Tag: poetry

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.

Father of mine…

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Today was the first time I spoke to you

in four long years.

She foisted her phone into my beating hands

like a pusher pushing pills at a party

and I swallowed all my awkwardness

until it perched on my stomach’s seabed

and breathed a gobsmacked “hello” to my estranged father.

Flitting between fond memories

(all six of them)

and chucklesome banter

(that isn’t so chucklesome)

I laugh and I giggle and I smile and she pipes in beside me

content to be our relationship’s catalyst.

You’re away, frittering about in some far-flung country

where business is rife and you’re free from the stench of failure

failure at being a dad, a husband and a friend.

You tell me you’ll be back soon

like a perpetual Schwarzenegger, the phrase has been on a loop

in my head for the best part of a decade

so you shouldn’t expect a homecoming party anytime soon

because soon is a very long time

for such a short word.

Island dreams, coconut groves

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I knew it was going to hurt.

Like a severed limb, cut off, bleeding

it was always going to have an unsavoury feeling.

The amputation was set in motion back in January

when I told you I didn’t love you

anymore

and we ran circles around our words

had muffled conversations in burger bars

and pressed our palms together in desperate solidarity

and then we waited.

The operation commenced in the month of May

when we went our separate ways

left with bloody stumps, the both of us

our bandages were cherry-red and ached

we knew it would take time to heal.

What I didn’t bargain for was the loss of two limbs

– one for you and one for the country we’d lived in

that sun-dappled, banana breeding ground closer to Africa than Europe

which I would moan about and rant about to reluctant relatives

who told me “just come home”

and now I miss that platano-infested wasteland

of orange-gold hills clad in the sun’s rays

ugly, Arizona-esque but comforting all the same.

We left our flat and burned our bridges

and ripped out our relationship’s stitches

left your handy, hopeful car

tucked away behind a few bushes by the airport

and made a dash for it, a dash towards the unknown.

These bloody stumps may never heal

because I loved you and our life

and now I’ve broken the seal.

Dodging germs

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There’s not a lot you can say to somebody who’s ill.

Somebody who coughs like they’re allergic to oxygen

and can’t find clean air to breathe,

somebody who sniffs and snuffles and talks in a muffled

croaky, woe-is-me voice, fractured and afraid

that the common cold might kill them.

I’ve had plenty of illnesses, plenty of bugs,

I’ve swallowed plenty of tablets and drank Lemsip

from plenty of mugs, ’til my face turned lemony, bitter like a nettle,

and my breath started smelling strangely like Dettol.

I’ve had a handful of flus, a handful of UTIs,

I’ve thrown a sickly shade of green up in front of teenage guys

on a green in Kew Gardens, when the liquor had hardened

in my stomach

and I sat with my head in a bin, spewing the remnants of a Subway sandwich.

I’ve had McDonalds food poisoning and full-bodied chicken pox

the former had me chucking up bitesized nuggets

the latter had hands, grandfatherly rugged,

spraying my back with tepid water

while I listened to the faint voice of his beloved daughter,

– my mother

the one who’s ill now and spewing her guts out

and popping paracetamol ’til she reaches the goal

of numbness.

There’s not a lot I can say to her,

except “get well soon” or “I hope you get better”

and give her a pat on the back or blow her a kiss

staying away from those leperous lips.

She woke me up with her violent upchucks

two nights ago, tossing to and fro,

I could hear her writhing in amongst the sheets,

internally mumbling a chorus of “why me’s”

but in the morning there wasn’t much to say

except “oh you poor thing, I hope you’re okay”

and wait for her illness to latch its greasy claws onto little old me

I’m sure soon I’ll be spluttering

and turning Hulk-green.

European weekend

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We rolled into a Spanish town, filled with green crested hills and fluffy neighbourhoods

And I’m thinking about work and life and commitments

I’m pondering the flaky freelance mode de vie,

I’m wondering if it’ll stunt me socially

And make me boring and broke.

As the flesh coloured figures roll past the window panes

And the platforms dash in a blur of brushed aluminium

Thoughts ricochet off my synapses

And flood my mind with what ifs and how to’s

The world seems so scary

My path seems so bumpy

When I make good with my brain

That’s when it’ll all piece together.

Cucarachas

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Cockroaches are underrated

They’re universally hated

For being oh so dirty

And a little too flirty

With mess and food

And people’s shoes

So they’re stamped on and crushed

Or down the toilet they’re flushed

Gut reaction is to squash

And give your hands a good wash

People don’t realise

A cockroach can survive

Atomic bombs and other disasters

And at playing dead they’re total masters

So how about we cut ’em some slack

And refrain from taking a WHACK!