She Must Be Mad Page 6

  bodies

  You can turn them off and on

  You can make them fat then thin

  You could do a lot of courageous stuff

  If we gave them enough space to breathe in

  The prodding is an obvious hurdle

  And the feeling your stomach feels

  When it’s near ready for its contents to curdle

  The thighs leaning back

  Trying to impression a gap

  Waiting for a waistline

  To waste away

  It’s all a trap

  Squeezing anxiously at your face

  And your nail beds being the last thing that you could taste

  Wondering if down there is tight enough

  Wondering if your jaw line is slight enough

  Enough

  These bodies that we’ve made

  Are much stronger than we ever knew

  Before we saw what we’d face

  They’re bigger than our thoughts

  And sturdier than our psyche

  It’s a miracle that they can’t speak

  Because if they could they’d shout

  WHY CAN’T YOU JUST LIKE ME

  I’m doing so much stuff

  That you don’t ever see

  I’m forcing organs and beating breaths

  I’m keeping us alive, quietly

  And all you do is complain

  What’s sad is it’s fair and often contrite

  We do all of this personal grieving

  Even though we know that it’s not right

  But how we can we change our learnt perceptions

  When the thoughts that we breed are invited to receptions

  Daily

  To listen to our own lack of worth

  When our bodies are trailed through media’s dirt

  When school is not about grades but the length of your skirt

  If I’m half a size smaller will I be liked first

  I’ve only had liquids so how do I quantify thirst

  When sex isn’t about love but ‘how much did it hurt?’

  When do we remember our worth

  It really is worth it

  To think about how we’re working

  Not to fixate on the vanity parade

  That we’re constantly scrolling and old school surfing

  This stuff we consume is so fleeting

  When there’s stuff that supports us a whole life time

  That keeps us breathing

  And we shun it

  Tell us in a lottery of bodies

  Everyone else has won it

  But us

  That’s crazy

  Crazy that we fill ourselves with so little that we’re hazy

  We can’t think properly

  Because our diets are so light

  That our concentration’s sloppy

  That our skin is so grim

  Because we drink ourselves so wobbly

  Our head bangs so bad that we can’t help but think somberly

  We’re chain smoking at the sight of a sky

  So you can just pause for a moment

  And on your own sigh ‘what’s wrong with me?’

  That is not a good use of a body

  It should be angry and charging

  Not knackered and starving

  It has so much power to be starting

  Anything we drive it towards

  Past a distraction of how we treated it before

  Past us ignoring its own personal encore

  To be reignited

  For the love of whatever is good

  What the hell are we fighting?

  When the skin we’re in

  Holds us closer than our next of kin

  Ever could

  Why are we fighting against something

  That gods never would?

  Why are we bowing to a new fate

  That our muchness is weighed up to

  To the weight that we weigh

  That our sumptuous ethereal smart humanness means

  We’ll always think we are paupers

  But have the same bodies as queens

  sexy

  I am not yours

  To be beautiful for

  I do not clothe myself

  To be adored

  The most finite of knowledge

  That I can keep steady

  Is that I am mine

  To feel sexy.

  she must be an adult

  age

  You are eight years old, tiny toes and fingers have clambered up onto the sofa and sprawled, soft head first, onto the lap of your grandfather. You unpick a packet of Chewits cautiously, popping a pink one in your mouth and clammy handedly produce a yellow one for him. In between each chomp he smiles

  ‘One day you’ll be as old as me, I never knew I’d be as old as me.’

  It frightens you. Your eyes close and you sigh. He pauses, rushes his hands through your hair and grins

  ‘Think of all the adventures you’re going to have. I wonder who you’ll marry? I wonder if that man has been born yet, where is he in the world? I wonder who you’ll decide to be. Isn’t that exciting!

  You just don’t know yet but I know it’s all going to be brilliant.’

  It sticks with you much longer than he ever let it be a thought. It sticks with you until those questions grow around your ribs and seep into your lungs, you push them out past sighs and lengthen them to breaths. You let them grow to become place holders for answers.

  Your mother and your grandmother sit across from you on that same sofa, you are now fourteen. The dips and peaks of their profiles are identical to yours, their fidgets mirror, their breaths beat similar.

  You think of all the adventures they’ve had, the mistakes they’ve made and the promises they’ve kept. The women they’ve become. The powerhouses and strong-willed statues, the no-nonsense and all loving, the triers and succeeders, the women.

