Age appropriate

Sometimes you have a birthday and feel that the age doesn’t suit you. Personally, I was okay up to about 40, but every digit after that seemed worrisome. I began to think those things your mother used to say – Can I still wear this? Is the bar brightly lit? Do you say ‘groovy’ anymore?

And ageing is clearly sexist. Women can’t do ‘rugged’. Less men feel compelled to base their job prospects on their looks, and subsequently get into plastic surgery as a form of career maintenance. The cliché of the boss running off with the young secretary clearly isn’t about her dictation skills.

The downhill slide is more noticeable if you had a perky frontage previously. I was astounded to discover recently that scientists believe breasts were impermanent pre-Pleistocene times; they inflated and deflated like summer lilo’s. In fact, men would have actually found them a turn-off since they signalled a woman was already impregnated. And, once they had served their purpose for baby’s nutrition, they would have dwindled away.

Imagine the horror! Not only crows feet (read: laughter lines) and chin hairs (read: erm, chin hairs) but disappearing boobs to signal that the prime of your life is over. So, maybe we should be grateful for evolution – for turning breasts into our life-long pals. After all, there isn’t much that a push-up bra and a pair of high heels can’t solve.

Ageing must work from top to bottom for a reason. Babies grow proportionately from their head downwards i.e. first the brain and nervous system develop, then the limbs elongate and strengthen, until the child can sit, then stand, then walk. Similarly, we age that way – face and hair show the first signs of deterioration, but we are left with lovely knees. Who among us hasn’t had that awful shock when admiring a shapely pair of legs only to be startled when an ancient toothless crone’s face is attached? No? Just me then.

Perhaps there is a clue in the way our relationships need to develop. As babies, our wide-eyed innocence is designed to appeal to the parents nurturing instinct, and ensure that we are looked after to grow into adulthood. As we age, find a life partner, and produce a family, there comes a time when attracting a mate is no longer useful. Our looks decline so that we can concentrate on more cerebral tasks without distraction. Luckily, our eyesight often fails too, so we have no idea how rough we look.

I have decided that if this is the game plan, there must be a way to see the positive in it.

As Jenny Joseph said:
“When I am old, I will wear purple,
With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me....
...And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick flowers in other people's gardens
And learn to spit.”

Hoorah! Roll on my disreputable years to come.

When there isn’t time

You marshall thoughts like dominos, careful
to avoid one last tap. The page erupts in its blaring white
signal of the endless now. Knowing that

you should really set out to collect them from the school gates
or there will be tears. Put down the cup, the mouse, the pen
and drag on the non-slip boots, all too mundane for poetry

but woven into your day since the redundancy tossed
you back into the maelstrom of your four-square life.
It bites, that ankle-nip you tense for but can’t avoid.

How can there not be time, as if poems grow
like nine-month conceptions, after the futon excitement,
after the furore becomes the roar of daily traffic. Bald

bellies over combats disturb you in the plaza
the careless presence of a child only a skin’s wall away
from harm. There is no time, this time, to tell them.

Conjunctions over coffee, but I am removed from the room
floating with the smoke skeins, mere inches above
each separate insistent forehead. The world turns

on a pin; a dream of longing packed into a sci-fi movie
in that square inch in my periphery, above the coffee-cup rattle
and her face where time has passed while no-one noticed.

To make a difference. To be remembered. To be eternal
in the blush of youth, an echoing chain gang of family passes
through generations in the shape of a tea-stained birthmark.

The baby hiccoughs. She leans its head on her arm
like there is all the time in the world to worry about him,
but not now, when her own pulse races, and skips.

I take their bags. Coats. There will be time to write
after they have learned trigonometry, epidermal layers,
and the intricacies of conveying their hearts desires

to me, as though I could fulfill them. If only. The cats
yawn, removing themselves from their feline Ouroboros
to make space at the PC. I must read more Vonnegut.

Screwed Up

There is plenty wrong with the world. We don’t seem to be making inroads in fixing many of the problems, but we are fantastic at creating more.

I love films, stories, depiction of lives around the globe different to our own – ‘shapes of otherness’. But I am feeling despondent at how many of the brightest Hollywood actors die in their twenties. Drugs, pills, alcohol, guns, knives, cars. Heath Ledger, Brad Renfro, Kurt Cobain, River Phoenix, James Dean. Young white males taking on the psychosis of our age.

I worked with ‘at risk’ teens in London for a while. The same issues are there, just a bit less money to go around. Disconnected families, alcoholic parents, unemployed, glue-sniffing, self-harming kids. They can all watch TV and see this brighter world out there, where people have cars and homes and holidays, and they don’t get why they can’t have it. Don’t they deserve it? If they were prettier, thinner, cleverer, sneakier, maybe they could get out of the ghetto-ised suburbs, leapfrog their way to the States, or get a record deal, or a rich boyfriend.

And if they got there? To this dreamland of riches and fun and fame? How screwed up could they get there?

There’s no fun in studying every night, getting exams, going to uni’ while working in bars, studying more, applying for jobs, putting up with cheap clothes, a car loan, a student loan, a mortgage, studying more, getting a promotion, working late, putting work before family, squashing dreams, being practical. Is there?

