An imprint of harm

Photo by Anna Shvets on Pexels.com

glassy echo, reflecting

repulsion

There, at the turning of your lips

Words you want to say, willing still

Anger swirling behind dark eyes

They walk calmly

Anything but

Appearance is a veil

I saw you once

Unguarded

Without your battlement

The disguise lay strewn

With other stolen objects

Mere indents in a soft bed

Your madness at the surface

Like a Hydra you panted

For release and weapons

None heard this request

All of you is secreted within layers

No one can unravel

You divide and multiply in your apparent cruelty

There is a token of delight

A brand for some and your bequeathing

Some are not set on this Earth for kindness

They live by the stain left in their wake

An imprint of harm

Slow the leash trains unwilling

Gradual uncovering, sin takes her high chair

In the pit of things you writhe nude and tarnished

We make our own hell with toys of old

Those picture books of loss and shame, shackles for the weary

I could pick you now,

a yellow rose,

your nectar just on the verge.

Pure & broken

Lie in bed

Child

Lest what stands beyond threshold

Threatens calm

Waking to the sound of winter silence

Clutching at inanimate objects

The seen friends who do not reply

Delve deeper into the mind

Where disturbance is held away

By merciful imagination

How long can a child

Pretend

And make-believe?

The sounds of fighting through the walls

Even the deaf hear

The crack in plaster grows wider

Each day carpet higher

Till jungle swallows child

Alone

Her own words ingrowing

Dance when no one is looking

For nobody did

Turned faces absentees

Hunger for attention

At first an annoying shame-faced thing

Then the end of longing

Acceptance

You placed me in a room of my own and said

Thrive

I did not

Instead

Half of me turned into plaster and chipboard and carpet fibers

And half climbed out windows and got lost

Letting her feathers be plucked early

By stranger fondling hands and false words

Prophet’s without prophecy

Girls born without reason

Growing in one ache

The silence their lover and their torment

Sliced in half

One, a creature straining to survive herself

One the albatross of finely dressed humans

Absenting themselves from responsibility

She says

You damned me

You shut me up

You expected me to thrive and grow in darkness and coal

As you closed the door and said entertain yourself

She switched the camera on and let them come one by one

Watch her fall beneath the lights

Mayhap dancer, mayhap pornographer

No words escape her

She moves her pain

Above you like light streaming down

Pure and broken into prisms

The hands of the lost

Sometimes

You pick the sinking ship

Recognizing within

Carousel parts of

Your own visit on earth

There is much wrong

In repeating mistakes or

Returning to well worn habit

When outcomes have proven they are

Dead roads and broken boats

It is not that you are

A martyr

Or even a fool

You do not wish

To bring yourself lower

But if you imagine life

As a well worn stoop

And whom you should feel

Most comfortable sitting there with

Then you will fathom

The type who finds themselves

Supporting the broken-down and

The fractured

For the sheer honesty of their response

And that well earned familiar

That you have known over and over

In the apologetic eyes of your own

And that trembling hand teaching through time

Asking you to

Be patient with my mistakes

There is something

Comforting and real

In a flaw

When all the city lights try to attain pearly perfection

Something you’ve never related to

Another language for

Early risers without grime stains behind their ears

The kinds who are punctual and routine

And do not make shoddy excuses for

Why they cannot lift the weight of the world

From their shoulders

People who may

Go on to take office whilst you seek

To survive and advance by understanding

What keeps the world turning

Which

Can be discovered

In equal amount

From the hands of the lost

As those who are found

For as we live, we hide the place we found

In polite society, I was born before 1999 and know

You oughtn’t make mention of wanting to be fucked

Then behind your clean starched mask, you tilt wildly

Stringing sentences with unevenly matched Japanese pearls

Wanting to reduce the sauce and toss your marrow

Spilling on good clean table cloth

Pent up urges

…

Good girls with breeding

Even those with tattoos and bar bells

Have no karaoke for the need to be sexed

It’s unacceptable

Unless you’re a muse of Mira Nedyalkova

To show your keening before nightfall

If indeed there is a room for

The un-beautiful cast offs

Dampening their secret gyrate

When the door bell chimes

And lust must be folded against bedtime book

Empty beds, careless marriages

They stopped touching you, as the record ended

Scratching against needle in the sleeping dark of disinterest

…

Still you had unquenchable thirst

Standing by the window watching swallows gather force

You thought of your own lost voice and that place

Between your legs aching to be emptied

Of a bright star

Only women past the loving hour

Who do not possess tight arse and foals legs

Can hope for nothing better than a vibration of their own hand

…

Where did you come from then?

