Look what this poem is doing to me.
It's an act of possession, attrition;
it's war without peace, and yet I can't cease
from this ruddy reaction, a sort of
attraction; a kind of compulsion; this
pugnacious poem is so revolting
me. Yet I desire to be so leashed.

Look what this poem is doing to me.
One hand at my throat, and pushed up this close
it's lusty, musky, and temptingly male.
But when push came to shove, it said, 'Turn out
your pockets, pompous poet, of lazy
rhetorical devices, give me tales
or fine phrases to daze and amaze me.'

So I tried.

But the poem looked askance at my crazy
collection: at Tam's funny flat hat, and
Ozzy's lorn legs. And the twenty brown bees
couriered poste-haste from Persephone?
They fared no better. I rooted around,
and brought from a sack, seven apple pips.
'Just look at these,' I said, sure to impress.

'They'll get stuck in my teeth!' it sniffed, then
bloody hells bells, the bastard poem bit me.
'Poem, oh poem, please don't reject me
really, I promise to be good as a
good poet should, and not to annoy you.
I love to tease but I love even more,
poem, to please, don't you see? Say you do.'

The poem sighed.

'If you promise to be good, as a
good poet should and not to annoy me
then I shall demur.' And the poem looked quite
coy and we sat there, poet, poem, swinging
our several feet to a silent, shared beat.
Between us the beating of our shy hearts.
It was not yet love, but it was a start.

I just love it when I feel her
uncurl in my ear, pushing two
soft tongues there. I arch, unfolding,

as she rolls me with soft knuckles
and holds all my longing bones there.
My head lolls, cupped with two, three hands

that pull me falling forwards, where
slightly fingers tighten in my hair.
and hold me as she starts to sing.

[an earlier version of the poem]
the music is No es tan cierto by Juana Molina.

I'm in bed; I have the kind of restlessness of the sick that enables me to move a little a lot: to tense, release, to shift the pressure slightly on and off my arse. My feet are cold, pulling the heat down from my body.

I can see the shed outside, covered in a creeper and crusted on top with snow. In the summer, when the creeper is in leaf, it blends into the hedge behind. There's something Tolkien about it. I fully expect it to talk to me one of these days. And when it does, I'll say hello back, and with some emphasis on empathy and understanding, I'll add, 'I see you're stuck too.'

I couldn't really imagine the tone of it's voice, but it may say something like,

'Cut this fucking creeper off me when you next get your sorry arse out of bed.'

And I'd have to retort, 'Shed, anyone can see that the creeper is holding you up. If I cut it down, you'll fall to the ground.'

Silence possibly from the shed. Then, in an altogether more contrite tone, 'But I'm choking'

I, as you might expect, would need to give my next response some thought,

'Ah, but only slowly, shed. Besides, better that than a pile of sticks.'

'Sticks might not be so bad' the shed might say, changing tack.

'Give me the attention of dynamite. Polarise or disassemble me. But do not let me choke'

'Shed, shed, shed, shed, shed' I'd say, 'If I cut the creeper and you went away touting for the attention of the avant-garde, then where would I keep my pots and things; the fork, the spade and the pea-netting? Would it help if I wrote the names of all my former boyfriends inside you, or covered you with embroidery?'

But that could well provoke the shed into some furious rage, and might face me with a barrage of abuse on my needlework and handicraft skills. And I'd have to pull the pillow over my head just to get some peace.

Maybe best just to sit here instead, and not engage my shed in conversation after all.

image provided by John Hughes at SXC, 2007.

Lately, she'd started to notice smells: chips, grass, beef, vinegar; smells from shopping bags; dog smells; and a smell so strong from her childhood that she could taste it: Caramac chocolate. She could even feel the thin slip of the gold foil paper between her fingers.

Then the smells started to get complicated: salty roses; washing powder and jam; stewed apples and petrol. She didn't get it, it made no sense. Where could the smells be coming from?

One day, she brought her warm, downy arm up to her nose and breathed in, slowly. Skin, of course. She inhaled again: a faint smell of peach shower gel, and then something else. What? She screwed up her face in disgust: pigeons, she smelled of pigeons. Dry, dusty, filthy, light-starved, shitting pigeons...

Still gripping her arm, she saw herself as a child of six or seven following her Grandfather through the rank, dim, slatted shadows of his pigeon coup; him cooing and rattling dessicated corn around the edge of an enameled tin dish. She'd been fascinated but repulsed by the birds that'd looked at her sideways and whose white shit had stuck to the soles of her shoes. Then in the shadows, her unsmiling Grandfather had squeezed her flat chest and she'd let fall the handful of corn she'd been holding tightly in her small hand. She remembered his filthy fingernails and the startled, confined pigeons flapping violently, filling the air with choking dust. She rubbed her skin furiously: it flared red like a pigeon's eye.

She went to the doctor. He looked at her in a kindly, mildly alarmed way as she told him, more hurriedly than she'd intended to, that she smelled stuff; that she could smell pigeons on her. She knew that he'd not be able to help, but when he paused and told her that he could smell nothing passing her a questionnaire to fill in on depression, she'd looked back at him blankly and retorted: 'I'm not depressed'. She'd left then smelling, she was convinced, like a full, heavy raw liver, sliced in two.

