Little Poems

My Dad is sitting outside on the balcony in the dark, drinking cheap wine and listening to Pink Floyd on a discman really loudly. It's slightly worrying. He was doing the same thing inside earlier, and this has pretty much been the blueprint for how he spends his nights for the last week or so.
It has recently come out (officially) that he and his wife of almost a year had split up, sometime right after Christmas. I met with Scarlett, my ex-step-sister, at a tram stop by the river. She seemed nonplussed by the whole thing, even revealing that her Mom took "like fifty pills" the day after Christmas.
I worry for him.

After dinner, my brain started itching. Words started battering the inside of my skull like fireworks; they needed to go somewhere. So I wrote two poems. Here they are.

The Sea Indoors

I thrash
Mackerel in a net
Balloon on the moon
My body is tethered and rubber banded into place
Motion is fixed in a slow, furious struggle against the line that separates us

I arch
Practicing a type of pain
I am not myself
As much as I am a mere part of everyone else
Slow winds shake through the concrete wasteland
Rippling unfortunate white trousers nearby and tickling my throat
Bared for the slaughter, if you dare

I decay
Gasping desperation
Hot tulips blister behind eyelids
An agile audience only an arm-span away
But there is an ocean between us as I sink amongst the sirens
Adopt me as your sister and I will be home

I surge
Snapping back
The lofty bedlam floats above
Livid blue babies mock and speak in mature vindictiveness
Snap at my heels but you will not have me, I cry fruitlessly
For my voice will bend and dissolve, and be only for me


Traipsing Off the Cliff

Leave me in my shell a bit longer? I am only
half-baked, and chill will swoop like an eagle
should I venture from safety into your jungles.
Come and rain your love down on me
so I might benefit from the vitamins. Rouse me,
my bones lay just beneath the surface, my love
the only red thing left from my collection.
That bicycle, that hair ribbon, that insouciant mouth
could be a liability or a pleasure, if you would stop
and rouse my bones. Sometimes you whisper
my dreams back at me, so much more real than
when I entrusted them to you. Let’s make them seven
of the seventh-seven like me, red like me, then
perhaps they can live in me, my love-dream.

Hand me pane e burro any day over this, grey
patterings, frightening me away from rest.
Why such flowings now? Months and days of
drought striking without consideration; now milk
and honey twenty-four-seven. Hopes and minds
reveal their fecundity without mercy. I know it’s
disappointing, my love. Your little one is no Atlas;
her shoulders shrink and snap like glass filigree.
If only this, if only that. She doesn’t try hard enough.
Peel her and maybe a diamond? No, I’m full of coal
and all the bitterness of generations, pent up in blood and
pretension. Why so close and unyielding, yet you are so far?
When you sleep, I swoon over your eyelashes. I could pass
a whole winter alone, but not this single week without you.