I don't want to think of war,
not ever, and instead my eyes are slamming
like screen doors and
my mind growing, growling,
my non-existent soul
pleading for me to affirm it
because it is like the tree that fell but never fell
for nobody saw or heard it fall
said the lumberjack
with his broad chest.
I don't want to think of forests,
squirrels with no home,
and I am thinking about
the squirrel that used to come
to our door every day,
my sister leaving food out for it and
the neighbors' cat
that once scratched her
and she cried because she didn't understand
that catsare not malicious,
just cats. I will find you
in another life when we are both cats.
Shape-shifting and time-travelling, is that
how I will remember these days?
and will I forget
these days, I don't think I'll risk
another, these days,
I am thinking about
flashbacks to last month, the one before,
the one before, and trip trip trip
back to May, when everything was dead
and I should have died then
and I should have died.
My handwriting is messy.
There was a spark that used to glow
in me and my eyes and words
but it was never there, really,
it was a trick, an optical illusion,
I was a magician, swallowing mirrors
and smoke, and pulling out
white rabbit decoys,
distractions out of hat
that is upturned like the rest of my world is
and was and no use trying to tilt it back,
smoking joints and leaning
along an awkward axis.
A heartbeat like an insect
hitting the windowpane.
The dead moth my cousin kept
in a box. My hands in the dirt
finding worms under the shed.
My hands in the dirt
in the flowerpot my father
blew up with fireworks.
The smell of melting plastic,
Thinking about the proper way
to destroy an American flag.
Destruction with instruction,
destruction with common sense.
I think of bluebell wood and
wonder if there are bluebells there
this time of year, remembering
snowdrops in the cold of winter.
Orange bottles and white boxes
underneath my grandmother's sink.
I drank the Oramorph like it was juice
and didn't count the pills as I finished
them and my grandmother's trapped nerve
was something I could understand
being trapped like that.
In the hospital, everything was gluey
and viscous, and I collapsed
outside the bathroom
and the girl in the bed beside me
had cut up arms and I remember
my mother's face wheeling past her
on the bed. I remember picking
at the tube in my arm.
I am not thinking about that anymore.
My thoughts are not my own.
My body is alive, brought back
and I live in it now wholly.
Everything is green before it's not.
The storms are still here
but they have different names.
Hurricane Jane became Hurricane Kate.
The clouds don't rain, they just brew
nebulae under the fingers
that pluck guitar strings like dandelion heads.
Each winter it seems I lived
like wouldn't survive and every summer
there was the sort of disappointed realisation
that I always do. Ungrateful brat,
hiss hiss, take your precious life
and don't try and break what isn't yet
fully formed. You have lived nine lives,
you malicious cat, now you don't have
any left to throw away.
I hide my face when people talk to me
my eyes flit away when other eyes try
to meet them. Still, I am appreciating now
the lucky little breaks
that are going to be
what fixes me.
Recipe for whatever: half me half you,
one cup bitter the other cup too sweet.