One day she smelled of white rum and was eighteen again in Paris wearing a white cotton dress with broderie anglais layered to the hem at her knee and then up in a tight bodice to her neck. It was very, very pretty, she'd thought. But then, jammed in the Metro sometime later, she found herself with her back to some bloke, who spent the journey with his fist rammed hard against and between her buttocks, knowing that she couldn't move. That evening she'd got drunk on white rum and lemon juice and drank until she was sick. She never wore the dress again.

The smells got worse. People started to notice, she was sure of it. Young women, mainly, with perfect, peachy skin, their nostrils flaring. One day she'd smell like some old, dry potato with frantic white shoots trying to grow out of a fetid, plastic bag; the next the dried up smell of baby milk vomited up. She hated herself, and chaffed at her skin.

She wanted to smell clean, perfumed, somewhere between sandalwood and vanilla not bleach and blood. She tried a variety of costly dermo-facial creams with gently abrading micro-beads. Hopeless. Though she baulked at the cost, a skin peel that slathered her in trichloroacetic acid delivered on the promise to separate and peel away top layers of skin to leave her face 'regenerated' and 'thoroughly cleansed'. She glowed. But her skin was defiant, and that evening as she splashed cold water on her tender face she could smell fish where the water ran back through her cupped fingers.

Finally, she bought a pumice stone and scrubbed, needing to get right under her skin. She scrubbed and scrubbed until she bled, red raw shining patches flaring across her body. But still she scrubbed.

It couldn't go on. She woke one day in great pain in a hospital bed, swaddled in bandages, her abraded, flayed skin raw and sticky beneath the warm dressings. She felt strangely secure, and closed her eyes; was it a dream, or could she smell the faintest perfume of petrol-free, damask roses? Perhaps this was the last smell she smelled as she lay there alone as the sores on her festered and spread. A little more than two weeks later her exhausted body quite simply gave up.

When the porters came to remove her they found her in a small, stuffy annex at the end of the ward.

'Jeez, it stinks in here. What's that smell?' said one.

The other went to the window and flung it wide open, inhaling the fresh air deeply.

'Nothing but bad skin, mate,' he said, 'Nothing but bad skin. Believe me, you get used to it.'

image provided by Bartlomiej Stroinski at SXC, 2006.

This morning I found a fish under the fridge. A flat fish of some sort. Had to be, there was never room for a salmon or a cod under there. That I found it at all was remarkable. It was only because I was down on my hands and knees, head pressed flat on the floor looking for the silver hook fastening from off the end of a necklace that I saw it at all.

Unmistakable. Two silver eyes peering out of the gloom. Blinking now and then. I blinked back.

Now, both you know and I know that I can't stand fish. But what could I do? Leave it there? I stretched out on my stomach, feeling the threadbare grain of the carpet cool and scratchy against my cheek. The fridge door towered above me like the rusting hull of an old, white steel trawler.

'Hello, buddy,' I said, 'What you doing under there?'

The fish blinked again. Good start, I thought. I reached out an arm, stretching out my hand tentatively towards the fish. It recoiled sharply, moving back with a damp thwack against the skirting board behind the fridge. I strained to see it in the gloom, and withdrew my hand. Christ, the carpet stank. I sat up, rubbing off a crust of fluff and old food off my cheek.

Now what? It couldn't stay there, under the fridge. I lay down again, but, try as I might, the fish wasn't for coming out. It seemed otherwise okay. All the same, I had no idea how long it'd been there under my fridge, and was worried that it might be hungry or thirsty. I wondered what I could give it to eat. Bread? Bacon? Worms?

Over the next few hours the fish rejected all my attempts to feed it, and my offerings of broken up biscuits, cornflakes and crackers went unheeded and looked like so much stale flotsam washed up under the fridge. I was losing patience with this fish, I tell you. It was beginning to smell too.

And then, quite by chance, I caught sight of the small hook from off the end of the necklace: the fastening that I'd been looking for when I first spied the fish. That was it! It was a bit small, but it might just work. I tied a length of string to the hook, and, in a flash of inspiration, wound a small sliver of tin foil above the hook. Perfect!

Flat on my stomach again, I carefully pushed the hook under the fridge door, and wiggled the string a little. Nothing. I wiggled it again, seeing the silver lure turn over and catch the light, and, quick as a flash, the fish shot forwards and swallowed the hook, and started to pull and thrash backwards and sideways, frantic with fear.

Jeez, for a small fish, that's a strong bugger, I thought, as the fish flailed, curling and uncurling furiously. And then it pulled sharply. My hand was wrenched suddenly under the fridge. I swore and pulled back. The fish pulled sharply again, and now my arm was stuck all the way up to the shoulder under the fridge and my cheek pressed hard against the white steel door. Little bugger! Angry now, I didn't think to let go, but yanked the line as hard as I could.

The line went slack. I relaxed. And then, with an almighty pull, the fish hauled back on the line, and the fridge started to topple over.

And I found myself nose to nose with the fish. I blinked. It blinked.

It spat out the hook.

'Dinner time, I think', it said, baring two rows of very sharp, white teeth. And I would have scarpered there and then, but, you know what? I was stuck under the fridge.

For A.W. and the fish under his fridge