Poetry From The Back Of My Hand

Raining on a sunny day
Someone is watering us as if we were clothed Daffodils fleshed out.
Someone is crying on our shoulders, calling out the clouds, which are not sheep or candy floss or chunks of cotton wool but hot air from our boiling bodies coated in plastic as if we were kettles.
Someone is taunting us with their tears on our one sunny day. They want us to think we have hurt them by forgetting them for just one day.

Yet the sun is still out, staring at us as if children,
locking itself on our bodies which glimmer like hot tarr. It will
not leave our hospital bed, even when it is dying itself, but will linger there like dew,
waiting for our wounds to heal, and when they don’t just sits there playing cards until it leaves.
The sun, a ball of raw anger boils blood at dawn at our demise, attending our funeral even if it rains.
It tends the flowers placed beside our stone and lets the grass grow over us like a blanket
coveri ng our now naked bodies which call on the sun to warm them.

Sometimes I forget why I came here, when it’s still and cool like this. It’s not that I intend to forget, even though it hurts when I don’t, it’s just that it doesn’t occur to me that I left for any other reason than to come here. I forget that it wasn’t my choice to leave Chile but that I was forced to. I forget that I used to live anywhere else but here and then it occurs to me that things weren’t always this calm, this still and that I did have another life before Beckenham.
The first thing that I forget isn’t the revolution, which cannot be forgotten but the way I used to live each day in fear that that day was to be my last and that at any moment I would be found. Nowadays I take everything like that for granted, and forget to pause, look at life and really take it in for what it’s worth. Instead I take every day as if there were a million and one other days like that ahead of me. I also take my political beliefs for granted too, and leave them dormant in my mind as there is no use for them here. I still believe in a free world, but do not fight for it as I used to as it’s no longer my problem or my fight. I sometimes worry that I have lost the fight in me, but then I remember that when you don’t need something anymore it sometimes goes away, but that one day I might wake up and it will be there, waiting for me.
It’s three o’clock in the morning, and I am awake. The air is so still that I can hear the mice crawling around in the kitchen and for a moment I think that I can hear something else, but the scrapping soon replaces that other sound until it is all that I can hear. I fall in and out of sleep for the next four hours until suddenly waking up at seven in the morning as if something has happened. After that I can’t go back to sleep, so resign to lying in bed until my body adjusts to the cool air.
The air is no longer still, and as I climb out of bed it comes to me in the same way a dream might, and for a moment I think that that’s all it is and ever was, but something about the air jostles me awake and reminds me that it was real. There was a revolution and I was in it.
At first all I remember is this; I am in a room, and there is a crowd of people listening to me make a speech. I can’t hear what I am saying but know that I am speaking about Pinochet, feel it, and then I hear banging and the door break. Then I remember a bit more, and then a bit more until it all comes back to me. There is a scramble, a fight and people are led away in handcuffs. I am one of the last to be taken. I am taken by force, and pushed into an unmarked car. Suddenly I blank out as if I have been hit on the head.
When I come round my head aches and I am in a cell with nothing but a bed in it and I am cold. I wrap my arms around my body, and turn myself into a ball. As the hours pass I become conscious of the possibility that they have left me here to die, and that they have forgotten about me. I let myself fall asleep and it is only when I hear a shout that I wake up.
There is a man in a suit shouting at me and before I know what is happening he has kicked me in my crotch. “Now Mister, what are we going to do with you?” he asks before swearing and kicking me in my stomach. I am on the floor by now with his feet on my head.
“Are you going to talk, or am I going to have to continue?”
When he doesn’t get a reply, he bends over and punches me in the nose before kicking me in my stomach and leaving.
He is back two hours later to continue his attack on me,
Of course this isn’t the only Chile I remember. I also remember the good food, the heat, and the people before all that happened. It was as if someone took all of that away from me when Pinochet came into power. It wasn’t just another country, it was another life.
As I make breakfast it occurs to me that I don’t normally think about what happened for so long, but today it’s as if I can still feel the pain in my abdomen. I try to remember what happened after the kicks and the punches, but all I can remember next is getting on a plane and coming here.
I was lucky, others died. Had they found me on the platform and not where they did I would not be here today.
As I eat breakfast a mouse scurries out of the corner to eat his. I casually toss him a bit of mine before remembering the Chile that I missed, the one that cannot be found even now. I tried going back home after Pinochet, but it wasn’t the same. I had grown too accustomed to England and its way of life and the sun was not warm this time but overly hot. The food was still good, but with no home there to call my own didn’t taste the same. The people were different too, less polite and helpful and more interested in money. Time had changed Chile and changed me and we no longer fit together.
I leave the mouse and the plates and go to read.

