; like an envelope spat from the slat of the post-box, it had no direction, does not fit with intention.

Yes, she lied, her eyes brought horizontal – closed, open, wide. She messed with her stare for a few seconds. The television she noticed, in its top corner, announced it was ‘Live’. Strange. She thought to ‘live’ was what people were supposed to do, not television stations. The number of occasions at which she had been told to ‘live a little’, like when she sat at her desk and stared into the distances that only a computer face can constitute. Living was meant to be the awful, in-your-face amalgamation of harsh physicality and a kind of exertion people assumed to be ‘feeling’. yet behind a screen, it was permitted to be pale and two-dimensional, paper – looking at ‘live’ from layer behind layer. It was an old television, so a screen with a vast empty space behind its bulky screen-frame. They have become ‘better’ though, televisions, thinning, slimming, to conceal the space behind.

People don’t seem to like knowing that there is space in places. After all, the words don’t quite fit for a start. Perhaps that is what ‘work; is for. That named occupation which swum up as the digits shifted on the screen . They managed that activity known as ‘reminding’. Perhaps that was what her smile was like, a little digital box, flickering for arrangement in the face like it did as a child, the same phrase ‘look mummy it works’ – only now, slightly tamed, typed. She remembered bringing down the magnifying glass on the ant in the sun and shrieking ‘Look Mummy, it works, it works, it works.” Testing her tongue over the remains.

On Time

(Place your hands where you please)

It’s been set up

The custom-black couch, the embroidered

Gold watch

The long corridor with water tanks,

Barred windows.  The backstage

With public access, so not a full truth

Only half

I watch my reflection in the glass

I have already drank

I rinse my laugh

As the doctor says

‘You will mature over time,”

The body  hung, as by  wire or  vine

Like an exposed joint above the fire.

I nod for the  flames to swill my sides.

But

He says,

(making the note of fingers

On my face, tracing the lumps)

Raised mouth ignites like a match’s nub

-          You have time yet

I already watch my wrist in greedy snatches

As if looking for a pulse

I am out of it

As ‘they’ would say, the audience  in the wings

Of the provincial angel

Pulling the crown

Of triumph

Over the eyes as the child still sleeps.

Or keeps, time in the palm

Like an animal plucked from space

Like a wish, a metaphor

A habitat missed

Too ashamed, like surveying the catch

Consciously, of fish now hooked

Yet knowing that is losing time

And looking for the line, like something stitched

Yet rather than had, it is something told

In silence, on the last platform, alone

Its paradox of in and out is given, found

In the hands

Yet is never known.