Two Prose Poems
Just heard I've had a couple of prose poems (not these) accepted for a new anthology, so this is to celebrate.
I took my girl onto Jeremy Kyle to see if she’d been faithful. The stage was prefab podium, the bouncers beefy; himself in a shiny grey two-piece get up. Lights in your eyes as the questions hammer in. What made you suspect (to me). Just how did you think he’d react if you said things like that (to her, the crowd applauding). Interpretation’s a slippery snake, often of the trouser variety. I never did much with my letters to be honest. Black tats on a rough cut square. But I always check her stories when she’s back, let her words flute out into silence... Here the whole thing’s thrown – I wouldn’t say relief – more like a fun house mirror, scratch marks pulled into hideous hatchings. Jezza opens the envelope, pulls out the polygraph card: just look at his scrubbed clean hands. I knew there was more to it than a simple explanation.
*
I’ve always had a sweet tooth. Glucose and his siblings power through my veins, creating a rush from which language flows in its triple-jump parabola. Hop, skip, bound and down. Sometimes my embouchure is changed, harmonics adjusted through cavity or coating, the contraindications of a stirred-in life. I must have been quite young still, getting a toffee apple from my dad, unbalanced by his one-off supermarket circuit, a man on woman’s terrain (it was the seventies). The sphere of hard-set gloop went up to my face. I gaped open in hope, like a trilobite sucking a planet. I pushed my incisors to work, felt cracks at the overstretched edges of my flesh. Then – I remember – enormous surprise at finding a tooth embedded in the glaze, feeling the new lacuna with my tongue. It was painless, it was fun. Just last year, I saw them again on sale (Hallowe’en) and bought one for nostalgia’s sake. The split of its fragile carapace, the watery flesh of the fruit – what had I expected?
I took my girl onto Jeremy Kyle to see if she’d been faithful. The stage was prefab podium, the bouncers beefy; himself in a shiny grey two-piece get up. Lights in your eyes as the questions hammer in. What made you suspect (to me). Just how did you think he’d react if you said things like that (to her, the crowd applauding). Interpretation’s a slippery snake, often of the trouser variety. I never did much with my letters to be honest. Black tats on a rough cut square. But I always check her stories when she’s back, let her words flute out into silence... Here the whole thing’s thrown – I wouldn’t say relief – more like a fun house mirror, scratch marks pulled into hideous hatchings. Jezza opens the envelope, pulls out the polygraph card: just look at his scrubbed clean hands. I knew there was more to it than a simple explanation.
*
I’ve always had a sweet tooth. Glucose and his siblings power through my veins, creating a rush from which language flows in its triple-jump parabola. Hop, skip, bound and down. Sometimes my embouchure is changed, harmonics adjusted through cavity or coating, the contraindications of a stirred-in life. I must have been quite young still, getting a toffee apple from my dad, unbalanced by his one-off supermarket circuit, a man on woman’s terrain (it was the seventies). The sphere of hard-set gloop went up to my face. I gaped open in hope, like a trilobite sucking a planet. I pushed my incisors to work, felt cracks at the overstretched edges of my flesh. Then – I remember – enormous surprise at finding a tooth embedded in the glaze, feeling the new lacuna with my tongue. It was painless, it was fun. Just last year, I saw them again on sale (Hallowe’en) and bought one for nostalgia’s sake. The split of its fragile carapace, the watery flesh of the fruit – what had I expected?
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