Grandpoems

Full Up

There is no shame in dining alone

because you’ll never be the only one

with a head full of tide

and a lung full of hum

to roll over that tongue with.

Grand

I

He was once the tallest policeman who knew how to be unafraid,

and now, still wearing a tie, he’s all dressed in beige,

standing alone out the front of a house that whispers,

painting the air with a wave that says,

‘I think of you every day.’

Ten years ago today, a child with a wonky smile,

I watched him crumble –

hands trembling in the hands of my mother

who has her mother’s hands.

His tie was there, and his hair, to match his expression,

was neatly flattened.

I couldn’t help but stare –

hope to never be consumed by a love such as his;

a love that should so completely,

so violently happen.

II

Ten years ago today I would have known you better

if it hadn’t have been for my oblivious age.

I’ve heard tell of times when you couldn’t leave the house

and I wonder when I’m stuck inside

if it’s you who might have been able to explain why

I sometimes can’t help but hide.

If I’d known we were to grow so alike

I could have asked you questions,

prepared for these lonely hibernations.

I’ve got you buried in my bones and,

some say, on the end of my nose,

and don’t worry about your village policeman

because each day I’m tugging on the string

between our tin cans.

Twenty-Oh-Four

This is the room where we couldn’t finish our homework

because we were too busy learning eye contact.

Here, dizzy on my dad’s homemade wine,

the colour of Ribena, dangerous as gin,

we slept dead until Sundays began to darken,

to find all of our friends had gone home hours ago.

We played hide and seek

with words we believed only existed written down;

here we learned what our mouths are for,

both the escape route and the cage.

This is the room in which we thought we were growing old,

where we got stuck on one another

in chequered pyjamas

before I could grab a hold.

This dandelion sky

is fooling me into thinking

that if I could just jump far enough to high five a cloud

I’d get a mouthful of that sweet smelling powder

my grandmother wore until the day she died.

Now that it's November -

From the Bridge

I come here in every weather to see if it feels different.
I come here to feel the vibrations of scattered birds
landing around my feet, taking flight through my hair.
The slow water gives me exactly what I need -
blurred reflections of the very same day -
comfort blanket miles away to a sleepy sea.
I know I'm boxed in, often underground, breathing heat,
but here I become a much tinier me -
one with fewer words for it all,
one with eyes for it all, and teeth,
but a me without much else to speak of.

The shock of it all.

Throughout our lives we are taugh what to value,
but how can it be that after all these years
all it takes is standing on a bridge
looking beyond ourselves,
learning where the edge is,
to shake and to shake any sense that remains?
All I can do, watching the water crawl beneath,
is wait for an outer shudder
to warm myself awake once more.




The Letters of Words / The Words of Letters

You always had my address,
it topped every letter I ever sent
and each one I never sent,
and now that I'm spent with writing it down,
tired of all this pressing on my crown,
it's dawning that there aren't the words for half the things I ever meant.




Accidental Orchard

If you catch yourself eating the whole apple, cyanide seeds and all,
don't be one bit afraid of the orchard that might start to grow in your belly,
or the fruit that someday will fall.
Resting by day, flourishing to bloom during the night;
playing Grandmother's Footsteps with the pull of the moon,
it'll sprout in rhythm with your sleep.
It will finally come to fruition at the moment you change beat -
after a pause for photosynthesis -
when dry eyes and sunlight dare to meet.




When You Disappeared Behind My Eyes

The night when the power diffused and you couldn't wake up,
I dreamed of you, fully clothed, no white sheets,
all put back together, tubeless between the teeth.
You were walking away from me
and your back never looked so defiant.
You couldn't turn or wouldn't turn around to see what you were doing to me,
because wherever it was you were heading was illuminated
with needing you more than I did.
You continued walking but it was never certain whether you ever arrived
and that's why your sister and your wife were still waiting for you at the hospital,
watching for a flicker of light from behind your eyes.

Digits, negative space, and trying to stay still.

Sleeping Lions

At the first birthday parties I learned how to be still as a hungry lion hiding,
and when I can't stop moving, these nights,
I picture myself a big cat being poked in the ribs by my mother
who is saying, 'It's time to go home.'




The Long Walk to Stillness

The negative space around my shape still remembers how it feels to be anticipated.
As it is now, the blanket that sits snug around my mind is unravelling one stitch at a time,
facing an early Winter with nothing but a single last thread for warmth.
And at the core, I'm no longer really here.
If I stand still for long enough in a busy place,
I forget my limbs and the mind forgets its hurry.
Everything slows and the focus of emergency is abandoned.
And I remind myself the heart has no part in this.
It fuels the blood that keeps my insides moving,
that aches these shaking limbs, yes,
but as soon as the digits are still,
the extremities, the eyes,
everything is lost to negative space,
who knows what it is to tessellate.
An admirable lady once told me that everything hurts the most when it's coming back to life,
and she'd be right.




