\u2018\u2026life is hard and so am I\u2026’<\/strong><\/p>\n A murk of weed, Novocaine for the Soul<\/em> on repeat. <\/p>\n \u2018\u2026when I came into this world they slapped me\u2026’<\/strong><\/p>\n Dreary, light-headed with hate, I watched my father feed his fish. <\/p>\n \u2018\u2026there were more just like you\u2026’<\/strong><\/p>\n Sixteen. <\/p>\n \u2018\u2026with your name on my tongue\u2026’<\/strong><\/p>\n The last thing she did was talk to me, the dead leaves are elated!<\/em> <\/p>\n
\nSeventeen was a pond with a chair at the bottom.
\nIt was the millenium.
\nI read sci-fi all summer, strung homegrown upside-down to dry, its reek sweetening my room’s tall cupboards.
\nNothing went exactly wrong or right.
\nI hollowed a hardback to stow gear inside; it was a first edition and worth more than my stash.
\nBy Melba’s Mart, I fumbled a bottle of red.
\nIt struck the kerb, and bounced to knee-height, light slipping its length for a stretched, stoned second.
\nI left the mess.
\nAt every step I’d failed some adult test.
\nI remember pipistrelles flitted the street, as I lay on the roof to watch the eclipse through a welder’s visor.
\nA well opened over houses, for days I had black rings in my vision.<\/p>\n
\nElectric blue and yellow darted the dark of the aquarium.
\nThe lights dimmed infinitesimally.
\nSomewhere inside my thirteen years, my father’s fishtank was exploding.
\nThe fork hadn’t yet budged in my fist.
\nThe waves of impact were invisible, with me in the middle, completely still. <\/p>\n
\nI hadn’t been kissed for a year.
\nThis longing was like being peeled from something slowly.
\nThe year blowing with my lusts, pangs of woodsmoke, bats and blackberries hanging in the calendar.
\nEverything I’d drawn or written I tore up.
\nI despised my bright red blood, the wispy life in the hairbrush, and took sides against my luck.
\nOne by one, I chucked seashells in the bramblebush, and stripped my bedroom bare.
\nEverywhere the resistance of objects, their marks.
\nI couldn’t hold on to any one thing for long.
\nScraps of paper curled on the bed, the table.
\nThere is nothing to pin to these similar, irregular labels.<\/p>\n
\nGiddy, fourteen circled me with blackbirds.
\nSummer almost gone.
\nThese fields the last fields.
\nIf I reach the road before the next car passes\u2026<\/em>
\nI solved my love on the half-mile home, wore it as a stain is worn, a new cut on my thumb.
\nOn Gallows Hill the sunset tapped my empty head.
\nThe red clouds collapsed, like clouds above the bomb.
\nThe bus could crash and we could live forever in its wreckage! <\/em>
\nThe trees agreed.
\nI have her pen and remember each firecoloured hair upon her arm, if the apocalypse comes now it comes!<\/em><\/p>\n
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The last thing she did was talk to me, the dead leaves are elated!<\/em>