When there are monsters in the smell of freshly mown grass,

In the ring of a phone, in the knock of a door,

When you can only hide and wait for all to pass,

Who will ever come to know your core,

One says he can see you and all you can be,

But his errant belief does suffocate,

No vigour to strive, only to flee,

You know aloneness is your fate,

One says you’re lucky he puts up with you,

As you know no one else will,

And it’s all so fucked up, but still true,

As again you freeze so painfully still,

One loves you on and on,

Through every missed call, every unopened door,

And finally you feel that you’ve won,

Until he says he can love you no more,

You shouldn’t have a child you know,

But it happens and you try every day,

To make sure the monsters in the winds that blow,

Over her hold no sway,

And though you stay in solitude,

The child grows wild and fierce and free,

And though the monsters still intrude,

You are still happy.

“Are you writing a poem?” he asks, looking over her shoulder.

She tenses, but doesn’t hide it. Her need to have him see it, in spite of everything, is perverse.

“Is that supposed to be me in the fourth stanza? I never said I couldn’t love you. I said you couldn’t love anyone.”

She shrugs, it’s the same in her mind. He was supposed to understand that she loved differently, and he didn’t.

(She’s selfish. She was raised to believe that being anything less would make her weak, pathetic and most of all unworthy. She still tries her hardest, in her own way, to be loving).

There was a time he would’ve fixated, grown that line into a cosmic betrayal, she almost misses those times when he moves to the next paragraph.

“Is this you trying to convince yourself you’re a good parent? I know we were all worried you would be too heartless and cold and harsh, but you’ve frankly overcorrected the other way.”  

“Fuck you.” She briefly considers asking for a divorce, it feels like they’re ramping up towards one of their ‘let’s end it all’ phases again, but she doesn’t have the energy, especially considering they never go through with it. And likely never will. As much as they hate each other, they also love each other.

“The kid needs discipline.”

“The kid’s fine.”

(She hadn’t known how to be a loving parent, having no loving parents of her own to learn from. She's doing okay. But the thought of discipline makes bile rise in her throat: being told she looked fucking stupid when she cried, being ignored, watching her brother cower bruised and bloody. And she knows, that’s not what discipline is, but her spine knows otherwise).

“You love her, we all know you love her, she knows you love her. Teaching her how to behave doesn’t mean you love her any less, and doesn’t mean you love her flaws any less.”   

She purses her lips, blinks to keep the tears in place. Swallows and swallows and swallows and says, “Okay.”

He lies in bed, unmoving,

From some inexplicable, intangible force,

There is no energy,

Rising is gargantuan, impossible,

Irreconcilable weight.

There is despair, only.

He stares at the pill bottle, unopened.

His stomach rumbles, empty,

The pots and pans, unwashed,

There is no dish-soap,

He opens the pill bottle, considers,

And closes it again, unused.

Maybe he’ll try tomorrow, anew.

He says this every day.

He picks up a pill, swallows,

There is no revelation, no epiphany,

He washes a fork,

And opens a can of sweetcorn,

This is something, enough.

It has to be enough, today.

He carries on.

I let things pile up,

Books and letters and emails and messages,

Words tucked away,

Where they cannot touch me, or taunt me,

Or drain me or haunt me.

Like a wall of dull metal bricks,

Held together with a cement,

That’s part anxiety, part depression and part laziness,

Part existential being,

I don’t know the ratios of each part.

Stories unwritten, words unsaid, deeds undone,

Acts tucked away,

Where they cannot shame me,

Or blame me.

Ailments unresolved, prescriptions unfilled,

And there’s water coming through the bricks,

Wetting my feet.

I take down one brick at a time,

It’s weighty in my brittle hands,

Two appear in its place.

Sights unseen, roads untraversed, dreams unexplored,

Conversations un-encountered,

Life tucked away,

Where it cannot hurt me.

These small bricks seem insurmountable,

Untenable, I dismantle,

One day at a time,

And the wall stays level,

So I must be fine.