The Card

It started with this message on a website:

‘Cooking dinner, how you treating yours?’
Rejoinder: ‘not as well as I should’
(Us Universal Protectors of Earth-Mother).
We were round at my sister’s, I confessed;
you looking after nephew/son/grandson
and I mooching about, unencumbered
by nappy-changing obligations.
I internalised the self-scathing afterthought
that I’d neither lavished you with
that shprauncy £65 Landmark tea,
bestowed multiple treatments at Grayshott,
nor cross-bred a species of orchid bearing your name.
So not only were you not being treated, you were playing nurse.

Well, and so; what business of hers
that my heart sunk to my gut and the mea culpas
stacked up on my throat like deadweights?
It was the stark realisation that
I’d abdicated responsibility in matters of relating,
meaning, I’d been a coward. Deserting myself and you.
I wanted to prove that I knew what was right.

I half-lotussed on the couch as you spooned him guvguv
wondering: what makes expressing love
so tumultuous? I could surmount this phantom barricade
with little more than a firm resolution,
when it becomes unbreachable and I’m paralysed.
I admit: our turgid custom is more bearable
than this new regime’s anarchy of affection.
Why? Well, what would you make of the unexpected?
Squirm, recoil, contort? So we did our stock thing
of occluding intimacy, through snatches of clumsy lolling eye contact,
distanced like pylons. We talked not without some warmth.
And yet, you are so nice and so gentle and so kind,
and we could truly bond and quench this desideratum.

He.
He adores you unremittingly, uninhibitedly.
Nestles in your arms like a pouched marsupial;
Trusting, regressing to babyhood, almost blissful.
You hear ‘Mamma’, I, Nang-Na (Chinese)
which distinguishes you from Mum-mee (Korean),
He is oblivious to this strait-jacket of repression
which buckles me till I can’t answer questions;
simple ones, ‘did you win?’

But the worst of all was this card: scantest of grist.
When I’d ripped away its sugar-plastic coating,
I was lumpen, unable even to lift the pen
and there was nothing but retch
to temper the slogan’s fatuous conceit,
which allied to the quip I’d propounded over
the last few months that I’d been adopted,
fashioned a curlicue of twisted sense. It read:
“YOU’RE LIKE A MOTHER TO ME.”
Thankfully, I avoided reinforcing it,
yet all I managed in the end was a tepid:
‘Love Simon, Bertie and Plompy xx’,
and in spite of all this, you willingly embraced
this bastardised-contrived nugget of humour as
an object rife for love-alchemy. Took what you could get.
And I neither hugged nor kissed you nor anythinged and
here, I suppose, is the explanation.