somethingeveryday

Modern love is not told in paper

but the pixels in a face trapped

and peering out, bound in comments,

tagged with us. Click, see friendship,

it is you and I, December, ‘in a relationship’,

flicking between pictures

from when we first met.

Forty-three people have liked

our solid-state love. Kiss kiss.

Heart heart. Smiley face.

Wink.

Facebook is like a photo album

for the mind and more forgetful.

It collects what we do not.

In March we shift to, ‘it’s complicated’.

(Acquaintances, not friends,

the people there to bolster numbers

and educate in networking, click

‘like’.)

It always ends.

In time,

come May,

we are ‘single’.

Facebook has updated but we are still

in this state;

you find three messages from a boy

that has been in my head for two months.

We end.

Spend our days stalking

clicking through the photos of each other

that now hold alien men where once

we were two halves of mussel shells.

A couple.

Now, separate

as salt dough to sweet.

We send niceties. Discuss politics. Say hello.

Someone finds an old disposable camera

from a trip to Blackpool Pleasure Beach,

they upload it and tag us,

kissing with rock between our mouths

like lady and the tramp, but trampier.

You can trace the history

of real life, of us, of ourness

through MySQL databases,

notes, see friendship, click,

like, click, love,

click, love. Click, account.

Log out.

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An unwashed plate; we break two glasses half-emptied with wine and our Rioja stained mouths; time washes us in seconds that turn to days. Sunday, night; I sleep with my back turned to breath-sounds and the noise of silence. A hand curls around my hipbone; I shift away, a visitor in my quilts and the guilt of not-knowing-why. Head drums a beat of no, no, no. We do not make love. You try, and I insist. My mind is a curled up rosebud retreating. “There is nothing to be stressed about.” Instead say: Why are you stressed? What’s wrong? I’m sorry. It’s okay. I love you.

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A power cut, two half-baked smiles and the knowing silence of regret. Dark, dark as the grime soaked tray in your hands, charred peppers and too-fried onions. You are in the kitchen. Outside the world is a lacquered painting and running away. Water drips the pine tree across the pane and road. Drum. Drum. Drum-beats the glass. Inside the kettle stops its boiling midway and his face is covered in dropping tears. You are failing to make words form through a twisted out-of-batteries tongue. He closes his eyes and tries to hide his pain with what you have done. Wring your hands but still no verbs leap to lips. All you can presume is that there are no words left to say.

Leave the kitchen and slip into his bed fully clothed. Pretend to sleep. In the morning the rains and tears stop and dry you lie in bed broken by before. When the world shudders back to life and a sharp light switches on, your eyes turn with purple outlines of a haze. Groan. A few moments pass and in the kitchen hear the kettle begin again. He does not say a word. Relieve him of the silence. Creak. Leave before it boils.

A final glance. Sigh as the door slams a wooden tongue. Do not look back as dawn carries her torch across the sky; he will stay. Tarmac claps footsteps toward day and then, within, something out loud to the world that he will never hear; ‘I am sorry, you know.’

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Wake in the morning and weigh your heart

against hangover scales and remnant palms.

Do not wash to hold him against your skin

sigh and feel the weight of everything …

As another comes with blue-eyed guilt, bed

dressed in morning grubbery in your mind,

hear his nonsense sounds and taste, smell,

feel the reek of his five a.m. breath. Kiss

let the image shift, ripple, flex, awash again

with dew-dawn, on a cliff looking out at sea

as two bodies bring in the sun and sink

inside, retreat your hands behind your ribcage

with fear and text, text your other-love

with furious hands as though he can tell

through satellites and instant-time

what you have done. Give him extra kisses.

When he replies with just one,

give him none.

Buy now.

Here,

on wet grains,

the sea wipes sand

like rain across glass.

They sit under a tartan rug

hands down pants, fondling

as the fire cracks and chatter

spit-spurts between dark silhouettes

and ghoulish uplit faces.

