Tag: ataraxicat

Middle 8

She had wanted to listen to that new Phoebe Bridgers album on the drive home from school. Just shy of 41 minutes, she knew she would be home before the penultimate track, but was prepared to sit in the car until its finish, if the album proved worth it.

She waited until she had driven out of the area entirely, before connecting Bluetooth and pressing the play button on her phone. The car stereo came slowly to life. She allowed it all to fade into obscurity, rounding the corner onto Fairfield: the gates of the school, the bus stop, the manicured hedgerow, and the smattering of parked Audi parents in gilets and floaty dresses, waiting for their kids.

NME had promised a sonic palette – something close to ethereal – and she would give the album her full attention.

But it was not to be. Looming in the distance, four yellow roadworks signs, and a subsequent diversion, had already interrupted some of the finer dissonances in Track 4, and the experience had, all at once, been marred. She pressed the power button on the car stereo and stared through the windscreen, listening only to the beginnings of flat patter on the glass, and waiting for the lights to go green. She would have to take Hedley, and avoid the A road altogether. 

Continue reading “Middle 8”

May Our Favourite People Never Turn Into Ghosts

May we still think of them
all of the time
and tell them cool things

like what good films
just came out on Prime
or that there’s 26 bridges
over the Tyne –
same number of albums
in Bowie’s lifetime

May we remember them
whilst we’re apart
and tell them daft things

like how you can’t hear
real music in the charts
that there’s nowt bitterer
than the human heart
or that shiver is the
collective noun for sharks

May we fear them
at the end of it all
and tell them sad things

like the 52 Blue whale
and it’s lonesome call
that your brother begged
Santa to make him tall
and how sunlight passes
across your bedroom wall

Earlier this morning, when you showed me a photo of how whales sleep.

Look at this, you said.

I saw a dozen grey torpedoes hung,
such monstrous baubles, in the depths
of the ocean, motionless
and unaltered by the heft
of water surrounding them.
Scattered indifferently,
their fleshy tonnes suspended
like great iron pendants, laid bare
to the perils of foe and flow
in a thalassic slumber.

We sat sipping tea in silent dread,
to think of such cryptic bed.

Dumb Luck Love Song

I’m drunker now than I ever was
before we saw this through

And I don’t know how to look in love
without looking at you

Because I find ways to put your name
anywhere I see a blank

I’ve touched the wood of hopefulness
each time my courage sank

And though nothing true is ever said
when lovers speak at night

We stay up late and laugh and sing
and to us that feels alright

Iron Lung

I heard it first
when I was a little girl
before I understood

I looked down at my chest

fancied I could hear the whirring
of mechanisms

a cold release in every rest
the squeezebox rise and fall
of springs that sprung
from two iron lungs

wondered if my other organs
were built the same,
drew pictures of the biotech

a silver chest
beneath my dress

years passed, we had a laugh
at the way a child can think

how their open minds
paint a picture
without the need for ink

I see now how we are
too fragile to be composed
of anything but paper
and glass

bone and heart
a crack and tear, here and there

until we break apart

A Drowning

Nobody screamed

not even when blackness came
and small waves bounced upward,
obscuring the shoreline from sight:
biting at the sky

not even when their necks numbed
and boreal steel filled their pockets, 
with weight like loss: the rush of 
fear in a vacuum

Still, nobody screamed

instead, their throats made small alarms,
guttural from behind clamped jaws;
layers of yellowing silt shifting until
they all saw sky

instead, the march of steady breath
fell out of step with each arterial beat;
one by one they hissed like matches
softly dipped in water

Volta

Beyond weak, she
was now spelling it out
for him, like a mother –
holding the small
fat hand of her
first born, pushing
the stubborn fingers
around, as they
clutched a pencil
to shape the letters
of his own name.

His name.

How many times
had she said it now?
Could she count
how many times
she had laughed it,
asked it, stuttered
and moaned it
and even once –
in the vacancy of
quiet hours –
called for it, loudly
across an ocean
of silence.