Playing

It began with phrases

I would reuse them, increase them for occasion

Let my tongue locate feeling

‘I really feel for you’ I would say, like a friend did

I  lied, titled my head to one side

As I had seen in the films. I talked about films

Like the text in magazines, filled

Silence with clichés, camera stills

Became role-play.  I willed a voice

From memory into mine

Trembling, tripping through time

‘I am truly envious’ – even though I was not.

I am haunted by memories

Of a teacher who spoke

In tones as cut-clear as a pitcher

Serving ice-water at lunch

Which froze our lips over

-          I could only smile dumbly with every sip.

Now I intend to drink in

Yet still I drop, clichés and clench

To the arms which still rock –

They hold bracelets not, handed down, hot

Like the pen between fingers, making shapes over

The box which says ‘sign here’

The recycled gesture

The recycled thought

The first few words recycled

Slide through the throat

What do you want

Is an odd question

From when we are children

-              The trill of annoyance

Irritable, launched

By the teacher who once made you

Stand in the corner

‘what do you want?’.

I wanted to be an author

But that was not what she meant

Meaning – ‘why are you being so awful?’

I wanted knowledge, friends

But nothing belonged here

I am trying to get something off my chest

It isn’t working

I bring the subject up slowly,

Thickening near my neck,

Hurting. It could be age

Not yet an adult

Skin still inflamed by clichés,

Rage – can even have positive meaning

Rage rage rage rage

laughing laughing laughing as the kettle cries

It had all the props for an appropriate life

The ladelling, the block of knives

(teeth slotted into gaping holes)

Noticed the weight of feet against the tiles

The newspaper sheets just soaking up

The confession dropped, this liquid life.

Why

Broken the room dedicated to

The welding of energy for the day

Their stoking to inflame the cheek

The fork amplified in its embrace.

Perhaps the years of pangs of worth

I believed, were naive,  brittle

Thinking of forest fires upon the screen

And looked for love in what was metal.

The scores still settling in the skin

 Of the goose my mother plucked  with her own hands

It was the softest they have ever felt

For death tenders there the hands of man

 And still does now

I flick the switch

The kitchen anticipates it’s light

But instead, the kettle hilt

Liquidless, and left now, to boil dry.

I lean against the granite surface

And watch the kettle slowly start to gape

Steam fizz from underneath the plastic hatch

The deliciousness of seeing something break.

No longer am I the simple child

Who assumed  kitchen as a place of love

No longer do I seek to find

Nor know when I have had enough

 My finger still, upon the switch

The kettle shrieks, then screams, then asks

In acrid streaks of blue-black smoke

If it  better to remove the mask

It has assumed

And I have bought

From the passed-down familial sense

That to be domestic is to be ‘dutiful;

To produce, they call it ‘consequence’.

The clean attempt at cutting space

Though my finger trembles on the tab

As the kettle threatens at the mains

And screams and screams and belches ash

For even it has found its moisture

Which has managed in itself to move

And lost beyond the tabled effort

In the attempt to assemble what was love.