full fridge

my father comes home with more unnecessary food and opens the fridge and sighs. sighs because it is full. sighs because now there is no space for his new food. no more space for the 5th block of cheese* and the pack of the supermarket's "best" pork pies. except they're not the best. they just want you to think that. in fact it's exactly the same old eye-balls and asshole junk, but you feel better about it coz you are under the spell of their semantic lies. my father sighs genuinely and irritably because he doesn't know what to do. he sighs at the world for making it difficult for him. he sighs because someone has gone ahead, of their own accord, and FILLED the space that he now needs for his superfluous comfort shopping. oh sweet baby jesus - the tragedy of these first world problems. urch, and there's that noise again. that fretting, deleterious pant, huff and sniff that says he'll die of heart failure. he should see himself. not only is the fridge merely full, but it is so glutonously full that no one can even see to the back - to where the forgotten foods rot. this is insane. this is chokingly mad.

*this is not an exaggeration. i have before (if one were to include cream and spreadable varieties), counted over 10 types of cheese.

patients

in waiting rooms people fall silent
for fear of being a nuisance.

the silence could be comfortable,
as in churches and libraries,
but this is a waiting room,
where everyone is waiting
for something.
and it's usually bad news.
and everyone wants it to happen as soon as possible,
which is the complete opposite of what's going to happen.

instead the silence is tense;
purposeful and strained.
a quiet standard has been set.
one that is communally maintained.
and for it, we repress all our personal tones
that might otherwise have blended 
into the ambient sounds and phones
of chatter and clatter,
of rumbling syllables and burbling prosody.

silence is a mute and un-worded language
that screams social conformity,
and aids only in drawing attention to those things that pierce it,
such as the sound of an elastic band snapping,
a cough, a copy-cat, a snotty snort
a smothered sneeze, a child's cry,
a frustrated sigh,
or the awkward scuffle of chairs.

in these venues of taciturn delay,
as we endeavour to entertain ourselves with out-of-date gloss,
we notice
that when someone coughs
it is everyone's cue
to cough too,
quickly, within the constricting window of a second or so,
so as to get back to the holy hush
and the expanding span of polite indifference.

couldn't we all agree to murmur instead?
murmur and relax in the cushions and fog of ambiguous vibration,
giving our jerking anxiety soft corners.
bodily functions will not yield for the sake of a few decibels,
the lady across from me can testify,
as i pray for a cloud to rain lucky dribbles,
so that we may bask in the irregular giggles
of a spluttering tin roof.

i had an appointment for twenty to four
to discuss the joint dysfunction of my clicking jaw.
...at 5 o'clock i was told that i should be speaking to a dentist.

shhhhhhhh...

scent of a woman

seeing is not believing coz looking at a picture or seeing someone from across a room is still distant and heart-wrenching. but to sense someone's natural scent, you have to be so beautifully, beautifully close.

Women! What can you say? Who made 'em? God must have been a fuckin' genius. The hair... They say the hair is everything, you know. Have you ever buried your nose in a mountain of curls... just wanted to go to sleep forever? Or lips... and when they touched, yours were like... that first swallow of wine... after you just crossed the desert. Tits. Hoo-ah! Big ones, little ones, nipples staring right out at ya, like secret searchlights. Mmm. Legs. I don't care if they're Greek columns... or secondhand Steinways. What's between 'em is a passport to heaven. ...I need a drink.

Christmas: the drinking game (festive diary entry)

overshadowed by the slap
a feeling of loss like someone stole your kidneys
but hasn't bothered to tell you yet
n you're feeling around your mid-riff
like "something aint right..."

so hungover i almost puked on the roast duck
why did they get the near vegetarian to do the carving?
shivering and clenching
after a tiny portion i nursed a beer for 5 hours
and bitched with our tiny extended family about what was on TV

every time i suck i get the taste of iron filings
leaking something dark and rotten
rich with mould and purple decay
i will never forgive myself for letting my teeth turn
from pebbles of young enamel into jagged chips

so much MXE on NYE i thought i had got to the end of the universe
where life repeats itself in a constant loop of inevitability.
after what seemed like years my mother woke me and i was struck
with an insane belief that i had finally been released from the asylum
but after a while everything went back to normal

carols and sirens merge in wet winds
chapped lips and brittle bones
riding the waves of fever
glad of a central heating system
and glad not to be flooded