today

Today is sour, curdled in its sickly insides.

It’s puffed up and chocked around its throat.

Crooked in its edges.

It drags its swollen belly across time in zig zag sighs.

It hangs its saggy body over my head all year round.

Hissing it’s long ‘I’m nearly here.’

Today it prickles between my bones and skin.

Clamps itself around my chest with steely claws.

At six our memories are in a suitcase.

Stuffy in their space.

I hold them close in you and the you I think of every day.

Grief doesn’t leave.

It’s just replaced.

It turns from one pain to the next in a coin toss.  

Curls into a new creature.

Leaving today bitter, congealed, fermented. 

And we pull our heavy legs through its waters.

And remember today is just a day, it’s just not like any other.

Shrunken dog

My black dog has shrunk. I might have put the beast in the wash.

I think I must have.

My black dog has shrunk and is stretched in weird ways, his fur is licked into curls that stick to his sloppy face.

His stuffing is bulging around his knees and ankles, his calves are saggy.

Disfigured and tiny my black dog has turned from beast to stuffed puppy.

Without his growl being so loud, it’s become, life has become, a little bit quieter.

I’m a little less frightened.

It’s slightly easier to climb out of bed in the morning. 

Now he’s shrunk so small. 

I’ve grown tall. Taller. 

I’ve not done the bad things, not a single one of them, for a while now. Now he’s so much smaller.

I guess I get a chance now. To feel proud now, about the time we had together just before now.

 When I needed to be stronger because he was so loud when he was around when he was big and tall and round.

Now he’s in the palm of my hand, I’ll tuck him up, I’ll put him down.

vomit story

I’m always shocked my rudeness, by the mean- and I’m always shocked that I’m shocked.

The young man was sitting on the steps going down to the Great Northern rail and the Victoria line at Highbury and Islington at 7:35 AM on a Tuesday. It’s busy at that time in the morning, yet I had just been thinking that it was much quieter than normal. I think I was about to ask the man if was ok when I noticed someone was already doing it, or perhaps I’m making excuses- I should have asked him. This second man was on his phone, (which is an odd thing to do when you’re underground, perhaps he was listening to a voicemail). This man, I think he’s a builder because he’s got those work trousers on which have lots of pockets, they’ve got paint on them and he’s wearing a florescent jacket, he’s saying ‘something, something… you can’t sit there man.’ He’s aggressive, he’s actually angry. I don’t think people enjoy sitting in crowded smelly stations. He doesn’t stop moving, he marches forward, looking back at him and sneering; his upper lip curled to show yellowish teeth. The young man, the first man, who I now see is pale and green, his eyes chubby and pink, cheeks swollen, he says, meekly ‘I’ve just been sick,’ and he gestures the wall next to him that’s splattered with clear acidic vomit. I just keep walking, I have to catch my train. Now I’m on the train and I’m thinking of that young man walking down the steps, suddenly hit with nausea, trembling stopping, dropping his laptop bag, clutching the hand rail, people shoving him as his liquid breakfast churns and comes up and out. He had the sort of face where it could be anything, he could be an alcoholic or an addict deep in pain, or maybe it’s cancer and today is about to be the worst day of his life or the chemo has split open his insides, or maybe he’s got sick from holding onto a rail on the tube that had recently been licked by a 3 year old tummy bug toddler then he bit the nail on his thumb, thus ingesting those pesky germs. Whatever it is, I’m sorry he’s having a shit day and I’m cross that I didn’t ask if he needed some help. I could have walked him back up for air, out of the

(This is when I realised I’d missed my stop.)   

dust

Do you feel sorrow or remorse for giving up on that dream or did a new dream appear?

One the meant more?

Or did you just grow up, dust of childhood fairy dust, rust up.

Did you let it go with ease, without doubt or pain?

Did you simply let it slip?

Let the priorities change.

Did a part of you change or did it move away,

did it go and leave you hollow?

Did you try and cling on with finger tips to slippy cliffs?

Did you think it might still happen, but that you must let it go for now, 

then did it return too late?

Did you mess it up?

The time was now and does that hurt?

Do you feel pain?

Do you blame others when it was you who walked away?

Did you slice up the dream with razor blades, keeping parts for rainy days.

Throwing the rest away?

Did you think that it was perhaps never really me, that was going to be that anyway?

Did you think you weren't good enough or did you just say that to try and be tough,

to tuck away, to fold away, what you really thought.

Did it have more courage that way?

Do you feel like you settled, lied to yourself? 

Or am I wrong and it is the greatest simple life you have.

