Tag: Friends

I should have been in Berlin

My friend Josette, whom I love dearly, has (and she would say this herself) the worst luck when it comes to travel; weird and wonderful dramas abound whenever she tries to head off somewhere. This month she went to Berlin and her suitcase didn’t arrive. In fact it took an age to arrive; most of her trip to be precise. When we spoke about it I said I’d love to be able to speak with objects when things like this happen and started to speculate about what the suitcase would say about its journey…and sat down to write this silly poem. 

Ah Columbus, you never had these issues
your bag rode high on the tumultuous seas
it couldn’t get lost inside pesky air fissures.

As for me, we’d said goodbye at old Gatwick
she’d seen me off and gone straight to the bar
(I knew the routine, it was all pretty slick).

Stuck with a tag that was bound for Berlin,
imagine my surprise when I arrived in…
Lisbon, Tallin then finally Turin!

All those unexpected places and curious faces
I was vulnerable, alone, weighed with the guilt
that I had all her clothes, her make-up, shoelaces.

Oh for a pair of legs to get to the gate
I’d not have left it to the hapless air staff
I’d not have left it to God and to bloody old fate

but as it was I was stuck
(just another holiday drama)
all the while knowing she’d feel like a schmuck.

Josette, if I’d could I wouldn’t have seen
(this my apology to you, my blonde queen)
all those old cities and silly bland bits in between

because quite honestly it was all a bit boring, mundane
I didn’t see anything at all to be fair, to be sure
just me and the dreary old back of a plane.

I thought of you often, you must forgive me my sin
that I left you with just the clothes you stood in
I came when I could, even if it turned out
that I was too late; you were already leaving
that beautiful city we all call Berlin.

 

 

 

 

 

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Poppy

My dearest friend Zoe has a two year old named Poppy and it was a pleasure to spend the weekend with them recently. Young children don’t really feature in my life so it was a real novelty to play with her and witness her growing (and expansive) imagination. This is dedicated to her.

We stride through parklands of Living Room

Out to where balls can be thrown up, up to the clouds.

And the decking outside is a sandy dune

where we jump from the pier to the sea.

We swim through the treacherous high waves that is grass

and ponder the weeds that are jellyfish.

Dodging crab-like splodges of mud underfoot

We wade our way back to the front,

where rocking horse carriages wait us

so we can travel round roundabout circular roundabouts.

Later at night I sit mindless,

Popped back to reality by phones, crying and diaries,

But in your mind the play still comes like a flooding

Gabbling tales of giants up ladders

and mice sitting on top of your knee.

There’s a dolly that needs fed in her buggy

and a snack that she’d like to be aubergine.

And all of this comes from Poppy’s young head,

I wonder what dreams are like when she’s asleep in her bed!

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The Clock of the Long Now

I’ve recently headed back to London to meet up with old friends and spend time with my family. Two of my oldest friends, Lois whom I met when I was 7 at the Church my family attended in West London and Rebecca, whom I’ve known since my first day at grammar school, met me at the Science Museum for a day. We all love Space and spent a considerable amount of time in the ‘Exploring Space’ hall where ‘The Clock of the Long Now’, also called the 10,000-year clock, is kept. This is a proposed mechanical clock designed to keep time for 10,000 years and the two-meter prototype is on display at the Science Museum in London.

August brought us together;
colliding microcosms in the Hall of the Cosmos,
South Kensington.

As Hebe pokes buttons with sticky fingers
I remember the one in the pews
and the other in an icy school annexe.

Time’s hands tick tricks on us all;
as I find myself questioning  those childhood beliefs
and I still have to learn to look at an empty sky
and no longer believe in trees filled with angels.

Can God really stay constant?

The Museum looks different from how I remember it
and our bodies tell tales of 105 years of living.
‘The Clock of the Long Now’ stands unmoving before us
but in those milliseconds we have changed again
and somewhere in the universe another path has been walked
another fate has been dealt
and what comforts me in moments like this

is that change can be hard and unforgiving

but what remains constant is me, you and you.

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A Farewell to Friendship

So much is made of romantic relationships and how to deal with the unsettling grief and sorrow that comes along when they break down. But what of friendships? What do you do when you realise someone you were close to no longer feels happy about being friends with you? What are the rules and where is the guidance for that kind of confusion, guilt and distress? It feels like unchartered territory.

