Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

3rd of 3 instalments

it wasn’t just that this one was ugly, it was that he kept farting all the time and it’s okay if they do this because it’s natural, it’s when they are proud of it that it becomes unacceptable. but he had a real problem and said that he was taking charcoal. I said, ‘you’d be better off taking a bit of charcoal and using it as a plug to plug it up’,

                                                  he was an elementary canal, prone to long periods of burping and farting, he kept me late whenever I wanted to go out with my girlfriends,

                                         one night he threw all the cutlery to the ceiling, so that some of the knives and forks had stuck in the plaster,

                                                                                                    when I got home he was lying in bed with a sore foot, he had kicked it on a brick wall,

I massaged it for him whilst he moved between anger and self pity, then he went and slept in the dog box that he had built for my two dogs Binda and Kindi,

                  I thought it was good that he used it, the dogs felt less guilty because they knew from the beginning that they as sure as hell weren’t going to use it,

                          when Shane first built the ‘dog box', they had both looked on in a curious way, once it was finished he called them over to it and they sniffed around,

                         and when they thought he was serious and acting a bit weird, they rushed back inside the house,

                                                                     later he found out that Binda had shat in his toolbox,

                                       when a dog shits in your toolbox it takes you about three hours to wash it all out, a little bit of soft shit goes a long way through one hundred tools,

                                              when a dog does this it means that he doesn’t like you, and when a dog doesn’t like someone it is usually a good indicator of their personality type,

                                                        dogs don’t dislike someone for nothing, the way children and animals respond to adults is a good indication of where the society is at,

                                         like when a dog listens to the wind for a moment and tells you that all is not right, best to prepare for the cyclone or the earthquake,

                      the light at Lort Smith Animal Hospital had been tested on its pupil, which did not respond, the last thing I saw was it clinging to the cage, its broken dropped jaw opened to the universe, so that the universe climbed to inside it and became dark and endless, already the universe was invading the possum’s body, but the possum was preserving itself, the eyes were a mess, one was popped out, the other swollen and filling with blood from the back, the possum was agonised and blind, but still protecting itself from the oncoming universe, the hands of the vet reached in, first a pain killer to ease the struggle because when we feel pain we cling, tense up and become a struggling ball, that shakes inside itself, then the euthanasing drug to slide the possum away into the evening, like pushing a child down a slow slippery dip in a big park, the young male brushtail possum that was fond of fruit, on Studley Park road, is stumbling blind pulp, throbbing beneath its wheel of pain, fear and exhaustion prone, it is not in its right mind or body anymore,

                                                                                                  they said, ‘Brendon’s gone mad, he’s taken off with a shaved head and a tattoo on his back across southern France, he’s looking for castles’

                                                                                                        I only wish I had got to go and had got to know him more whilst he was here, but he didn’t believe what had been done to me in the next room, because to acknowledge that would have been to acknowledge his own pain, so that’s how Brendon first became imprisoned by holding his pain inside himself, by carrying around the wreckage that he should have walked away from, by holding the big containers of toxic waste upright until they started spilling, or you see that the dead body inside that car smash was all the one person, all yourself with no help in sight and then he started running towards freedom, wouldn’t you if you suddenly saw your own corpse many times over, or the dangerous container started leaking with no prospect of compensation, fast running doesn’t work towards gaining freedom, I’m afraid it’s time to go back and clean up, the rebel inside me is not free, she is controlled by a society that she must perpetually rebel against, the angry person will gain freedom by releasing anger, so long as they know when to stop, the healing of the infection once the pus is out,

after being bashed I called up frazer for a week at work and called him a maggot, after he bashed me he couldn’t get any sense out of me and he never did again,

                            I wasn’t free whilst I was calling him a maggot over and over, but after I had finished the cage door opened and I walked out of the shit of our lives and flew away,

                                                     when I called him a maggot he said, ‘you must still love me,’

                               I feel that Brendon is the lucky one to have escaped to Europe from the family, he makes me feel self doubt in that perhaps I haven’t gone far enough away, but I an alive and since they wanted me dead that tells me that I have gone a long way from home, part of me thought I would have to run through seven wildernesses to escape, through every country in Europe, but I thawed out in the red centre and what came in to replace my family cane in the form of light, once you can face the evilness of your mother and let go of her part in abusing you, you will have her and other similar family members replaced, by something greater and more powerful than anything that they could have given you, than anything that they have promised you,

