You can listen to this poem here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JJdRPCq6Ns&t=2s
The sky a hateful stone gray, like a thousand concrete walls. Clouds, dark and hefty like giant colliding buffalos.
On a day like today, windblown, wet, cold, harsh, like an accusing
squint. I fight the memories that sting and bite.
My troubled mind a rattle with sinister old jingles that ring
with pain, pain, pain. The past with its ugliness comes rushing, an endless
backbreaking winter.
I want the darkness outside to reflect the darkness within,
but when night came, traffic lights bled into menacing red and green snakes,
uncoiling on inky streets.
All graves unburied, all badly sewn wounds unstitched, all my
banished ghosts are back to haunt me, my sleeping grief opens its cruel yellow eyes
and cackles, I could burst with all the tears I can’t cry.
On a day like today nothing is real, I feel the sunless, steely
sky in my bones, like an ugly grimace,
The trees are wicked, old, misshapen things with pointy dark
fingers, even the birds suspended midair are wooden, unreal
Everything feels like a purple throbbing bruise, a thousand
doors slam shut in my head, I can’t see the kind faces saying ‘good morning’,
my smile a separate detached thing on my face
Every word grates on me; a woman says “it was like having my
eyes rubbed with sand paper” my teeth clench, my eyes shut, my muscles ache,
the violence of her metaphor bears on me all day, I bend with pain.
I hear all things in images, l hold on to the robustness of things,
I peel off my clothes, black and heavy with sweat, rid of its bondage, my sore
body exhales. My grip tight around the shower tap, water as hard as hailstones burrowing
in my skin. I want to disappear in it, to evaporate and drop like the cold
tears on the bathroom mirror, Oh to melt, to wash away like dead skin down the
drain.
