Timber fences; empty freedom.

You were five when the world shifted

when you told me you wished

we were never made.

 

There was a time, before those words,

when the world was broad and

apropos of nothing.

 

Those words changed the world

like pregnant did

when we lost

 

some other words

and the ones in the hospital,

the cancer ones.

 

Since the words, in these new days,

we take a moment to breathe

and fear the empty time.

 

We were younger last week

and the world came with us.

Us, a couple with everything to prove to

 

everyone else but each other.

We’re the youngest in the waiting room,

fearing the universal thump

of timber fences; empty freedom.

 

I asked a stranger why she had to deal with

a cochlear implant and

how is that fair?

 

Asked another where she grew up,

she said in C ward when

my mother saw my wrists.

 

It didn’t hit us then.

Not until

we cried about how good our friends were

 

and how terrible the rest had been,

that I can control some words, and

smell the rain a day off.

 

I can’t remember the beginning, but

I guess I’m here and

I hope to god the end is better.

 

We wait on the amber light

and ignore people again

missed calls rack up

I run my hand along the bathroom tiles

undulating

till the grout is thick with skin,

the places where the rain gets in

                                                        overrun ourselves

live in inference and spatchcocked time

we make god in our own image

and damn Him for it, the

latticed ornate last line full of yesterdays

the first line since the diagnosis

drinking boneyard lattes in prurient despair

and I’m sorry your toast is burnt but there was this

bit in this song and I just lost it for a minute...

 

In this new dawn,

post-creation,

the evolution of the eye is proof or disproof of god.

 

But I can’t even complain I wasn’t told, I

just didn’t listen.

And here we are

 

scared of the silence and open spaces

just co-codamol and coffee in the car,

the Adam and Eve of a rotten Eden.

 

Here, amongst the women who look at me while

they kiss their partners, I

can’t shake the feeling I’m owed, we’re

 

just a man and a woman

not allowed to fall apart, and in

all the blank years

 

after the diagnosis,

what’s left to worship but the words.