Octavia

O phone box, thou art sick

O red phone box (o symbol of Britain!) 

- You that once sheltered 
Young men, ways from home, calling Mum every Sunday;
And lovers, fumbling change instead of clothing;
And little old ladies, ringing sisters far away 
To talk of hips and dogs and scurrilous slovenly daughters -

Now harbour naught but cheap smudgesmeared postcards:

Nadia, Syndy, Cara, Sherice

(All new in town, and wanting to play).

Black beauty/loves anal/ pre-op/ mid-post-op/ 

And the odd (niche market) older femme. 

Women still carry out 95% of household chores

You vigorously thrust your hands into my heart, right up to the elbow, and rummage around with such brisk brio that dirtsoapy swells slosh free and make your feet wet.

Pre-Tender

I render you tender

Then return you to sender.

Three for ten pounds

It is impossible to drop a pill in a subtle manner. 

Viz.: Friday club. Strobed blue drinks and the heart baseline beat fracturing our people-mirror like a rock, leaving jaggard nightlife shards: a beautiful girl twirling, with lips as red as cherries and skin as white as the snow knocked back under the disdainful gaze of the paper-faced toilet assistant selling perfume and Milky Ways past their sell-by date; the sweat-wet barman lending Darwin a hand by ignoring anyone with a penis; a bouncer gum chewing and face scanning, puffed-up large in his large puffed-up jacket; couples kissing, merging into one melting candle body; and everywhere, all the time, that tell tale hand-clasp-hand-mouth move, discharged by a hasty gulp of overpriced bottled water.

No way no where to hide.

And this is why I have to cause a distratcion when you say that we have no secrets. Trapped desperate I scramble to wave a shiny new word or to drop down on my knees for you, so that retching and while you're not looking I can dry swallow back the bitter pill of what I know and what you can never know. 

I caught Daddy kissing Sister Olga

My father has a crush on a Russian nun, who is in England to sell Orthodox icons at faux German Christmas markets. His voice fairy lights whenever he talks about her (which is often): how she came over from Minsk with five of her sisters, driven the whole way in a Soviet rattling minibus; how (the others scattered across the country) she is staying with Franciscan monks near the university, and is amazed at the contents of their fridge; how she has to stand alone all day in the cold, squeezed betwixt a bratwurst booth and a stall selling ties made of wood; how she smiles and shakes her head, bemused that foreginers should pay and display her religion on their Christmas trees.

Each fact a different colour for him, thrown at me in a tumble of excited exclamations, just happy to be talking about her; and on Christmas morning I received two icons (St Stephen and the Virgin) and a CD recording of the Russian Orthodox Easter service. Later, he produced the bag in which they'd come, tracing the cyrillic in breathless awe.

I wouldn't mind, but I'd asked for the new Girls Aloud CD.

Fairytale of Essex Road

I caught the eye of a Polish butcher this morning. Usually I stride numb past his leergruntdarling, my mind immuned by work and love and hate and oh caffeine need clench thoughts; but today i am weak. Weak because of Christmas. So i look him full face and his features turn golden and come away from the edges in surprise and then he grabs a hanfdul of raw sausages and makes fucking gestures at me.

Vicim rage and a day spent imagining scrotum slicing with a ham hook yes; but also anger at Christmas for doing this to me. For changing who I am, for making me tearful and snap mawkish and making fights with my love and taking bites from myself.

Christmas means families. It means migrating south on resisting wings to a prolonged period of my parents, of what they have become. My mother is dead to me herself god whatever; her days exist in pain and madness. 'Home' for me is thus catheters and bedsore ointments and slop feeding and massaging legs swollen like rotten logs while she either disrecognises me or rochester laughs or weeps slow maggoty tears. It is my dad's face alight with joy at seeing me and the guilt gullet twist of how gladly he salutes me as I come through the ticket barrier, his glee that of a puppy that thought himself abandoned.

