Tag: northern writers

I’m thinking about ripping my heart out

today I started missing you
so here’s how I’ll deal with that
I’ll stick my hand
in my mouth
down my throat
and tug my heart out
in ten seconds flat

plop it in the sink
and no more pain
won’t feel the throb again
drop it like jelly
and watch it drain
like a red teabag
only not quite the same

there’ll be no ache
just a hollow space
but better that than a break
or a wrenching, tearing,
sinking black hole –
better out than in
for my health’s sake

and my heart will just sit
in the sink for a bit
while I go to Tesco’s,
finish work, eat toast,
watch films, get fit
and feel nothing but nothing
not good but not shit

I’ll leave all that missing
with the washing up
under a dripping tap
and not give a fuck
as I pass by the kitchen
never again fussed
by the thought of us kissing

What it’s like to be lonely at night

at first, it is faint
like some underlying
sourness of milk
a lacking fullness
the creeping sense
of error before
the realisation of one

without a burst
there is a drip
a leak in the dark
it saturates you
turning your sheets
cold and leaden
and you wake up 

flooded

Time Spent and Trampoline

He’d been watching the kids play across the street for a while before the police had showed up. He didn’t know what time it was exactly, but knew she’d be here soon. She always came round after her Thursday shift.

The sun had dipped slightly out of sight, but the chill of evening had not yet cloaked the estate. In the distance, he could still hear lads kick a football outside the chippy. Washing no longer flapped on lines, but had yet to be taken in. The pubs hadn’t turned out, so he knew he had a while before his father returned, red-faced and heavy with lager. 

Near where he sat on the front step, pressed into the damp lip of an discarded Tennent’s, were the spent ends of three cigs. He calculated that he must have been perched there for at least 20 minutes when he saw the blues silently flickering towards the end of the road. 

The kids – two boys – were playing on a trampoline that took up the entirety of the square front yard of number 43. As they leapt about, it’s metal framework skittered and giggled across the concrete, echoing against the parallel walls of the estate. Two coppers exited the car. A man and a woman.

Continue reading “Time Spent and Trampoline”

This song reminded me of you

You probably already know about them:
where the group is from and how they banded,
what year their first EP came out,
if the lead guitarist is left or right handed.

Maybe you own a few of their albums,
perhaps you’ve known of them forever,
but this song reminded me of you
though we’ve never listened to it together.

We didn’t ever hear it in that place we like
where the barmen all wear pocket flowers,
and we never queued it on the juke box
that night we drank and laughed for hours.

And it wasn’t playing in your car
when you dropped me at central station,
but this song reminds me of you
and fills me with a blue elation.

So I reckon, several years from now,
needing something to get me through
I’ll play this song I’ve played so much
because it reminded me of you.

Lunar You

when we find ourselves
together, I glow

like the moon

sometimes, it seems
so perfect – a soft light

like the moon

our shapes wax
and do not wane

like the moon

but then I reach out
and can touch only air.

I wonder about the eclipse
of you and I, and turn pale

like the moon

Stage Fright

Gunther did not remember much about his death. In fact, the moment had passed somewhat uneventfully and, had it not been for the audience’s few gasps of surprise and an ill-timed giggle, he might have thought he’d dreamt it up altogether. 

Emily had been sat in the second row, slightly left of centre stage – not that he’d been able to see his wife during much of the performance itself. The stage lamps had masked the audience from the players with a brilliantly intense void of white light. He had felt the glow draw conspicuous beads of sweat to his forehead almost the instant he had taken his first steps on stage, like the rapid onset of fever. It had felt like being in the presence of a dying star. 

Continue reading “Stage Fright”

The Pigeon

I was seven when
the neighbour’s cat caught a pigeon
and dragged its twittering, tattered trunk 
through our kitchen.

The cat and her mouth,
now clean and empty, seemed innocent,
but the errant trail of crumpled feathers
gave it up.

We hid it from mam,
stayed up in shifts, fostered and fed it sugar
water from a spoon, playing each other’s 
game of nurse.

I remember the thrill
waiting for the magical renewal we were
led to expect: a resurgence promised that
would never come.

It fell still then,
its beak soaked, sticky with sugar, as its
drowned and silent body lay between us,
ruined and scrap.

Sometimes I wake from 
shadowed dreams to see the smothered thing
in its throes, and I do not sleep. We were not
what you think.

Some Give

I don’t feel bad about how
the world might be ending –
and I don’t feel guilty,
if that’s what you’re getting at.

I’m more concerned about how
I can feel myself bending –
a little like this, at first
and also, somehow, like that.

Brother

When it gets late, we watch Cops on TV,
once all the rest have made their way to bed.
Then you make cheese on toast, and I make tea –
we feel inclined to sit up late, instead –
and though our conversation is quite plain,
you’ll show me something funny on your phone,
and when we laugh our ribs vibrate with pain,
as though at something we should have outgrown.
At three or four o’clock we start to shrink;
my tired mind begins to wonder whether
you’ll think about us sitting here, in sync,
when you and I no longer live together.
For me, it’s that I’ll miss, though it seems trite –
when we watch Cops together late at night.