Author: pillow talker

female poet writing about adulthood and the masks we wear

The week after

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The week after, I’ve been left with flaming wreckage. A plane engulfed by biting fire and yapping sparks has been laid at the foot of my bed like a weak old party balloon.

“Is this what courting is?” I find myself saying. Sounding strangely like a grandmother with clotted cream hair and purple eyelids.

Is it supposed to be buried beneath a flurry of sexualised messages, dirty whispers and cyber seduction? Is this how dating goes in the modern world?

These otherworldly, devilish letters and icons lead me through a maze where the end point looks to be a thick fluffy duvet and steady breathing, moaning. Crumbs lurking beneath writhing derrieres, squashed by midnight blues and swollen purples, beg for mercy.

Where’s the inane chat? The everyday tube dilemmas? The tepid English air making you croak out messages of discontent and strife?

The ‘whatcha been up tos’, the ‘how’s your day goings’ – those have frittered away in the sweat-saddled heat, morphing into ‘i want you nows’ and ‘talk dirty to mes’ and that’s where the courting feels alien. Messages sent from another planet from a little green man with an erect penis.

 

Duvet.

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You are gorgeous, vibrant and have the hair of a rockstar, the mouth of a warm, spring-saddled duvet and the eyes of a twinkly blow torch.

They cut through me, singe my skin and seep their warm fire into my body’s crevices unapologetically.

Set alight by you, oozing your thunder, I’m completely captured, spellbound, clad in chaotic lust.

Your duvet lips envelop me, like Peter Pan and Wendy, they send me soaring through heart-addled skies and my brain fizzes and rages against the air and that bulbous London Eye gently rocking on the horizon.

It takes a great deal out of me

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I had lengthy midnight cyber kisses with a boy who looks like Jim Morrison.

The conversation grew on feeble, fecund words about sports and television. We reeled off quotes like a game of table tennis and peculiar deep self talk.

You asked me to describe myself as if I were in an interview. And after my thumbs clicked and words harpooned themselves onto my message bar (the word “typing” forever appearing) I knew I’d become stuck in the treacle-like web that is lusting after somebody I’d never met before.

It’s a sticky mess of pink and grey – a stark contrast between what you think you know and what you actually do.

He’s the Jim to my Pam. He’s the waffle I want to wake up to. The whipped cream I want to guzzle. The song I’d like to keep on repeat.

Or is he?

Maybe he’s vacuous and selfish. Artistically-driven but pretentiously-inclined. Beneath his beard are lies and beneath his eyelids are sadness and maybe he’s not what I think he is.

Still, those midnight cyber kisses prevailed. I felt my eyes become doused in fiery fatigue, begging to close, but unwilling to do so while the conversation flowed like melted chocolate.

He said I was attractive and that’s when I fell to my knees. Too busy relishing in the idea that somebody liked me, too caught up in this fleeting feeling of self-worth that I found it hard once the medicine had worn off… to be pleased with myself.

Because if I can act like that – like a slippery, giggly schoolgirl whose self-esteem bar has only just begun to lift off the ground, then I’m further back than I thought. Further down the gym rope than I’d anticipated. Further back on my journey of tube stops to Self Confidence Street or Extoverted Alley.

Eventually we said farewell. I left my phone off airplane mode, longing to hear that chipper buzz in the small hours… a sign you were thinking of me.

And then I wrestle with my duvet and push my face into my pillow and scream.

Because I don’t even know you, Jim.

 

 

The middle of the carriage

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And I’ll stand in the middle of the carriage

Entwined around a bar

Legs wedged around rucksack

Head resting on the pole

And instead of feeling exposed

In a sea of people – the only one standing

I toughed it out and remained there lurking

Could have hop-footed to the end

And hidden by that menacing window

That blows your hair to and fro

And is too stiff to raise

(I know, I’ve tried)

Instead I stayed stuck firmly in the middle

Of this leaky, foul-breathed carriage

Where coffee slurps and morning angst

Flood through like creaking sludge

The middle is where I was

Until a seat popped up

Like those rarest of Pokemon

And I snatched it and sat

Content with my mini achievement for the day.