And I am so angry, so angry for him. And for her, the most independent, the most battling: a single mother in the '60s, who when refused a mortgage by tweedsuits disapproving of her bastard child returned years later to pay for her house in cash. She who caught me creeping in the back door when I was 11 because I was afraid to walk past the builders (at that age I was tall was woman enough to blip on their radar) and made me parade tofro past them, 'becase no daughter of mine is going to be afraid'. She who now lives who for life years has lived able to do nothing other than survey not only the shell of her existence, but how she sucks dry that of my dad, and how she has forced the pink softness out of me. 

When you train to be a Samaritan, they tell you that carers seldom kill themselves. Responsibility deters them. As my Russian granny would say, sprasping the words between the gap in her teeth (sculpted by decades of drinking her tea through a sugar lump clamped there): 'In Moskva, there was no such thing as depression. People either killed themselves, or got on with it.'

So we continue our lives. Or rather, so our lives continue. And all you 'I'm so unhappy although there's nothing really wrong but GOD the futility of existence and no one sees it but us oh and I was bullied at school' bloggers?

Fuck you. 

Merry Christmas. 

Absent, I'll follow you with dark fires (alternative ending)

He has left me.

I am good at being broken. I weep. I am hugged by my friends. I dissect his then my then bitch her star signs (I don't believe in horoscopes). My heart drips pus. Berebescu.

And then, the lowest of the low, the most shameful, most out of character: I ask Dear Aunty Internet for advice.

Suggestions and soapy web warmth are immediate. I must talk to my friends. Start an evening class. Take up a hobby! Take up drugs and overdose on his doorstep. And then, a comment by a name I recognise, one of the bosom-clutching 'you guys are so sweet' chthonic purveyors of my excruciation: I must get rid of everything that reminds me of him.

Everything that reminds me of you.

The dustbin lorry comes every Thursday morning, at an hour painful to the hungover. Its grumble rumble stop grumble rumble stop alice-in-wonderlands me, so I hear again my dad proclaiming in theatrical tones 'the DUSTBIN DRAGON is here' as he crouched with me to peer through the letter box at the monster tearing apart the rubbish bags. My Thursday dragon still has the same strong teeth, which clamp and empty the 52-gallon wheelie bins - I read somewhere that 'dustman' charts in the top 10 of jobs earning amputated limbs: the monster gets peckish. Such jaws are surely strong enough to crunch through the things that remind me of you. I plan my destruction. I tell all my friends. They approve: this is healthy.

On the Wednesday night I ceremoniously parade forthback from my flat to the bin by the broken-down fence in the front garden, heaping up the history of us. A half-finished packet of fags (you only smoke when you're drunk). The underwear in which you loved me best: blue silk, and I have to belly bend and throw up at the lustflash of the first time you saw me in it, your softsharp intake of breath, how your eyes fucked me, as you plucked a loose strand and put it in your pocket, 'to analyse later, like in a crime scene'. One of your pens (you always use the same kind). The sheets in which we slept cat-curled and silk stroken. The chart you scrawled me to prove that man really did land on the moon.

I sit on the broken fence and survey the pile. Small; insubstantial; meaningless. Everything every thing an echo. It is cold but I stay sitting, one shoe kicked off, black clothes hanging loose, waiting.

As dawn blots (late, it is winter) I pack everything in the bin, carefully compacting and pushing everything down until something plastic snaps. I swing the lid shut. All our love measures little more than six inches high: there is still plenty of room in the bin.

I hear the brumble of the lorry and it turns the corner in the half dark, stopping outside the big house. Shadows push a bin funereally forward; the dragon's mouth gapes; it clamps pig hard on the plastic and gulps back its contents into the grinding depths. I hear crunched metal masticated as it spits the bin back to earth.

I think of you, of us. I see the way you looked at me. I smell the side of your neck, and taste it on my tongue's tip. I feel your fingers stroketracing the curve of my waist. I think of every thing.

Then I open the bin and climb inside. There is plenty of room. I pull the lid shut over me and wait.

