By Sam Riviere
Four poems from early ‘Eels’ lyrics
‘…life is hard and so am I…’
A murk of weed, Novocaine for the Soul on repeat.
Seventeen was a pond with a chair at the bottom.
It was the millenium.
I read sci-fi all summer, strung homegrown upside-down to dry, its reek sweetening my room’s tall cupboards.
Nothing went exactly wrong or right.
I hollowed a hardback to stow gear inside; it was a first edition and worth more than my stash.
By Melba’s Mart, I fumbled a bottle of red.
It struck the kerb, and bounced to knee-height, light slipping its length for a stretched, stoned second.
I left the mess.
At every step I’d failed some adult test.
I remember pipistrelles flitted the street, as I lay on the roof to watch the eclipse through a welder’s visor.
A well opened over houses, for days I had black rings in my vision.
‘…when I came into this world they slapped me…’
Dreary, light-headed with hate, I watched my father feed his fish.
Electric blue and yellow darted the dark of the aquarium.
The lights dimmed infinitesimally.
Somewhere inside my thirteen years, my father’s fishtank was exploding.
The fork hadn’t yet budged in my fist.
The waves of impact were invisible, with me in the middle, completely still.
‘…there were more just like you…’
Sixteen.
I hadn’t been kissed for a year.
This longing was like being peeled from something slowly.
The year blowing with my lusts, pangs of woodsmoke, bats and blackberries hanging in the calendar.
Everything I’d drawn or written I tore up.
I despised my bright red blood, the wispy life in the hairbrush, and took sides against my luck.
One by one, I chucked seashells in the bramblebush, and stripped my bedroom bare.
Everywhere the resistance of objects, their marks.
I couldn’t hold on to any one thing for long.
Scraps of paper curled on the bed, the table.
There is nothing to pin to these similar, irregular labels.
‘…with your name on my tongue…’
The last thing she did was talk to me, the dead leaves are elated!
Giddy, fourteen circled me with blackbirds.
Summer almost gone.
These fields the last fields.
If I reach the road before the next car passes…
I solved my love on the half-mile home, wore it as a stain is worn, a new cut on my thumb.
On Gallows Hill the sunset tapped my empty head.
The red clouds collapsed, like clouds above the bomb.
The bus could crash and we could live forever in its wreckage!
The trees agreed.
I have her pen and remember each firecoloured hair upon her arm, if the apocalypse comes now it comes!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sam Riviere was born in 1981, and began to write poems while at the Norwich School of Art and Design. He completed his MA at Royal Holloway in 2006. He co-edits the anthology series Stop/Sharpening/Your/Knives. A recipient of a 2009 Eric Gregory Award, he was selected for the Faber New Poets scheme.