Hangovers

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We swigged

And I suffered through a glass of tepid, flat prosecco

(Complimentary so failure to chug was not an option)

Then the glass turned bottle-shaped

And bubbles pierced my lips and throat

And I’m pretty sure my teeth groaned after being sugar-slapped.

After three glasses each (or two?) the bottle was empty

Like an abandoned alcoholic barnyard

Snatched off our table by a server who brought us pizza too late

And our bill too soon.

I’m sitting there swigging fizz and swallowing bubbles

And then I’m quaffing double vodkas

Served in cups which are too small

The spirit explodes in my mouth like a bomb made of fiery gasoline

Meant for cars not people surely

But dancing helps, and I soon forget I’m sipping burning sludge

And it’s onto the next, and then a shot

(Because why not?)

The hangover is awful and obscene and my tongue feels like a bristly rug

That’s been soaked in alcohol and doused in fuel

My brain is fried and my lips are chapped

All this for a boogie?

I can’t tell if it’s worth it or not.

First

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And with the bright lights churning out their boozy glow,

The bar standing empty, only a glass and a half and a hasty once-over

With an old rag

Voices pecking at other voices, toasts to the untoastworthy

A darting look over at us from a man twice my age

The older couple nearby, tucking into ribs and etching a slippery sauce onto their teeth and chins

It made me hungry.

But my brain was already fizzing from the large white wine spritzer

Which I’d ordered to blend in and be normal.

Dizzying highs and frantic lows, desperately trying not to drop my dignity

But also come across as the most beautiful, most interesting girl you’d ever met

(Oh the pressures of being me)

Out on a Saturday night for once in a blue moon

And I barely looked around me, barely soaked up the atmosphere

Barely present, in the moment, there.

Commuter daze

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We’ve simply swapped newspapers for phones. Eye contact was never there. It never had (or has) a place on whirring locomotives filled with desperate commuters trying not to fall into a piping hot well of small talk and inane conversations. Shuffling feet, iPlayer booming, podcasts streaming, face blushing from the sticky air of the 9-to-5 grind. Days of meetings, handshakes, coffee runs and espresso-coloured panics await us all. There are newspapers flirting with the grimy floors but when the train shudders to a stop and an announcement informs of a fatality, phones become second limbs. Messages spurting out from every medium and endless scrolling keeps the ennui at bay.

Someone

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Like someone reading your diary

Touching your thoughts with a scalpel

Splitting them open and letting the innards glow freely

Beneath the blade.

Like someone knowing your darkest secrets

Most troubling defects

And personality problems, character flaws.

Like someone scraping out the inside of your head like a coconut

Amassing all these troubles, all these woes

And picking at your skull like a vulture.

Like someone who read your poetry.

Rush hour ramblings

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Pandemonium at Waterloo

At quarter to six.

Desperate, jumping commuters

Juggling briefcases, contents akimbo

Scurry like mice to the platform’s edge.

Scuttling, weak-kneed pensioners are thrown into a gruelling moshpit

Seats are treasures

For the fast and furious

Who tread on toes and elbow ribs and shove handbags

Muffled sorrys

Echo in a room filled with people desperate to get home.

Warbling announcements tell of woeful delays

Heels click, mouths tut, throats yawn.

And then a dash to the train turns into a marathon

Survival of the fittest, else you’ll have to stand.

The horrors of rocking up at Vauxhall

Knowing there’s no space.

Pedestrians left looking lemon-faced, scorned

Like a cruel joke we ride on past.

Me seated, on my way to inhale some jambalaya,

Them standing, wondering when they’ll catch a break.

The same happens at Clapham Junction

And I’m just a little bit sympathetically smug.

Reminiscing

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I thought of that cup

The one I bought from Ikea, all greenly gold and new

The one I drank my morning brew in

The one that saw coffee swish within its China skeleton

Like a dinghy at water park.

My lips fat and swallowing, teeth chinking against the sides

It took us months to get through that giant bag of Costco coffee

The beans floated to the top, never ending

And everyday I’d start my morning with that pastel green cup

Finger my iPad

And wriggle my way into consciousness.