Having Turned A Corner

There was a time in the Summer of our lives
when I held my head under a tap in the corner of a field.
My brain froze for a moment.
I looked at you, grinning back at a dripping me,
and I thought, 'this is it, this is us, this is you and me,'
and so that image is forever preserved,
frozen, in the corner of a field in a flooded corner of my mind
in that, the Summer of our lives.



The Middle of the Night Knitting Circle For the Incredibly Alone

What we'd do is not sit in a circle
for a circle is indulgent, assuming,
cuts corners with no escape route.
Four straight sides around the edges of a small room,
space between, space for elbows and four millimetre needles,
and far enough to humour a sadness each to our own.
The curtains will be musty with the scent of old, too high to reach,
they'll be set wide apart or pulled in, shut,
keeping the cold out and the sorrow in,
or the space out but a chill within.
What we'd do is talk about how there is nothing any of us can really say;
nothing anyone can do,
how it's only us who know the size and shape of our own negative space.
We will not discuss absentees,
or the trembling of our hands and our knocking knees,
and we will keep our minds still,
exorcise our energies out through busy digits
and into every little knit, each imperfect purl,
into a tea cosy for a loved one,
a blanket for a child we've yet to meet.




(Untitled)

Gently stirring in the morning,
words leaving me in ribbons,
I feel everything, as if it were all new.
Under this weather that's only ever some shade of rust,
I'm still thinking of you and me,
and this is the furthest away from home I've ever been.

It's the smell of cheap meat cooking,
and the shock of a fox looking larger than in the story books.
When the wind is up
and the slow breath of far away cars is low,
I'll stand outside with my eyelids high
and know that what I know is all I know.

Shells 2

Your breath goes steady into the dark, warm, setting the pace for your sleep.

Here lies me, amid another breed of darkness;

dark as ever, blinding as always, but without rhythm.

In the quiet we listen hard. Pressing one ear, covering the other,

we listen to one another’s shells;

I strain to hear the shapes that the air around your breath makes,

all the colours of the dark emerging like a bleeding watercolour.

Meanwhile you’ll be folding the blank space into shapes that could be my shadow,

and here is where we tessellate, trying to forget the space.

Vanishing Point

I’ll watch you until you reach the vanishing point,

Waving all the while, just in case –

I’ll keep one ear to the ground,

feeling your footsteps fluttering far away

in the hope that –

As you drive across the bridge, I’ll climb the wall

to see you rise and comfortably fall;

I’ll keep two fingers on your wrist

for every time I almost missed you

until we’re doing wonky high tens, if we have to.

And if you ever do the opposite of staying here,

if you find yourself in the unsafe place,

I’m never going to let you disappear.

The only language

is the silence in the noise and the roar and the scream;

the calm in the thunder, in the storm of the train.

Walking and Waving

With a pocketful of crumbs I set off.

Keeping my head down

and focusing on the ground that moves towards me

I walk away with one long wave that paints the air.

My hair trails behind me like a sail,

my coat follows my feet like a tail,

and the fate of my map is left to a pile of embers

in a place I know I may never find again.

Treading Water


We spent a long day treading water ten minutes at a time;
learnt how to breathe through one another,
live through one another underneath the salt,
keep warm hugging nothing but our knees,
keep smiling showing nothing but our crashing teeth.
Between exhaling life in through my mouth
and coming up from the depths to look at my eyes,
you said, 'Now, if we face a shipwreck, we know we'll survive.'

From the Fort


Wrapped inside the smell of you, all your being,
the womb like warmth of clothes too large for me -
a child looking into the night
from the sleepy safety of a homemade fort,
I make believe.
I make myself believe that I'm inside out,
that I cradle all your being
and all my being
in the muffled dark of my womb.
He hears nothing but the echoes of air
shifting worlds away,
breathing itself in and sighing around us.
I make believe the colour of his cheeks -
their distant blush deep inside me
and the silence of his sleep -
an internal tide
pulling and stretching me into a reflective slumber,
until our heartbeats sound in chorus;
a cappella; question; answer;
the gentle chaos of a loving conversation.

Homing Pigeon

with your head in my lap in the morning

this is one of the ways I love you the most:

everything warm and malleable,

slow moving

through honey,

asking whether planes still fly on bonfire night