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PROSE POETRy
Pick You Up, Bring You Home
“My brother said, ‘Relax,’ so I’m so relaxed I can’t feel my teeth. We’re penniless gods, skint as anything and full of heaven; my robot boy doesn’t cry – he buffers – and I’m sticking around. That’s a threat, by the way, not a promise. And God help me, I get in.”
Pick you up and bring you home – that’s what he said: the man in the car, with the engine running and the window down an inch, enough for the smell to get out – long road. Fog mixed with the misty weather, so you can’t tell what’s breath and what’s sky, and the wipers going like a maniac with grinding teeth: scrape, scrape, scrape. Big-time storms coming down over the motorway lights like somebody up there is emptying the bins.
I’m fine. I’m fine, honestly. I’m being myself in a solo setting, which is what the leaflet at the GP’s calls it when you eat cold beans standing up at the sink at four in the morning. I had a glimpse of surrender once, you know. It was lovely. It was the nicest thing that ever happened to me. Then a wave of madness came up the stairs in its socks and sat on the end of the bed and said, go on then, love, tell me about your feelings, and I did, and it laughed.