As I zipped myself into a drawer and prepared my flattening

The ache of years, a library of unread self-possession

So long the gaze averted in the mirror, I only saw

A ghost and the moonlight, casting shadows in drawing gloom

You paid me a kindness

Took my urges to the silent place beneath time

Where I was a girl again, wet against your silky hand

And I felt your mouth measure my climb

Into the breast of a cloud, oxygen deprived, no cry is heard

But the cymbals of holding back are loosed

Falling a great weight, your fingers entwined into my roots

…

I waited beyond my lifetime for someone like you

To open my need, pull me into you, set me free

For as we live, we hide the place we found

Ourselves that first time the sky splitting wide

Beneath the tree with fingers inside, stroking to climax

That unbearable feeling of being alive

HEIRLOOMS

Image by Christine Renney

In the past, when we argued, I would often throw something. Now words are enough as over the years I have become more adept at hurling them and I no longer need to rely something inanimate. If I happened to be holding a mug I would throw that and, after retrieving the largest surviving part, I’d throw that again and again. Or I might reach and grab for something close at hand, an ornament or a trinket made from china or glass, something that would break, something that would smash. If I happened to be holding a book then I would throw that. It wouldn’t break of course, not even after I had kicked it and stamped on it. Books don’t come apart or at least not easily. Try for yourself, take one down from the shelf, a paperback, open it in the middle and try to rip it in two. It can’t be done. In order to destroy a book you need to act methodically, to tear the pages one at a time. I have done this, but only once.
I hadn’t read the book but I remember it was ‘The Idiot’ by Dostoevsky. As I started to rip out the pages, T… watched but she quickly tired and, exasperated, she went to bed. ‘The Idiot’ is a big book but I persevered until each and every page lay at my feet. In the heat of the moment a book is decidedly unsatisfactory. A mug, on the other hand, is ideal. A mug will bounce unscathed across a carpeted floor time and again. Six, eight, even ten times, before it will begin to chip and crack and, when it does, when it breaks, something snaps and in the silence we are able to make things right again. To scrub at the coffee stains and sweep up the pieces, although for weeks afterwards, we find bits of the mug lodged here, there and everywhere.

T… was frightened by my outbursts and believed if I didn’t react in this way that I would lash out and strike her. But it was only when the argument really took root, when it wouldn’t stop, that I would throw and break something. Of course, it wasn’t always a mug but sometimes things that were much more valuable and difficult to replace. Heirlooms, things that had been passed down and things we had bought together and which, over time, would have come to mean so much more. I won’t bore you with a list but I did once break a clock, a wedding present. I lifted it from the mantle and flung it to the floor. I kicked it, stood and stomped on it. Grinding the glass and the face and the mechanism until all of the tiny parts, the cogs and the washers and the wheels, were embedded in the carpet. Later, we hadn’t any choice but to carefully and painstakingly pick them out.

I am now aware, however, that T… has begun to replace some of the things I have destroyed from our past. I wouldn’t even have noticed if it hadn’t been for the book, not even the clock, but there it is up on the mantle, exactly the same although of course it isn’t. I wonder how she did it, how she managed to find it? And I would like to ask but how can I, how can we talk about this?

After finding the book and taking it down from the shelf, I carry it with me and begin to wander through the house, searching the rooms and discovering item after item, things I won’t list, not now, not here. I’ve told you about the book and about the clock and that’s enough. And the mugs of course, although they don’t matter, mugs are inconsequential; you use one only for so long and then replace it. Eventually I sit and start to read ‘The Idiot’ by Fyodor Dostoevsky, a copy of the book I desecrated long ago. It has the same cover, a sky blue border and the same painting on the front. ‘Portrait of Ivan Pochitonov’ by Nikolai Dmitrievich although of course these details I don’t remember.

T… comes into the room and, noticing the book, she asks quite coolly, ‘Haven’t you read that before?’.
‘I started once but didn’t finish it,’ I reply, ‘and I’ve decided to try again.’

RECONCILIATION

Image by Christine Renney

We yell until each of us is hollow. She is sobbing. The sound hoarse and guttural. She is empty and has no more words and I no longer have to fend against them.
She shivers and I touch her. She is cold and I fetch a sweater from the bedroom. With a handful of kitchen towel she mops at her face, at the snot and tears.
The sweater is too big and sitting she pulls at herself from inside. I place my hands on her shoulders and press down gently, an effort to still her.
I feel remorse, it fills the hollow inside, I am full to brimming with it when she turns, ready for regret.