                                                                       there is the long dark stretch of letting go of the thing that is choking you,
     but
           once
                     you
                             are
                                   released into the care of love, there is nothing like it,

this is freedom,

                          my backyard is freedom and every butterfly that rests upon the fence,

                          and the birds that bring money in their claws because I smiled are freedom,

                                 I was finally free from poverty,

                                                                                  all good things came after letting go,

                              now I must shift between the many worlds without the prospect of panic,

                               you can have freedom in your own house by using freedom furniture, it’s light

                                            and breezy,

                                                                 coloured like the sun and the ocean,

            freedom furniture solves everything, now that I have awareness and discipline,

                       at first I was unaware,

                                                              running from wilderness to wilderness, imprisoned and confused inside,

                                                                       I was crazy back then,

thought I could outrun the moon and then outrun the sun by morning,

then when it came up behind me I fell into screaming fatigue for kilometres on end,

              this was not freedom,

                                                  I was not free to explore the environment around me,

                     there was total disconnection, I kept falling over,

                                                                                                     seeing things in shades of grey,

                                          there was no rest,

                                                                           no peace inside myself,

now I have found the still point, the inner sanctuary,

                                                                                      my grandmother always said, ‘you have a good mother, you have a good mother, you have a good mother, you have a good mother,’ until although I believed her, I started to wonder why she was saying it so often, she never once said, ‘I have a good daughter,’

                                      he said, ‘I don’t trust women, they always let you down’, therefore he is putting me in the position, where I’ve got to somehow make him trust all women before he can trust me as an individual, and even then I wouldn’t want him to trust all women, but some would do,

                 the three thin lipped Australians said to my girlfriends and me on the street, ‘big fat arses’, we had been out enjoying the evening at a Latin American dance club and had not stopped to think of our arses that night, and even if we had it would have been a positive and fleeting thought,

meanwhile they had been out in a group at a sleazy downbeat pub, with that music that is so unspiritual that you want to chime bells through it, they had been looking for a fuck half drunk and hadn’t got one, by the time they were out on the street they were cold semi nauseous and the blood sugar level from the alcohol was starting to go down,

                                                                                       they were also mean spirited, trapped in the world of arses and arseholes, to say that about our arses they must have been thinking in terms of arses and arseholes. they must have been thinking about their own arseholes and the arseholes of others, until the whole of smith street in Collingwood became an arsehole, that is what they were preoccupied with and that is where they lived,

                              she was snarling at me, she had a dropped mouth at the world. I took a few photos of her and her lover on our trip north and he was out to it, off looking into the trees away from the both of us, he was an invertebrate, but she was always snarling into the camera lens, I took it personally but then I saw her snarling out at the world and I knew that it was nothing personal,

                                       like with my boyfriend who took all these photos of me and only two of them were in focus and the rest were blurred, I wondered how he had managed to blur a whole film, also in all the blurry photographs I was in stupid poses. whether I wasn’t ready or my tongue was poking out, or my sunglasses had fallen down over my mouth,

                                                                                                             to him I was just a blur of red lipstick gliding past and that is how alone we all are, I can see people clearly in focus, is this too much to ask?,

                                                                                                     am I another one ahead of my time?,

                                                    a genius?,

                                                                       I am aware of myself and am aware of what I want, I am aware of what people want and if it is a request within reason I can usually oblige,

                                                                      does this make me a popular person?

                but if those ones that demand too much don’t get what they want, they turn off me real quick, and I’m glad to be rid of them, I wonder how many people simply see my complete being as a strip of red lipstick gliding past,

                       like a slither of a summer cloud above sunset on its way to somewhere else,

                                so we all must use mirrors,

                                                                               my mother never saw me and I was unable to develop an identity without parental bonding, if an elephant who had lost her calf to the zoo trade had wandered into our front yard at rose street. I would have followed her thinking I was a baby elephant, with the potential to learn her soft intelligent way. to grow up into a grey elephant,

                                     I was that desperate,

                                                                           now I am not prepared to follow elephants for this reason, but I respect them from a human vantage point and love them, I am aware of how I appear to others, you know who sees you and who doesn’t, the ones that can give you what you want, for me it’s just the simple things, well they really are seeing you,