  You open up the place holders your grandfather first created and stamp them there as quotation marks, these are the women you too will become. Growing up, in that pause, is suddenly less daunting.

  But before you know it it’s 3 a.m. on a Monday and you’re typing cover letters with one hand and spoon feeding yourself baked beans on penne pasta from your bed, there is an old soup stain on your top making friends with a much older red wine stain, there is chipped nail varnish on your veneers from gnashing, forty-three unread text messages, fifteen new Tinder matches and one series of Master of None replaying over and over on an infinite loop in the background. The room smells tired. You fall asleep, everything left in its place.

  Four hours later, in your mother’s blazer and your grandmother’s dress, shoes that your father once bought you and a necklace you ‘borrowed’ from somebody else’s jewellery box, a little girl looks up at you with her pearl drop eyes of hope and wonder, unstuck momentarily from the moving landscape out the commuter train window and she surveys you. You smile at her as your ovaries trick you with a pang. She nestles her face behind her hands and takes another peek through her digits. She is wary. She looks at you, really looks, gaze fixated, and sees you, wholesomely, as an adult. When did this happen? It all happened so fast. And did it really happen at all? You want to shake her, lift off your blazer and show her your pyjama top still worn underneath, pull out the small bunny rabbit toy that you hide in your handbag for comfort, read her the panicked text messages to your mother that scream

  I don’t know how to be an adult.

  Scroll through countless photos of you in Ladbroke Grove just last week with red eyes and greasy hair, ham-fisted with receipts from a drunken hotel night stay, empty packets of cigarettes splayed across the table, searching for loose change to get the train to work, to get this train to work. ‘Shit, I’m going to work.’

  Shit, I’m an adult and nobody told me.

  goldman sachs

  Sometimes it doesn’t go right

  The wayward nights

  Yo
u imagined

  The taxi trips with strangers

  Paying bar bills with party favours

  Sometimes it isn’t a film

  No vignette close enough

  To cradle you within

  Its dark expanse and tell you that

  Not all of these men want adventure

  Not all of them are character studies

  Not all of them think you’re funny and smart

  Not all of them want to hear about your father

  Not all of them want to be a consensual partner

  Sometimes it doesn’t go right

  And sometimes it’s best

  To go home and straight to bed

  Instead of exploring the night.

  I’ll be home in the morning

  This is a mistake

  But something in my loins says yes

  Something allows him to undress

  Something takes me straight to bed

  And that something doesn’t live in my head

  It sits a pain within my chest

  Beyond a place where secrets rest

  It’s dark and I don’t like it there

  It’s packed with secrets and overstuffed

  Yet what it screams that mutes me deaf

  The most blatant entry I misread

  Says simply:

  Don’t do this

  When all you want to be is loved.

  too young

  It drizzled down

  Precious and thin

  Weaving matted through my hair

  My neck crooked over the side of the bath

  And your shoes gone from the bottom of the stairs.

  I must’ve been

  Only fifteen

  But that nausea was centuries old

  My nose plugged with the scent of your cheap aftershave

  And the shower head spitting out cold

  You said I no longer tasted much like love

  And my hips were the wrong side of wide

  I tried to wash you like dirt from off my red mottled skin

  And let you sink with the suds down the pipes

  But you left a scum that stuck to the sides.

  say you’re sorry

  She was nearly my age

  When she first heard your name

  It will take until her age

  For me to walk away

  And now at your age

  Everything’s too late.

  they came out and I stayed in

  All my friends are gay

  And I wouldn’t have it any other way

  Except on Friday nights

  When I’ve got no one to get off with.

  E1W 3SS/Billy

  Come up

  And come down with me

  Taste your figures

  On the furs of your teeth

  Youth might be wasted on the young

  But slip into this neon vulnerability

  And we’ll be wiser when the morning comes

  That ravages on our undressed mess

  But sip on the warm-ending edges of the sleepless sun

  And we’ll be wiser before we’re wasted again

  On all the thoughts we slurred and acted on

  Come up

  And come down with me

  We can’t do this when we’re thirty.

