The scent of them

I miss the smell of families –

Funky, loud, unabashedly visceral.

Granddad’s chest hair was wiry; sourly

Vinegary, reeked like baked conkers.

Nana’s cheaply-scented scarves and jangly

Jewellery stank of metal & pesky rashes.

And my mother’s chest, it was mossy and damp:

She smelt like dead roses, years fading into oblivion.

 
My sister, she smelt like farms – mud-pies, worms, ear picking – and jealousy.

My brother, he smelt like babies because he was a baby to me.

And all these smells, if could you see them, they would be bright bossy blues, 

Violent violets, rip-roaring ravenous bloody colours; they would be yellow like sick

And sun and sand; a heaving rainbow of wretched humanity.

 
I miss the stench of family, the air thick with intimacy.

Scents that would suspend and cloy round my face, my throat, my heart.

All these lives signed in blood; bound by a fist of matted, ineluctable roots.

 
I miss the stench of my dirty Croatian cousin’s hair when I pulled it out in a fight,

Her slovenly grease on my hands, a sign of mucky victory.

The smell of the caravan in the garden, called 'home' by the dog,

And stuffed with dreams gone wrong and jumble sale tat.

 
I miss the aroma of value-tinned tomatoes in rustic Balkan cooking

Cut through with the swirl of king-sized cigarette smoke.

I miss the smell of dead roses,

The days and years;

The years slinking away.