I came across the following article today when I was tinkering with my poem. Not only is it bang on topic but the title’s reference to Vietnam was scarily attuned to what’s been happening these last few months.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nancy-doyle-palmer-/a-friend-is-someone-who-likes-you_b_3488081.html

We will return the books we once borrowed,
and sports bra memories of runs side by side.

Stuff them in the pigeon holes that
represent our silent communication.

We will take down the photos
and tuck them somewhere safe

or tear them up and feed them
to the bin beneath the kitchen sink.

We will absently use the gifts we gave one another
feathered pens, books and twee camera cases from Japan,

purposely forgetting who wrapped them carefully
in pink paper and in crepe.

We will delete the emails and messages
and not share our updated skype addresses

to keep secret our new contact details
in recognition of what we couldn’t resolve.

We will sit at opposing ends
of tables at social functions

in the theatre on the last day of work
we will try to avoid each other’s eyes

as we part ways in public.
We can try to erase all those years of friendship but

your email address will still come up when I log on
and I will still have flashes of you looping your arm through mine.

I will stop myself from visiting you across the corridor
to share my news and trivia.

Like a needle and a thread
we sewed a tempestuous history:
the glorious glittering colours

and then the later skies of bruising black.

We will continue to chew away

at the tapestry of our friendship.

Gnawing away at the pictures;

unravelling it, unravelling it.

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Tides 

(with a little bit of a nod to Anne Sexton)
I have always been there, my friend.
A monument of black rock draped in weed,
armed with sharp gnarly edges:
11149165_10206041370090165_1099411680_nscratchy and easy to graze.

I’ve always been there, my friend.
I’ve had many visitors come for a moment:
The one that wanted to grieve on me;
The doctor whose fingers traced a trail in the cracks;
Pebbles from Poland that cemented the fractures.
(I really did think that the pebbles would stay –
until the day they were dashed and crumbled away.)

I’ve always been there, my friend.
Long before the tide dropped you sudden alongside.
You’ve stuck around longer than most.

But now I find that you’re edging away
as I stay fixed and unmoving.
Sometimes you edge a bit backwards
but that’s only when the moon is still high.

I know that the time is fast coming
(I’ve always known it would happen)
but in low tides I find myself thinking:
Was I just a convenient shady location?
An anchor in strange, stormy waters?
Too dull really to be of benefit
when there is so much more that delights you much better.

I’ll always be here, my friendrock
But I guess I will have to let you go.
And I’ll watch as you drift far, far away.

But I’ll be here.
Always here.
A black rock covered in weed and the brine.

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Bile

I recently learned that my Godfather had passed away. None of my family had seen or heard from him for a number of years after a messy divorce left him bitter and upset that my parents refused to take sides. He died after having had a total Gastrectomy (removal of the stomach) some ten years ago and clearly had been living under the black cloud of cancer for a long time. His death made me wonder whether those years of anger and resentment had somehow manifested themselves in his physicality.


For J.M.

The  room is vast. I have walked miles, days to see him laid semi-conscious on wooden planks suspended by a chain at the other end of the room. When I first arrived, the whiteness blinded me; BILEonce the door had been shut it had seemed like there had been nothing to focus on until I moved a couple of inches away from the entrance and my eyes fell upon the dark spot ahead. With no landmarks or clocks, it is like time has been suspended but I know it has been eons since I began to walk towards him because my stomach twists in hungry protest and my throat rasps with every intake of breath.

There is nothing apart from the white that billows and sometimes weaves around us occasionally so I can focus completely on him. A shrivelled cocoon that used to house a man. Now it is a mass of bones thinly wrapped in tissue paper skin, with a mop of dark hair threaded grey as a grotesque bow to complete the package. He lies supine, sore eyes facing the cloud-like shapes above us, refusing to make eye contact with me even though I’ve struggled to walk this far to see him.

‘I’ve waited years to see you. To clear this all up.’

He turns his head away to face the decades that await us all. Even now, he cannot bring himself to speak to me.

‘Please, face me.’

He turns and I start in horror as I watch small mites crawl from orifices of his decaying body armed with needles and thread to sew his mouth shut. His eyes rage at me defiantly.

