Yesterday

My mum called me and told me my father had had a stroke. I'd been up cavorting all weekend. I wrote this poem about it.

The way it went this weekend was predictable.
I've done it all before.

A hurried, pre-party meal,
An inappropriate feel,
Some wine, a line
A stolen rhyme,
Spinning around on the wheel.

A fist fight or two?
Nintendo for cash?

And everything disappeared.

All that occurred on Friday,
Can never be contained here.
Friday is a promiscuous thing, cares little,
Spreads herself around.
Gets high, fucks anyone.
The way that was Friday stretched,
Roughed up, raped, pumped full of narcotics,
Misshapen, malnourished, abandoned, abused,
It's a regrettable thing.
Her young and excitable voice morphed suddenly and deeply into Sunday,
His languid desperation,
His throaty growl outplaying her young cries.

Old Friday became too real, too visceral,
Evading my gaze.
I didn't see her leave, no backward glance.
Or lingering trail.

(My eyelashes nearly touched the sun,
As I suddenly saw I was unprepared,
With one brief phone call,
On this new and unwelcome Sunday,
For what will inevitably occur.)

Faintly comforting myself with the sympathetic touches,
I stem the endless flow of unshed tears.
Swimming away from the edge, paddling hard upstream, back-peddling
To shallower, sunnier waters, to smiles and lines, I drink a beer
And write a memo:
Do It Tomorrow.

Onwards

It's over.

My heartstrings have been wrenched from my chest and strummed to the last,
I try to look back over my shoulder, recall the force of the blast,

And all I can see are the miles of the smiles
Of my friends, the survivors, waving from the banks,
As I sail away, the day after my birthday.

Fiona Apple

'When the pawn hits the conflicts he thinks like a king
What he knows throws the blows when he goes to the fight
And he'll win the whole thing before he enters the ring
There's no body to batter when your mind is your might
So when you go solo, you hold your own hand
And remember that depth is the greatest of heights
And if you know where you stand, then you know where to land
And if you fall it won't matter, 'cause you'll know that you're right.'