They squeeze and pretend

that nothing is happening.

Tonight,

people leave, one by one,

and they remain alone

with the sea, gunblack,

which throws and turns,

a humongous tongue,

salivating.

They walk, hold hands

and kiss between rocks.

The water laps at their ankles;

stars stab white

in an upturned black basin.

Later,

as kisses turn from lips

to skin, to cloth and back,

the sea rushes forwards and retreats

a metronome to their throws.

Two sets of footsteps

stretch from rock to cove

where bent forwards,

arched back

they take turns.

Buy now.

Look through March rain veils

into sunscapes and green, green, woodland.

Take the pinch of reality and throw it behind you.

Do not let the other Megabus passengers see.

Swallow a Fisherman’s Friend and travel.

Tannoys tinkle and it is three tomorrows

away and soaked in eucalyptus and tanging almost-pain.

Shudders turn to slipping lullabies

and windows open portal-wide

and now, breathe,

count to three … one … two …

and it is the turn for your eyes.

You have arrived.

Another man, dressed in imaginary nights

and dancing is waiting.

Hand him your lover’s last words on his tongue

and with your other, take a strand of his fairy hair.

Hold him.

Do not let the world tug you back.

Focus.

Let him reach into his pocket and untuck a compact mirror

coated in the colour of heartache.

Open it.

Take back your smile.

Buy now.

I’ll leave the sheets as you desert them,

unmade, twisted.

Keep the last kiss you give me,

silent, rough with yearning.

Hold the darkness of night as we talk,

the blacks, whites of stars. Forever.

Won’t eat to keep you in my mouth

or drink to have you there, in my throat.

I’ll let the room remain still, not stagnant

but fostering. Growing.

Daylight would smash it all.

Buy now.

Take my coat and hang it on the door. Rip my shirt,

button by popped button. Tie it around your waist.

Pick up little black things and put them in your pocket.

Undo my belt, wrench it until the loops split. Curl it.

Slide down skin-clung trousers. Fumble with my feet, my socks.

Cut off my boxers.

                                    Now, take in my scent and eyes.

Shave my hair, brows, pubes. Stuff them in a pillowcase.

Peel the dead skin from my heels. Tap my head

three times and unlock my skull. Open the cavity.

Prise out my brain and let it sit on the windowsill.

Shed my case and dump it by your bed. Wipe the blood

from my musculature and smear it on your clothes.

Dismember my limbs. Put my toes and fingers

in your dog’s bowl. Crack open my ribs, suck the breath

from my lungs. Use my tendons as thread, my bones

as knitting needles. Gouge my eyes and add them

to the necklace you wear. Take it all. Everything. Now.

Buy Now.

This pressing of bodies:

sticky palms from where we held the counterweight to ourself; then lips,

lending each other breath and broad trunked chests,

heavy with the silence of evening song.

You enfold the Matryoshka-doll-me.

We are a duet, playing the night game

in the forgotten worlds between owl-time and breakfast.

We murmur each other’s names: dot-through-dot

and-dotted by the mmms of our notes.

A sharp clunk and my rattling head,

full of moths, fireflies and deadlines, wakes me.

Six-am dawn lays her fingers across the bones of your face.

Your feet, out, bare like dolphins against white linen waves.

I trip and fall.

You stir, grab and hold me into the nook,

the slotted jig, the saw of your neck; puck the air with your mouth.

I reach forwards, kiss, and curl up behind you

like a question mark of us.

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All the words forgotten,

words never said to strangers

on buses too shy to summon courage:

                                                ‘Hi’.

All the words I’ve lost

in time, death, life,

bundled up in bodies not my own,

words I could have used and never will.

All the words I’ve played games with

            ‘love’, ‘forever’, ‘everything’,

and been forgiven for playing.

‘Sorry’.

The words I’m no longer afraid of,

            ‘I’, ‘us’, ‘we’.

Those I’ve found,

yours is the word that never dies

but burns and burns and burns.

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