‘Fine,’ I say and look beneath the wooden planks of his makeshift bed. He squirms in anger and resentment but can no longer shout out to me, his protestations fall helpless against the fleshy wall of his gums. There it is. In a large glass bottle suspended in a thick bilious fluid is his stomach. Deformed and rotten with cancer, it was removed a decade before but in this half way corridor it has been partially reunited with him. In fact, the intestines have pushed the rubber bung out and are starting to feel along the chains to find him again. As I watch with morbid curiosity the small intestine finds him and, using his belly button as a handle, pulls open the door to his torso to reveal a blackened liver that looks at me ruefully from a myriad of pustules. Hastily, I pull the bottle out and hold it aloft. The stomach blinks at me and I begin to walk back towards the entrance a kilometer. Howls of anguish echo. He knows. He knows what is about to be said.

I crouch down and look intently at the bottle, twisting it to see how it fares in different lights and angles. The speckles and spores of cancer change tone but always remain at base level, the colour of a thin gruel.

The stomach blinks again and from the lacerated tubes spells out the following tale…

‘When it first happened he couldn’t bring himself to talk to you because he felt as though he had failed at work, at home; it wasn’t how things were meant to have been; he was destined to be the high-flyer, Alpha-Male, self-made man. The disappointment was crippling. But as the years marched on it became harder and harder to turn things around and speak to you. Pride and resentment consumed him. Every event you took for granted; Christmas with your family, another anniversary, was a bitter and empty meal . He fed me only lies, anger and fear that served to starve me. Eventually I succumbed and couldn’t pretend to digest it all anymore. I leaked the years of poisons and they destroyed him. Within days he had me removed and blamed me for his predicament. ’

Guiltily the stomach contracts until I can no longer see the eye. Sadly, I realise this is all the closure I am ever going to get.

Thoughtfully, I walk back to where he now lies half sleeping, his pale lidded eyes half closed as though squinting at something bright. Gently, I return the stomach to its place beneath his hanging bed. Gently, I touch his hand and walk back to 1987.

As I emerge through the door I’m in a large drawing room in Cobham, Surrey. A Christmas tree glitters in one corner, John Lennon is playing softly from the play room down the hall and with a start I see the white again weaving its line across my line of vision. What reality am I really in I wonder and then he pats me on the back, hands me a drink before walking towards his son, Jamie and I realise it’s his cigar smoke, always was, his calling card (the smell lingered for days). Emma skeleton keysappears in the doorway holding Georgina’s hand and I have this strange feeling that I’m suddenly disengaged and watching this all through someone else’s memories. It’s like I’m watching him laugh and move with ease around our families and friends as though they are all in a cinematic image and I find myself wishing I didn’t know what happens next. That it turns out differently for us all.

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Frog with One Eye

My parents have retired to Brixham, Devon and when I was back in the UK last summer, my close friend Zoe came to visit us. We spent a very wet afternoon in nearby Dartmouth and came across a poor little frog with, surprisingly, one eye.

For Zoe

I wonder what Dartmouth looked like to you
the day we found you on the path in the park.
Was everything halved to you?
When we peered at your speckled and slimy green back
Did you only see half a face?
Did you look with an envy the colour of your skin
At our blinking curiousity?
Frog with one eye
You were the most original thing I spotted that day
Amongst the clothing boutiques
The chain stores and the boats;
the London contingent on their weekend away.
I felt a twinge of something like regret
not pity
as we went on our rainy way
that I didn’t have the courage to lift you
and hold you up so you could see
Dartmouth in its 360 degree scenery.
Frog with one eye
I hope whatever happened to you
You managed to hop back somewhere safe
and didn’t end up squashed underfoot
Cos someone with two eyes didn’t notice you

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Bookcase

Just before Ashlee had to leave Ho Chi Minh City and head back to Melbourne, she told me this great anecdote about period of time when she lived with her Grandmother but there wasn’t really room for her so they fashioned a ‘bedroom’ for Ashlee behind a bookcase. I loved that idea so much I had to write a poem about it!

For Ashlee

Here, but not here;
somewhere between Alain de Botton and Theroux.
Trying to sleep
eyes tight shut
but the light filters on
shooting past fibres and glue binding
to lift your lids reminding you
that behind the bookcase is your makeshift space
within the confines of your grandmother’s living room.
Nestled snugly in quilts and musty dust
‘Kath and Kim’ and the ‘News at Ten’ interrupt
the strains of ‘Anna of the North’ that you were listening to.
Mind set, focused on day-dreams and night-time descents,
life behind the bookcase is
private and yet not private.
A wooden veneer between day and night;
‘A Room of One’s Own’.
Yet not.
A small partition;
a hermitage for a girl
branching out slowly into
adulthood.
A cocoon
or life raft.
A trial for what’s to come.

Bookcase

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