I think I should set up a rehab unit in Spain, on our remote plot of land that’s truly miles from anywhere. A place to learn physical work, study the stars at night, read in the shade of the carob tree, forget TV and DVD and PSP. Actually it wouldn’t even be rehab – I don’t want to tell other people how to kick their habit or sort out their relationships. But when I was a teen and stuck inside my own head I had different options...

I spent a week at my nan’s once. Left London, got on a train with my cat in a travelbasket, turned up on her doorstep and was welcomed. She didn’t ask why. She said ‘Do you want fish and chips tonight? Would you be a love and walk down the hill to get it for us? Take the dog with you.’

I slept on a horrible Z-bed, in a room with paisley wallpaper and flowered curtains. I walked around the hills and didn’t meet another soul. I listened to my Walkman under a big oak tree. I wrote some stuff – all angst-ridden nonsense, but it removed it from my train of thought and cleared my head. After a while I went back to my bedsit in London, and cleaned the kitchen. Even though it wasn’t my turn.

Got a minute?

After

There are moments
pinned to you as latent engrams
when life coagulates in one drop of blood
water sweat semen tears ink

her
hand wore a raven ring
the room intense with cold
when she took the whole pack of morphine pills the 400mg calculated by
current weight of 7 stone (but does that include the lumps)
and the tiniest globulous sip of water
3 days before
my first birthday without her

sweat
trickles down my freckled breasts it drops on the tiles I’ve mopped badly
so that the grime line is visible under the steel refrigerator doors
where I retrieve the bowl of Nectarines Aux Armagnac for the portly businessman
with the lechy colleague who asked me if I was aware of my own destiny
sniggering at the waitressy reply I give
since it would belittle me to talk philosophy
with a man who spat in his hors d’oeuvres so his partner would not try them

I touched
her shoulder and wondered if we would hug today
since her husband declared he no longer loved her or their two year old son
but preferred Natalia who had long straight hair and looked like
the photos of our mother in her sixties mini-skirt and kohl
who made jewellery for women to wear whilst sleeping with their husbands
while she was slumped into rolls of fat breasts and belly and my hand didn’t span her upper arm which used to look like Kate Moss’s
protruding from her ‘pulling dress’ with spaghetti straps from Jakarta
and the only tears she shed were for
boys who looked like girls
or her mutilated grey Siamese

dropping the pizza
off the edge of the perfect white plate
to stare at the amniotic fluid pooling under my table on the laminate flooring you laid by hand on your cracked knee for three days with Brad
while you looked for the watch timer you forgot you were wearing
and I stared at the black interior of a holdall containing the doll sized nappies
I doubted I could fasten around the waist of a doll let alone a red faced squalling thing with heart and lungs and pearlescent fingernails
that you would hold in your arms two hours later
while I investigated the hospital shower stall
and watched paint red blood
cascade down my inner thighs
to swill with water down the Art Deco floor grill

drops
from a sable brush
with a thick handle shaped like a carved chair leg
to make sweeping calligraphy flow inkily across the stretched cotton frame
of the T-shirt that Caisa hung in her flat in Göteborg that she sent the photo of
her wearing when we saw Ulrika outside the museum on Götaplatsen
and I stood in the window next to some Europeans and thought will I always feel English unable to see the future where my children speak Valenciano
and I read the digital European news emailed to me because
I need to find out if they’ve printed the article about our battle to save the Carrascal Mountain from urban developers
or if my poem’s in print
on that forum

on a tree stump
near the London to Cambridge railway line
in the shade cast behind the corona glare of a station lamppost
his penis constricted by the black mesh of my fishnets I refused
to remove, his penetrating finger adorned me with the scarlet blush
of my first orgasm
caused as much by the sight of his purple prick dripping
as by the hoot of the train
and the backdraft whoosh
and the stars coming into view
after.

The best game in the world?

Reading the Inner Minx’s blog-site the other day (innerminx.blogspot.com) I discovered this wonderful game. Put your name and the word ‘needs’ into Google and find out the secrets of life. For instance, I discovered that:

Penny needs to switch meds. (Really?)
Penny needs a Bra – Bad. (How do they know these things?)
Penny needs your help to be able to continue on her antibiotics and to get her serum (Bit of a theme here...)
Penny needs a home as she was found on the side of the road completely feral (I do apologise and I’ll never drink Strawberry Daiquiris again.)
Penny needs to be supervised (Ask my boss)
Penny needs to stick with Spanish films, because that's what she does best (Ok I’ll try)
Penny needs surgery as the screws holding her wrist together have worked loose. (Blimey, better quit this typing then.)

Go give it a try. Blog-sites are addictive for the wonderful insight they give into other people’s lives. It’s the ultimate voyeurism. My favourites right now are theshamelesslionswritingcircle.blogspot.com - reallybadmovies.blogspot.com- athomedaddy.blogspot.com - singularcake.blogspot.com and wherelizardsrun.blogspot.com- although www.thebloggingtimes.com and www.blogher.org are also fun. Course, I slipped my blog in there. Us bloggers are shameless.