#flipped eye

This is a recording of Diazepam Diaries. My audio/video skills are very amateur so forgive me, please?

Today I am that moment when you look in the mirror and see only that one spot on your entire face. That cluster of blackheads on your nose, those few stray hairs between your brows. Today I am that hungover moment in a tube station, when you are scared your own organs might dishonour you, rack against your ribs and throw you onto the tracks all guts and squished electricity. Today I am corduroy rubbed backwards on your thigh on the way to work. I am the frizz of a curled eyelash when you catch yourself with a pranked lighter outside a squat party, trying to impress the girl opposite you chewing her bubblegum. Today I am still cherryade at a school disco. A text message which won't deliver. I am a missed appointment, an irredeemable voucher. A dropped call. Today I am a retracted comment in a newspaper by an ex-Labour minister. That empty vowel sound of woosh as a door slams closed.

Imagine two things separate from one another, like Congress and swans, or maybe a jar of honey and an umbrella that takes three attempts to open. Take them both and substitute x and y, let them equal z and you’ll be fizzing. See how they shift, become a congress of swans, a honeyed umbrella. Up there is the sun in the corner of the poem beating tangential rays. Now, think of a third thing, think butter or beacon, or love, and watch as z squares. The congress of swans eating butter; a honeyed umbrella: a beacon to a lover in a crowd of shadows on a rainy day. The sun hides behind the grey sky; the umbrella is yellow, amber, orange. The swans on the lake plough through tiny waves; the butter’s on the bread, thrown by the kid, your lover’s kid, who sees you across the water, chucks up his arm into the air, waves his hand and screams Mum, Mum, Mum.

Wake in the morning and weigh your heart

against hangover scales and remnant palms.

  Do not wash to hold him against your skin

sigh and feel the weight of everything …

  As another comes with blue-eyed guilt, bed

dressed in morning grubbery in your mind,

  hear his nonsense sounds and taste, smell,

feel the reek of his five a.m. breath. Kiss

  let the image shift, ripple, flex, awash again

with dew-dawn, on a cliff looking out at sea

  as two bodies bring in the sun and sink

inside, retreat your hands behind your ribcage

  with fear and text, text your other-love

with furious hands as though he can tell

  through satellites and instant-time

what you have done. Give him extra kisses.

  When he replies with just one,

give him none.

We lie, two statues scared scared of skin.

All the days to tread till I meet you. All the miles walking together around kitchens, homes and showrooms clutching our Tesco/Morrisons/Waitrose-trolley-full-dreams. Swearing whilst our kids watch us, getting in a huff over what type of juice is good. I’m young; I’m old, still thinking this. Every stolen pillow is a memory out of reach on a shelf with steampressed showers, clammyfucked meek and sweet. On that ledge there’s your bottom shaped in tea leaves, stained mugs and all the silent faceless dreams I’ve had. In nightcoiled alleys you’re lamppost-flashing, winking a morse code language from a daylight, daybreak, future-never-seen and there at a place I can’t reach you’re dancing, smiling all-knowing because my feet can’t walk through time yet. Try as they might I can’t get the dance right. This could be five hundred poems, and it has and it will, every sky I’m under is over you, too; every time I sleep I’m eyetight, thinking of you clearly. All these drinks I’ve drowned, toasted dearly, dear. Every moment spent ticks towards our meeting, starbound, trapped, heavy, heaving. Kissing. Like this. x. And this. x. And this. x.