                                                                                                    the ones who try to destroy you are seeing the enemy of themselves within you, blurring you to billyo to white haze, best to keep out of their way, they are mistaking you for somebody else, with murder on their minds,

                                                                                                   when we chased the possum it was crazed with pain, not in its right mind, now it has left for good, it has left the hanging jaw and eyeballs, the body was still healthy, equipped to run without the invading control of the head, the body ran of its own accord without the proper instructions from the brain, without the eyes, nose and jaw functioning to lead it forward, the jaw could have been wired, the eye glued back in, the blood drained into a cup, but this species was common, the sanctuary full, no zoo had a need for them, could it have been saved?, it doesn’t matter, the first duty was to release the possum from suffering, life or death doesn’t matter, but its hard to see something in this kind of pain, it’s just not right, why does the universe do the things it does?, the baby brush-tail possum was clinging to the tyre because it didn’t know where we were taking it, its instincts spelt fear, told it that we may be taking it into more and more pain,

                                        I didn’t know if I wanted to live or die, only that I didn’t want to be in the situation that I was in,

                                                                              I had followed the black beetles of agony to be with my family and now the insects had been replaced by them,

                               at sixteen I sat on the coffee table cutting my wrists, whilst my mother watched TV, she did not like her adolescent daughter disrupting her reading or her TV programs, later my brother dale said, ‘do a better job of it next time,’

                                           he didn’t say it to be malicious, for him it was a practical thing, he wanted the townhouse that we were all crammed into for himself and was gradually killing us off in his own mind,

                                                                                               mum fortunately for him had a bronchial chest condition, dad wasn’t around anymore. Brendon and I were the problems as we were only a few years older,

             so it was simply a matter of convenience, that I should no longer exist and not of malicious intention, when dale was a child dad got drunk and play-wrestled with him and Brendon,

                                                                    dale got revenge by scratching his face until it bled at the end of the night, like a bird or a rat that had been kept in a cage and that suddenly bites hard,

                                                                                 dale always saved his long little finger nail on his right hand, the nail flicked open like a camping knife or the cat’s claws on a cartoon,

                                                              then he slashed,

                                                                                           he waited a long time for dad to hurt himself, dale saw dad’s head roll back near the bench but no bump,

                        dale saw dad fall down on the carpet on a twisted ankle but only laughter, the next day no hangover, you have to wait a long time for a drunk to hurt themselves,

                                             so dale struck with his dirty fingernail, this hurt dad’s feelings because dale was his favourite son,

                                                                                 dad had to go to the cop shop the next day, with a scratch that ran from the corner of his eye, to the corner of his mouth,

                                             if he had shed a tear it would have run down along it until he ate salt, but he didn’t look in mirrors and tried to forget about it,

                when people asked him what had happened, he said that the cat did it,

                  as for us, we are like those cats that are never quite right, those timid scraggy black ones that come in for a feed, wanting nothing more but that from you for the next ten years, if you’re lucky you get to pat their handsome back as they exit from your life, to god knows where until the next big storm or meal time, when they are found quietly in your laundry behind the washing machine, these cats look out at the world with such a betrayal on their faces, that it’s just heart breaking, they don’t want to be fed from you but they know they must eat, often to take away their fear of intimacy or dependency they pretend that the bit of vegecat on the scratched up newspaper, just automatically appears each evening, and then you appear which sends that cat screaming into its own black heart, the little basket is never settled into, she drinks the moisture from blades of grass and not the yellow dish, for her lovely grace and timid mature you have the best intentions in the world, and every move you make towards her is filled with love and sympathy, you call her kitty, but she is the cat of a nightmare, she moves quick and fleeting as if the thing that is inside her will catch up soon, she is not like one of those fat content tabbies with the vinyl collar, that lies around in front of the warm heater with the snowy paw stretched out over the dog, those cats are so wonderful, like big warm Saturday mornings, they remind us of families, parks and muffins, this other cat is shadow and bones, low down and smoothly along fences, the brightest yellow eyes that are ever distrustful saying, ‘you have no idea of who I am, where I have been, or what I have been through,’ the cat that had no hope of escaping the nightmare, it would be another one if it wasn’t you,

           there is always the pay off for the ones that stay with the family, for those who chose to play the game, ‘have you taken your medication?,'