The Gardener of Human Happiness

This is how it felt

I found her blog innocuously, a link from another page that praised her use of emotion and there she was and I knew the name and felt my heart skud. Then as I read their love their fucking connection their great literary romance their, their meeting I felt my body shaking and I was afraid to look over my shoulder because the whole world was waiting there to collapse on top of me, and I would see Eurydice with her beloved face burned purple raw and her pale innards maggoting out.

And I am seven again, still young enough that every day my mother limps through the streets to meet me at the school gates, and in winter she always has a boiled sweet for me in the pocket of her good wool coat. But this is summer, a blaze hot day and I am in the shop with a lemonade sparkle ice lolly in my hand and I am tracing the thin paper welded to the chevrons of the side when I feel a bright cyst pain on my arm and a horrified man looks down at me with his lit cigarette dangling and I dogleg from the volcano-red welt to his grave-gaping expression as he clocks what he’s done and my eyes boil with tears and he just turns and leaves.

This is how it feels. Like from nowhere life has changed.

at regina gravi iamdudum saucia cura

This is why:

We are in an old european capital, for a weekend seized and carried off (the decision made on who can mention it at work, and who must claim a boring few days around the house). In a war-raped town two hours away we climb the citadel and survey bombed bridges submerged where two rivers meet; we buy hot, savoury cakes that shed flakes on our cold fingers and you kiss me under a clock where the minute hand is shorter than the hour, as I trace cyrillic letters on the inside of your wrist.

Then back to the station for the last train home and we have plans for the night, guidebooks have been consulted and routes sketched and maps perused: but the train waiting is packed, jammed, every window gasping faces and every carriage breathing bodies. We ask if this is for the right destination: once, twice, three times we are told it is, and so we have no choice but to force ourselves into the nearest doorway, pushing by a salt-faced man stood with three infuriated dogs that snap kiss at our fingers as we pass.

We stand where two carriages connect surrounded by bodies and as the train jolt sighs all the lights go out and images of holocausts and transportations fill my head as I am thrown against you. Then your arms are round my back and you lean back into the concertina side and draw me into you as if you were rowing, and my face is an obulus from yours. Our eyes adjust to the dark and we look into each other and we see what lies beneath and we dance there.

Satis: That's all. For two hours, that's all. The train moans through the night and some people get off and more get on, shifting shades in our umbra. At one point three little girls appear there, all in identical rose-pink cloaks, and the oldest one looks at us and giggle whispers with the smallest, but the middle sister stares silent with serious hungry eyes and has to be dragged away, looking behind her still. We see an old man, a young woman with a sleep-curled baby, and a teenage girl who texts and silently weeps, thumbs alternating between writing messages and blocking the run of her tears.

Sometimes I'm aware of your cock twitching against my belly; often my hands dip into your clothes to melt merge in the warmth of your skin; once I turn so my back is your front, and your fingers clasp and squeeze under my breasts, as my nipples bloom and I feel the cotton cling between my thighs.

But mainly there is no I, no you, no my no yours. Mainly there is just us.

Kiss me, Hardy

My mother was let down by a barman, and my sister was the result. Well, possibly that’s what happened: we never talked about it. My family was very polite: not for us sharing, screaming, kissing, singing round the piano and punch-ups at christenings. My dad had two ways of showing he loved me - and he did, very much: he left half a mars bar outside my bedroom door religiously every Sunday morning; and he saved me the cream from the top of the milk bottle for my cereal.

Mrs A.N. Other Example: my mother was the recipient of various pig-related ornaments, tea towels, scarves, magnets for every birthday christmas mother’s day from the whole family for the first 20 years of my life. It was only then, as she lay dying on the lino, that she shared the fact that she was not particularly fond of things porcine: of course, they were very intelligent animals, but beyond she actually preferred cats.

Thus spaketh she the great revelation of her dying moments. I dwell on this often, twist turning it in my mind, trying to get it in the light. Had this injustice been building up over the years? Did I mishear? Was she intending to follow this up with a more important secret? And if this was her most important secret, what kind of life did she have?