  pint-sized

  I’ve got this thing with kids on trains

  I sit there mesmerised

  Watching the silhouettes of flashing landscapes

  Reflect like magic in their eyes

  Watching their tiny bodies perform

  Pint-sized

  Attempts at behaving

  Swaying

  With each stop

  I’d quite like to swap

  Because I can’t remember anymore

  Of how it felt to take up such little space

  And for that to be a good thing

  For my learning and naivety

  Grabbing hands and misused words

  To be a sweet thing

  How it felt to be a glaring honest thing

  I wish back then I would have taken note

  Could’ve scraped together all the statements I didn’t know to sugar coat

  And kept them in my armour

  Kept their tangy sour taste and smile at them with the same charm

  A new little girl now has

  With my old grabbing hands

  I want to shake her to realize

  That her mischief is perfect

  And that growing up is a downsize

  Just stay put,

  And only move as the train moves.

  whatsapp

  In these times

  Of double ticks

  Last seen minutes

  And ghosting pricks

  Just text your girls

  And save your breath.

  roots of them/sorry, jacob

  They’re so beautiful

  And even when I feel not so

  They still remain

  And there’s a beauty in knowing

  That when it can’t be self-proclaimed

  It can still be breathed in, seen and attained

  That those around you’s beauty always escapes your change

  Well sort of, same same

  But different

  You see it as a caged reminder of wrongdoings

  An unmeasurable imprisonment

  It thrashes a hotter whip

  Lashes of a slobbering trip

  As you lick your lips

  And taste the saltiness of their beauty

  Instead of smelling it as sweet

  Sometimes the feelings we mistake

  As a clarity on others darkness

  Screaming solemn swears that

  The harmless are heartless

  Is us projecting our fear of losing beauty

  Of power, of wonderment, of worth

  But for what it’s worth

  What I’ve learnt

  Is to swallow it down and accept it

  Pick up a tougher smile as you exit

  Pick up what you admire and inspect it

  Until you understand why you respect it

  Take time to realise the roots of them are the roots of you

  And you’ll think yourself beautiful too.

  kids

  Our bones stuck like honey

  Silken gestures grazing ground

  As we flew over handlebars

  And relished in dotting our bloodied scars with the same tiny digits that made shapes with carbon-backed stars.

  The nonsense made sense in its cherry-rich taste of speaking a language of pulling funny faces.

  The fear of inferior was nothing but a shifting canvas that smelt like summer

  Shedding our winter skin to become a

  Firecracker of innocence

  An uncorrupted, feverishly disruptive

  Blazing ball of wonder

  And when we expanded from its amber shell

  Spitting sparks as we embraced the swell

  Each filament of learning spun a grand farewell

  And spoke a greeting to the less bright

  Other side of where those taller weren’t glowing

  I’m sure we’d never have grown up if

  We’d been told where we were going.

  forever

  Can you be related to a soulmate?

  Can you be born into fate?

  Can two nodding identical profiles

  Bear such growing worldly weight?

  I sympathise my all

  With those who need to find the one

  When all of my searching

  Stopped when I begun

  Because the child in me has always known

  The only one I need

  Will always be my mum.

  baby ella

  Fingernails flat like scraps of seashells

  Pull and paw at a tide of softness

  Scratching out unthought feelings

  Human hieroglyphics />
  Of maternity

  As these tiny digits cling to me

  Until I breathe out a shape of my heart

  And imagine it as your own

  No longer frightened

  Knowing that all that’s within me

  Hands like yours one day

  Will hold and call home.

  adult

  You are shoulder to someone’s waist in rows of black. A ceiling above you fifteen times as many feet as you stand and as ornate and detailed as the Skechers trainers you’d begged to wear today but had been denied. Mum said they were inappropriate. You didn’t know what that meant. They were black and silver, just the same in your mind’s eye as every outfit you’d ever seen in Disney shows that were worn to funerals. You take a pew, bashfully battle your lungs for song and try to ignore the sobs. Grief is an unexplored, unexplained alien that greets you at a coffin, offers out its hand in introduction and pulls away quick enough for you to remain unacquainted properly. You go to offer it small talk but it is already someone else’s turn. You sit at a wake and watch people get drunk, laugh and tell stories, cry quietly safe in the knowledge that you, a small child who knows nothing, is only watching. There is something inside of you that begs to feel sad, to understand. You pull and push for tears, fists banging against your eyes to see stars, wishing for water but nothing comes. You feel your age for the very first time in a way that you’ll always remember. You are eight. You feel young. You feel untainted. You feel like today is a controlled blip in the universe being driven by a car that will keep on going to a place where you’ll never have to return. You only need to stand at this place once. You tell yourself, despite your known and sure naivety, with such total confidence that today is not normal and will not ever have to happen again. The world that you know is not made to allow for such capacity for sadness. The world that you know is so new it cannot end.