Needle spoon

Only five years or is it a whole five years?
I don’t know. 
Years too long or too quick. 
A trip slip and sink. Only just. Step missed. Twist. 
Throat closes and tiny air squeezes, drips through. 
Prickle stab. Gut grab. Drab. 
Empty meaning. 
I feel bad black blue. 
The messages stopped. 
You gave me a feather today. 
Grief is scattered, wrapped in coal boxes.
Opened once again today. 
Stinky sting gift. 
Don’t forget but move forward. 
Pushing through. 
Tight spaces too fine. 
The needle spoon. 
Too small. All too. 

tea poem

On a come down you were so sweet and kind
Drip Drop honey on my soul.

Sleep scattered eyes with crumble corners in early mornings
you cupped your hands around my heart and squeezed with quicken beats.
But not too quick like coffee caffeine hits.

Crisis slams ugly punches on my chest so I clutch you
stand with you. Suck life from you.

Between pages You're with me.
Tea

I talk over your steam about healing
feelings.

Smoke cigarettes and laugh-not with you-near you.
But tea, you're always there.

Recharge from your hot breath
pumping and warmth like bath tubs after storms.

Tea.
I'm sure I owe you a slither of my sanity.
If I had any.
Instead you have this poem from me. 

reunited

I’m told the ratio of recovery is 3 to 1 by a man at a Sunday evening meeting ‘one person dies, one person is in a relapse, one person is in recovery’, he says this with a sadness and smile that tells me ‘you’re doing okay’, but he sees needles and public toilets and pain in his mind. And I am tense in anticipation. Because nothing in that ratio is solid, but death. This is the reality. Although I think the real statistic is 1-10 chance of recovery.  Sadly, neither feel wrong, and that makes me ache. And so, I go, back to rehab for the day, the annual reunion. My first trip back.

We listen to music, talk loudly, silly singing and laughing, and bubbles in our tummies as we drive. It feels like it’s the only right thing to do, that there is only one way the car can go. Outside are the hills of Gloucestershire, I know this drive, something skips in my soul. There is coal in my chest that can’t be swallowed, it’s indigestible. As the roads get smaller and we get closer I am somewhere between me and who I was two years ago; I’m sitting between the two, sweaty palms and hospital stained skin, and clean and serenity. Squashed and suddenly nameless in thoughts. We turn in and I breathe deeply, pull together the two parts of me, squeeze them into each other. The tires roll over the gravel in that beautifully familiar sound. We walk up to the happy and joyful, who offer tea and name badges. We’re early, we wait. Sip tea under the marque that looks like too grand, too out of place, a sour thumb. It sits at the bottom end of the car park. The rest looks the same. It’s how I remember it but it’s shrunk. All the memories are still here, they’re right where I left them.

As people drift in the bells start to ring in my brain, with ‘it’s you,’ and everyone begins to feel like family again. We swap stories, talk of therapists we feared and ones who fell asleep. We are naughty school children with giggles and cigarettes. We laugh at the tedium and the tears we shared. The changes are huge, ‘not fast car- big house’ huge. But happiness huge, ‘I have my family back’ huge, ‘I walked the dog’ huge, ‘my life in now manageable’ huge. ‘I don’t want to die’ huge. One mother shares about how she’s now a grandmother, how she couldn’t be happier since her daughter left treatment three years ago. A woman talks about the old parts of herself she’s learnt to live with and ignore. Someone who’s voice was once stuck in their chest, picks up the microphone and talks of becoming a man, studying at university, being free from pain, being brave. And I am so proud to be part of this.

 There are faces that are mending, hopeful and full. Chubby where sullen cheeks once sat on grey sunken bones. Fresh with colour, eyes alive again. None of us want to go back there, back to the madness. We eat, spread ourselves busy across this space that now looks so small. Children play on a bouncy castle that sits on a piece of grass where I had sat and wept in hopelessness. Where I had felt this pain was forever and it was always. I scan the faces, the faces of the people who have dug themselves out. Spat out the dirt and scrubbed off the soil. And have come back here on a Saturday afternoon to keep fighting.

Some have relapsed and come back. My self-included, I’m almost six months again. We all say- ‘this time I’m doing something different, this time I have hope.’ That’s what today’s about- hope. The hope we find in each other. Because we know how dangerous this game of life can be. But today we are fighting. And it’s beautiful.

Back to Bristol and rain spits at the glass of the car window. I remember the fear I had of this city before. Terrified the place would steal me into its stinking underbelly. I’m not afraid of that any more.  

It went too quickly. I wanted to hold it longer. To crawl back into the space that saved me in the moment I needed to be saved to the most. To let it cover me in warmth. It’s a little bit like going home, like slipping into a memory or a dream or a world where time doesn’t exist at all because you’re back there and everything’s changed but nothing’s changed at all. Today is a tiny fragment of all the collected moments I’ve had so far. A day where the dots join up and new picture begins.