Zoetry

Home again with each in-breath

Grounded with the out

Your toes spread out rooting you in the grass

Supine and melted by the pool on a summers day burning so hot it costs too much to perfect your posture

People

Everywhere

Mammals at a watering hole

See them move and be and breathe and laugh and bend and drink and smoke and carefully rub all the different brands of sun cream that each country favours into the shoulders of a loved one

If bodies are simply bodies

Then your body must simply be so too

I feel your hands once more around my

Throat

I thought I threw you out

But you haunt me in my joy

Grip tightening

Blackening edges

Oh, but I’ve painted

Let me protect you from the sins you’ve made do and mended

Am I not visibly mended?

In the spotlight of a forced spring

All the eggs I laid bore no yolk.

The private post with all the wishes for everything laid out before me now

Like mismatched beautiful china

And I glow

And I burst with it

And I cry

And I connect the moments in time between then and now

Of hope and sheer gratitude that it came to pass at last

The audacity

The fucking audacity

Send me to sleep

And when I wake

The one with the tendrils of black.

The heaviest one that’s been there all along

That’s worn like a giant back pack?

Anthropomorphic

So good at distorting

Whispering a cacophony of shame

The silence was stark

And the world was so dark

When I finally gave you a name

I could no longer move

I had nothing to prove

What was the point anymore

So in you came creeping

That familiar feeling

Weighing down just like before

No I need to replace this

I cannot erase this

You can’t just keep filling the gap

You take more than you give

I just want to live

I have to be free of this trap

I guess I should thank you

I see what you tried to do

But you’ve not been a very good friend

I hope we will both learn

She asks nothing in return

It holds it

Eats it

Rots within

It’s all my fault

Why do I continue to catch the giant “why” that floats around constantly when my body divorces itself

When my limbs aren’t listening any more

I hold it

I eat it

I rot from within

I am not a child and I know better

But I don’t have an answer and I know I won’t get one

Why do I fail to divorce the concepts of

It comes from your brain

And

Its all in your head

They are not in a healthy relationship

I hold it

I eat it

I expect them once a month

When my dopamine levels are too low to fully reject them

Often they arrive when the candles are lit and I have signalled the end of the day to the dark

They are like drowning within your own carcass

Like you could lie down on the forest floor and have the moss consume you like a hollowed, rotting tree

Sometimes they arrive on a drizzly Thursday and you open the door to one that takes all day to unwrap

It only feels welcome once the candle is lit again and you can sigh into the dwindling day

Heavy

Daytime is full of invisible expectations

There is no room for the space that grieving takes up

It came on

And I went back in time for a moment

Stock Still but moving at the same time

Walking backwards towards the source ready to smash skip with the power of all the memories swirling

But

Then there was a pause

Just a moment

And something in me thought

No

Loud and clear

I am here

I am now

And I will do things anew reclaim things as my own again in this moment

So I listened

And there was a swell in my chest that burst as a sob

But then there was singing

And I felt today take the hand of yesterday and say

The sun bakes through the glass making a fierce aroma of human sweat mixed with petrol and something metallic

A playlist of songs that make me feel like I could easily assassinate someone fills my ears and it usually does a good job of leaving the seat beside me on the bus

Empty

I position myself so the young men behind me can’t stand any closer to the kid who is melting and giving off very overwhelmed signals

Like he might just be screaming in his head

When he fans himself with his hand desperately I stand so the exaggerated wafts of my hand fan cool him too

I don’t know if he notices

The anticipation of the busses arrival has people moving even closer

It creates an unnecessary claustrophobic jam that seems to suck the rest of the available air away

Some weird man takes a badly concealed photo of me as he crosses

I stare him down as he passes and scowl over my sunglasses

Prick

I take up space

I don’t fix my face

The bus arrives at last and provides no real salvation to the heat

I weep in the moments of joy and

Sigh with the sunsets

The tempestuous unrest

The unreal mix of light and dark

You stand barefoot on the grass in the blinding heat and a growl echoes to warn you the flowers will drink soon

The ecstasy of it

Sublime

And oh, to sleep to the soundtrack of frantic rain breaking the heat at last