My ecru skin is egg yolk smooth
as I lay on top of him.

His hands are on my breasts,
as he tugs at them as if in war.

After, when he is on the edge of the sheets,
and I am inside them, he sneers

at me, at us, at what we did,
pretending that he just came to talk.

He tells me, face as pale as pheasant eggs,
that he does not think love exists.

I listen, wait and wrap the sheets around me,
waiting for the door to slam.

Instead he cries, at me, at us,
at what we just did.

Like acid, he runs through my body
and like alcohol on a wound it burns,
relaxing me afterwards, as if I’ve just had sex.

My need for him is in my veins
strong as a magnolia,
delicate as a lily,
great as a bouquet.

I wait in my Volvo for two hours
until he comes
so that I can

cut myself and rub salt deep into the wound,
hold my breath and breathe in and in
clutching my arm as I watch him,
the closest thing to sex with him.

It burns, like my need for him
and the blood oozes like chocolate,
cascading onto my clothes.

I cut my arm up
like a comb
or as if it were a piece of clay
about to be fired.

But my skin is more like sliced ham,
or a dirty rag; peels like paint
or cotton fraying at the seams, where it most hurts.

Yet still my love for him is stronger than the pain.
I try again to cut,
to feel something other than the love.
I try again.

That acrid smell of sweat, of crotch
remains in bed with me this morning
when I roll over to an empty other side

expecting to feel far more than sheets
stiffened from our lovemaking,
starched and pressed like a policeman’s shirt.

I place my hand between my legs
and feel the dampness-
another wet dream, this time with Gods.

Ten men suckling at my breasts, thighs, earlobes
like wasps drawn by nectar,
splayed around me like the petals of a flower.

I am Athena with Odysseus,
and Penelope with Agamemnon
but I am never Penelope with Odysseus.

The coffee stained sheet frozen now,
as I slide open the front door
that glides on the ice december has brought,
as the earth thrown by the wind
seeps and melts into the cement.
I see winter’s children wrapped up like parcels
in their prams, showing only rosed cheeks
and eyes that dart forward
like shooting stars.
But seasons must, and will be challenged,
so I hack away at the ice with a hammer.

I peel the period blood red orange
and tear at the flesh
as if a lover tearing at it’s clothes.
Its skin oozes honey from its seams
and like cotton frays.
And when cold in my mouth,
it is the silky softness on my tongue
which consumes me
as it melts away as if honey in the sun
and runs onto my lips.
He is there to lick it off with kisses
and hold me in his arms
as if a butterfly in a cocoon
or a bee in its hive.

It was a wrong number that started it,
the voice on the other end
asking for someone he was not.
Nothing was real except chance.
In the beginning there was simply
the event and its consequences.
The question is the story itself.
There is little that need detain us.

Who he was, where he came from,
and what he did are of no greater importance
than the fact that the sun rose that day.
He had once been a father,

once been married
and once gotten lost in the mirage of images
crossing the streets like Zebras lost at sea.
Nearly every day, rain or shine, hot or cold,
he would leave his apartment to walk through
the city- never really going anywhere,
but simply going wherever his legs happened to take him.
Everything about Peter Stillman’s body was white.

White shirt, white pants, white shoes, white socks.
Against the pallor of his skin,
the flaxen thinness of his hair, the effect was
almost transparent, as though one could see through
to the blue veins behind the skin of his face.
The blue was almost the blue of his eyes:
a milky blue that seemed to dissolve
into a mixture of sky and clouds.