Quarter Life Crisis

The alarm punches fitful peace awake. I’ve had dreams,
a better me, a heavy purse, flickering helpless between

emails and daylight. It’s cold inside the rented mortar
we feign ours. I fix despondence with over boiled water,

lime scale good for tired bones. I’ve had thoughts
of mud huts, growing potatoes, shoeless. I’ve been taught

ingratitude by my generation. Overfed, hysterical, clothed
in the ease of child slavery. I have known

opportunity and cried at the tyranny of choice.
I’m a silent paper shuffler, I am the loudest voice

in a room playing quarter life games of my woes worse.
my life is pointless and yet I’ve so much worth.

I’ve been assaulted by a thousand early rises,
nameless, tobacco stained men, the glare of house prices

in a broken Stockwell window. I have tutted, watched
riots and wondered why no one loots the book shops

whilst painting placards for a war I cannot name.
I have been a socialist, feminist, activist from the shame

of an unmade bed at 5pm on a Sunday. I’ve had dreams
where I kill my boss, win the lottery, where I beam

from a golden podium and shout out to a popular minority
I’ve never known. I’ve been grateful to austerity

for giving me men to be angry with, suited TV specks
to blame for both my indolence and pay cheques.

I work hard to dream, to point a finger at rolls of fat
that aren’t my fault. I envy animals, the impertinence of cats.

I work to laze in the sun. I work to buy poorly stitched chiffon
and coffee beans and wide screens and broken tat from Taiwan.

Lived Here

I wonder if they’ll hang a plaque for me. I wonder

if they’ll let it rust the grease kissed orange of dirty

dishwater on the uncelebrated street where I begged

for more, for the front door to buckle with mercy,

 

Mum open-armed. The mortar collared me

like a rabid dog. The roads wound thick, unyielding,

slurping at hope like floodwaters under a bridge.

The bricks loom quietly here, trespassers building

 

flat-pack memories in the precious, yellowed room,

still damp with my tarnished virginity. The window,

blinded now, was where I risked death to glimpse

God’s face in a constellation. Things don’t

 

change much. Car parks still teem with drunk youth

dancing round the charred vessels of burnt out metal

someone’s absent Father gifted over love.

I’m still hunting God in tsunamis and clover petals,

 

out of windows into starless Vauxhall skies.

I wonder if the carpet remembers me, if they swept

away the wine-stained tantrums. I wonder where

they’ll bury me. I never called it home until I left.

The Camel

I am animal, an inexhaustible carcass
throwing myself at the mattress
as if
there’s dust to beat out of it.

You are delicate,
precious as the arum lilies
I will clutch on our aisle walk.

I am getting ahead of myself.

Something about you says receptacle,
as if you might contain me
and
let me slosh out the sides a bit.

Not a vase, not so stoic.
Reciprocal.

You are camel,
lip-curling,
snug-fitting,
love-retaining.

Brevity

I’ve nothing much to show for this Winter,
a receipt for bigger jeans, two splinters

from the audacious kitchen window,
and half a chapter of a novel, binned now

for short things suit me better, like Summer
in England, and pastry made with extra butter,

full fat. I’m a fleeting kind of June sweat,
a slip of orange moon that you will forget

for a perfect wolf-howler. I’m nothing much
but a curt thing, shooting star, hour long grudge,

flash in the pan. I love the brevity of death,
it’s promise of both nothing and forever.

Impressing Friends In Chiffon

I hide in bed when I don’t like me,
when I’m frightened by a sunrise
or shy in mirrors. I don’t see
reflection, I reflect on the disguise

some kind of me has put on.
Sometimes I wear my lips red. Why?
Am I impressing friends in chiffon?
Am I a better me in a black tie

Or a duvet? I worry about it all.
Dreams climb my legs at night
and I wake up in a pavement brawl,
between my mattress and the daylight.

 

Say It Again

Do you love me? Do you want to say it again
over breakfast, over tear-bothered shoulders
and nothings? Do you love me? In the shower,
in your solitude? I imagine your clean smoulder,

your awkward lip, curiously thick with age
you’ve not yet spent. You are swollen softly
with every sleepy sip. You tremble thinking
of a hundred more morning coffees

delivered bedside, begrudgingly, lovingly,
with an accidental sugar. I stick my back
into your slim-fleshed spine because I love you,
defiant, stubborn in my misguided lack

of refuge. I want all the kisses. All the hands
to smother me in familiarity, all the compliments
to waste on my already loved ears, my lands
conquered silently, with touch and not dominance.

