Travel Shorts

I have a pain in my fingers. My skin is mottled under the crush of my cheap heavy wool knit cardigan. My thumb throbs from being temporarily squished under my anxious pressing. My joints are stiff and my eyes are wet. This evening I've been looking after my family; my sister and her girls. And I thank my uselessness at relationships, my fuck-ups and my pain for equipping me with the skills I need to offer her insight. I make mistakes so you don't have to...

She is falling apart. Her eyes are red and hollow, her throat crackling like the fire we used to polish brass beside when Mum was hysterical over a break-up with some unsuitable stepfather type. The children draw pictures of hearts ripped in two. They shouldn’t understand this pain at such a young age. Only... Well, only it prepares them for the world, right? They’ll know that nothing works out how you want it to. People leave and there’s nothing you can do about it. There’s no point in trusting people when people only let you down.

We were brought up believing this: Men will leave you. They will let you down. And we saw example after example of unsuitable characters making their grand exit. Leaving our mother depressed and in tears. We all sat by the fire and wrote poems of loss in an attempt to win affection from our broken mother. In her attempt to win them back with words: ‘Without you the stars are black’, ‘Without you dawn won’t rise’, ‘Without you I’m nothing.’

We became well versed at self-fulfilling prophecies because if the affirmation ‘they will leave you’ is repeated enough, it becomes the only way of life. A fissure so deeply carved into our own landscape that nothing can smooth it over.

So when someone comes and tries to love you wholly, see you for who you are and still stick around, the prophecy isn’t working. The fissure is hidden under a deep and complex ocean. And we panic. Everything we have ever known is beginning to come undone. We must stop this madness. So we push, and push them away until they must leave. They’d be stupid to stay. After all now we are breaking their heart. We have to; for their own protection. When they leave, the circle is complete. ‘They will leave you’ has become ‘they have left’ like it did so many times before and the only equilibrium we know is restored.

My only advice, then, is to try and break the cycle...

I wrote love on my arms
to honour my feelings.
There were nights
I awoke
to traces on
my pillow
and creases on my
cheek that
mimic the
clefts tearing
the ocean bed.
Love spiralled through
the choir's song
echoing the
patterns dawn's rosy
fingers traced
creeping across the sky.
And scratching at my voice box
as it raked over my skin.

I felt love in my bones
on quiet days when I looked
at the river.
You could pick over
them like a carcass;
each one you
felt holding a story.
The clavicle he bit;
searing a bruise I'd not forget.
The clouds of weed smoke
danced tendrils in my olfactory hallucinations
and still conjure his broken eyes.

I slew love into my skin
The scratch of razor blades
atop the ulna
spoke of the one
who taught me the most
and cut me deepest.
He smelled of his mother's laundry
and grapefruit;
his fingers
tapped out rhythms as
he practised music
and shaped my future.

I gouged love in my eyes
trying to veil away my pain.
The scars of dirty needles
and a youth so misspent I can't even play pool.
The cigarettes he ground into my cheekbone
just below my eye socket.
His vitriolic words burnt a small hole in my heart
and left behind the scent of ash and blackened spoons.
He gave me stolen gold and blood stained sheets
but taught me forgiveness.

I smuggled love into prison.
Tasted salty blood in the back of my throat
with broken incisors and
cracked ribs. When I smell washing up liquid
and talcum powder it's him I see.
Scrubbing my skin red raw
and trying to turn his white.

I never wanted that trade.

I toured love around Europe.
We slept on railway platforms
and bathed in heavy rain.
I shattered my calcaneus
and he carried me;
never complaining
about his metallic navicular.
He learnt to dance with fire and
smelled of petrol and sawdust.
Our shattered ankles echoed
our fragile hearts and he taught me loss.

I etched love in the sand;
our angry walks on windy
days when the sea spelt out words
and in pathetic fallacy; raged against the rocks.
She has an infectious smile
and every word she says
is crafted like poetry
in the gentlest voice.

I tore love away from my soul.
He massaged my sore jaw bone
and watched me cry in pain
whilst he masked his under our blanket of lies.
My heart still fissured from
his emancipation
I tried to learn
life
and adulthood
and bled from my womb
whilst I wept into his tears
of Elska not being our baby,
but the cells of cracked hedonism
and delusion. I broke his heart
and he still fixed my broken body.
I saw a bright horizon,
I saw a northern sky
in the darkest depth of winter
in a country laden with larva and ice.
I missed the shattered tibula
and massaging his skull.
He filled me up with chorales
and facts about the universe.
I hoped that he'd forgive me
and I hoped he'd want to
try. But his love
meant more to me than
summertime
and I knew that for all the bones I've injured
I'd break a thousand more
to save his heart.
His face is etched in concrete
in chalky crumbling shores
in every time I pass the rhyme
of tides. In the whistle of the wind.
In every worn pebble of Serpentine
the scent of gorse on the cliff,
The chasing of dragonflies,
and all the words I write.

I stole love from myself
in the hope that he'd find his.

I committed my love to the sea
when the water was my shibboleth.
I chose to hide behind words
and he knew which ones would bruise me.
Sometimes on quiet days
by the river
I smell the woodsmoke
and diesel
and find those words in the mud.
Resting in the suture
where Integrity used to be.

he told me how you get pairs
of stars
who are forever in orbit
how circles make up the
base
of any relation[ship].
he likes how secrets are
like melons
whose insides can be sweet
and pink
and juicy
or dried stringy
white
and the many more circles you collect
the less pressure
each one has.
And when he pulled me closer
he made my circles unravel
creating fragile spirals
half a world away.

I have been talking to a good friend who helps me understand things in a different and more innocent way sometimes. This one's for you :)

Many hands make light work

Ain’t it just the way

Life called today
and apologised for getting
in the way sometimes.
Her husband is flirtatious
and easy.
Sometimes he makes
friends too quickly and keeps them
away from Life.
He says he does it to protect them.
Life says sorry



she gets in the way sometimes.