                                                                                                                ‘yes pop, all your children and grandchildren have taken their medication upon your request, because you have the most money, you are old and you are bleeding from the prostrate,’

                                 I said to dad, ‘he keeps asking me if I’m taking medication, is he being rude?, I don’t even take aspirin,’

                                                                                         dad said, ‘he worked in a mental hospital, he says that to everyone, don’t take any notice of it, worse things can happen,’

                                               there was this big husky voiced man who joined our prayer group at Kensington Christian network, many years before his wife and daughter were involved in a serious car accident on mother’s day, he was cooking dinner for them but they never arrived home, he was called to the morgue to identify the bodies, he said, ‘I went to kiss my dead wife and daughter good-bye, but when they pulled out the body tray at the morgue’ and when he bent down low as if to smell a flower, they had no heads, he said, I don’t remember what happened after that,’ but six years later he woke up in hospital with a grey beard surrounded by the mad,

                                                                                                                  we become winter dormant, sleep under trees for a century of meditation, whilst the body and mind tries to get it together,

                                                                               all right for an immortal, but by the time we wake up into our lives, we are on the last length of the journey to death,

                               I looked into the old cracked mirror at my first grey hairs, there was a mild sense of excitement, in that I had survived to mature like fruit,

                             but the child who had just begun to live looked stunned, upon its birth and continued abuse it had grown old inside very quickly,

childhood was robbed from the young body, then by the time that it recuperated, the body has grown old and the child stares out into wrinkles and grey hair,

                        nothing is synchronized, now suddenly I am thirty and I’ve only just begun to live, I simply have to make the most of every moment from here on,

                       like that conservative Christian Shame who worked in a metal factory, his greatest pleasure turned out to be sexual intimacy and spiking trees,

                       Kensington Christian network gave me the mop, broom, bucket, detergent. rag and sponge to clean the house and I made the most of it,

                     getting rid of the basher out of my life was like cleaning lice out of the roof, and the regular cleaning that big dirty old house every week kept me sane,

                                  it was like cleaning my insides out, it was the only thing I remember doing for four years, it was like I hardly knew I was here,

I knew the years were passing as the mop wore out, four years of jasmine creeping its scent along the wall, and the strange anxiety rising inside me,

I left my lover for good because he bashed me,

                                                                             I followed the witch that posed as my mother in dreams, down hallways of smashed glass but never saw her face,

                         the black hands of my father came down through the walls to knock me senseless, they flashed like white light and termites before my head was knocked off, but I never heard him speak,

                                                                           I heard the weird house shift on its foundations, the still icy breath of the first day of spring suspended like flowers in the railings of the porch,

                                                         I felt my own frail life trying to break through,

                  [the spasmodic broken breath of sorrow]

                                                                                        [the rapid shallow ragged breath of fear]

                                        [the shallow inhalation and strong panting exhalation]

                       [until the chest cavity of the child relaxed]

                                                                                            and the daylight outside turned kite blue and moved through the sanctuary of me,

                                                                                                            the baby brushtail possum passed me on the way out, as I reentered the atmosphere through a shaft of sunlight, it said, ‘thank you for not allowing me to die slowly in the gutter,’ I said, ‘I am deeply sorry that you wanted to sleep up in a hollow tree and that your body was crushed,'

                                                                                   today I am standing on a central heating vent alone in my bedroom, looking out into a cold grey day where wind and ice rush the clouds across the sky,

                                                                                           the trees bending and then giving in, with a  release of branches and leaves, I think of the gums around the city that possums sleep in, and the way in which a brushtail possum clung to life to be in that situation,

                                                                                     I am lucky to be intact, thinking of warm blue days sometime before the cruelty began, I like my soft pink pillow that I’ve had since I was a child that has turned black inside the cover, I have hugged and dribbled along that dark edge,

                                                                                                              I like the contrast of the heating piping up my pyjama leg and the freezing day flying past the glass outside, while I am able to survive I will dedicate my life to saving possums and trees from the disaster of us,

                                                                                              each and every tree in the city parks and backyards nay have a curled up possum in it, the sane breath that a possum breathed out in the botanical gardens last night I am breathing in at this moment,

                                                                  I would never have imagined a world so wild and windy as this great blue day outside, but there are little nests for us all