I want you to own me, without possession
or object, the way you own me when I hold
you, the way you own me when you’re fragile
and dream-ridden, when our limbs are rolled

into a beautiful woman and a vulnerable man.
Do you love me? My vulgarity? My desperate
needs? I want us penned to paper, remembered
by couples we meet on holiday, always together

in other minds. I want us shallow and deep.
I want us selfish. Do you love me? I have grown,
better, honest. I ask questions because I’m brave
enough for answers. I’m honest because I’ve known

you, known your pride. Do you love me even when
I wound you? When my midnight bones take to
empty corners? I see you heavy, future troubled
by my love. My love. My love, I love you.

Learning You

At first everything was a suburban grey.
Arrestingly yet lovingly dull. The walls
were grubby, blank slates of misspent pay,
marked by unloved oils, now bleeding in damp
cardboard, swindled off the local café

the old tenants called good friends. At first
it was all curtains and cutlery, impatience
rattling through the back door to curse
toes beneath new bed sheets. We laughed,
as if Winter weren’t approaching, nursed

warmth from our fluorescent bodies, whisky
from our first-bed-together mouths. I’m still
learning you, you said. Learning that tipsy
is but a stop-gap in my drunken oblivions,
that I cry every day. I need your absent pity,

your grow ups but never change. I’m learning
you and your kitchen sink crookedness,
bones clattering basin, neck bent in mourning
like the daisies that didn’t reach the flowerbed,
dead in their terracotta tombs. No warning

about how hard it is to make things grow.
We don’t know the first thing about gardening
but it’s been fun to pretend, to throw
a little colour. Why is there half a seashore
buried in our soil? Did you bring it from home?

You are a home we’re both learning to share,
your days wasted with sleep are hours I cherish
on a Saturday. Don’t resent me. Don’t compare.
We’ll learn to wake some mornings, synchronised
in sunlight. We’ll learn patterns, the freckle flare

of Summer’s square foot. How to tend the roses.
Yes at first everything was a suburban grey.
Now our skin and hair clogs the gaps, we impose
our beautiful lives on the empty, learning our spaces
and chances, how every flower decomposes.

False Gods

We sleep whilst rain interrogates the house,
roughing up the windows sheathed
in our still unhemmed curtains.

Paintings clutter the fireplace
next to nails full of intent
and our books don’t fit the shelves,
though neither of us reads much any more.

I’d not known Satsumas could go off
before I met you, that their youthful skin could pucker,
weather-pocked with neglect.

We’ve filled a house with vitamins and words,
false gods of dormant comfort.

We sleep with grease kissed mouths,
grubbied by spicy dinners
delivered in disposable plastic.

We sleep, heavy with simple utterings,
whilst the storm torments the back door,
and the dust swells from the carpet
and the poems cry unread
and the mice dance on the bread-crumbed table,
beside the unloved fruit bowl.

Medicating

My optimistic clock is set for five,
when I will squirm in sweat fits, chide the sun

for her ruthless benevolence. We’ve tried
to see eye-to-eye, blinded most days by

the redundancy of curtains. Weary
I will boil water, crippled by decision.

I don’t want caffeine. I don’t want bleary
falsehood, but I try to not let the little things

devour me. I will drink part-corked booze,
no respect for childhood French holidays

where my burnt Mother taught me how to choose
a lobster, taught me no shell is without a scream.

I cower at the window, from the postman’s bell.
I am not worthy of letters or bills.

I am not worthy of beauty. The smells
of land rotating are alien to the stagnant

roots I’ve grown. I am still until you’re home.
I cup your face, pretend to feel a pulse

and not the vulgar stubble, stubbornly grown
to teach me I’ve let go. It is my fault.

I am jealous of the hot windows, wet
with someone’s perfect, desperate orgasm,

warm with the love I pretend to forget,
that you’re too scared to wake me with.

Sunday Gripping

You wake at five woundstruck, surprised by the heartless
hunger of the morning, slumber shook and bed creased
in an awkward origami accident. You resent the harvest,
how ripe things must be eager, lament the energetic feast

we must pretend to gorge upon. Can’t we lay here, hungry?
Porridge starved and unenthused. Let’s be bored and stuffy,
sweat ridden by the snooze button. Let’s be a grey Monday
and never go to work again. Just roll this way and love me,

silent and heavy. Soon we’ll shower, dress, smile, pretend.
Let’s just be honest. I don’t want to move. I love the static,
the nothing and the everything. Beat with me. Let’s defend
this moment, our unflagging indolence, our lethargic magic.