I know 

You already cycle 

You eat vegetables 

You grow yourself.

You have good thoughts

You stay healthy 

In mind and body

But I worry about you.

Not just sentimentally;

We need you healthy for the next five years

And after.

Don’t let the braying Bullingdon boys

Raise your blood pressure,

Don’t let the murky Murdoch press

Get under your skin.

Don’t let the blustering Blairites

Sow self doubt in you.

Eat vegetables 

Cycle

Think good thoughts.

Keep doing what you’re doing

With my love.

When I think of you

I still see what I think you saw

In the mirror.

Earth mother

Nurturing, nourishing, kind

So good with children.

Your daughters 

Raised on educational games

And organic produce.

Your house

Full of cozy floral prints

And art that dreamed 

Of a fairer world.

You made me sit in the footwell of the car

Because I did not deserve a seatbelt.

You always made beans on toast when I came for tea

Because I was not worth really cooking for.

You watched your daughters bully me

Having learned from you how much less I was than them.

But when I think of you

I still think of your beautiful house

And your bountiful garden

And the kindness in your smile 

That was never really meant 

For me.

For an old lady on a ward I visited this week.
CN crap end of life care.
_______
You’re not at home

You’re on your own

It hurts.

Nobody comes

And when they do

They prod

And talk to you

Like you’re a child

But then

You hear them say

“She’s not got long”

Who’s “She”

You think you know.

This is actually about several people. What they have in common is that photographs on their dying moments or dead bodies have been shared on social media. So this is about that and the appropriate trigger warnings apply.
_________

I do not want to die

A violent death.

I do not want to know

That this is my last breath

Because another person willed it so.

I want to die in bed

With no drama

Asleep, in cozy pajamas

And in the triple digits.

But if I die, instead

Because I’m something terrible

To someone.

If I die in war, or I am killed in hate

Then I implore,

I ask for only this:

Put me on the Internet.

If you don’t know the exact circumstances of my untimely demise 

But you do have a photograph 

Of my still warm body 

 Bleeding into concrete

Share it.

Make the circumstances up 

To fit the narrative that you prefer.

Please, make insensitive comparisons

Between me and other victims.

It’s a reasonably safe thing to do.

None of us after all can talk back to you.

Make us compete, in death, for sympathy.

Lost cause pitted against victim minority

I want to live on in your talking points.

And I just can’t wait to trigger a PTSD episode in someone who sees themselves in my story

Or at least, whatever story they’ve been told by you.

I’m living for the day when, in dying, I give the people who would have hated me in life

A stick to beat my grieving siblings with.

Please let my memorial be a Facebook post you hit share on without reading.

Tag in your friends. I can’t wait for mine to suddenly see me there, bleeding.

I 

Just

Can’t 

Wait.

I dropped the can

And Diet Coke spurted out

In a four foot jet.

I felt like a fool

And I was disappointed 

To have lost my drink

But the way you stopped

And watched delightedly as

The can sprayed the road

The way that your laugh

Included me in your joy

Instead of mocking

The way that you waved 

Like we had become old friends

In those ten seconds

Made it worth the loss

Of my money and my drink

A million times

A late one from yesterday for my nephew.
Sometimes

You play life like chess

Thinking twenty moves ahead

If this then that.

If the worst, then the other.
I see your eyes widen

At a potential risk

In some unchosen future.
You told me once

That people had clouds around them 

And when a stranger’s cloud touched yours

You’d get more and more stressed

Until they went away.
We were walking to the shop

And every step

Made you more anxious.

At last you explained

What seemed so obvious to you.

The woman in the shop

Would know you, 

Wonder where your parents were.

And seeing you with me

Assume I’d kidnapped you

Call the police.

And then I’d be arrested

And it would be your fault.

Because you knew the woman in the shop

But she did not know me

The mixing of the clouds around us

You  predicted would end in disaster.

I reminded you

How much like your mum

People say I look.

They’ll realise I’m your auntie

It will be alright.

It will be alright.

It will be alright.

Just a memory of a sweet, sweet girl who suddenly realized she had the upper hand at the end of a year 7 special school class on a trip to Padley Gorge.

_______________

Sitting on a rock

in the middle of a river,

Arms folded, and knowing

For once

You have all of the power.

We can’t make you move

Can’t bully or plead or cajole

So we can’t leave

We all have to stay here by the river.

And this day 

Not spent trapped in a classroom 

Where nothing makes sense

Where reading will never be mastered

Where numbers will never add up

But instead, 

Feeding ducks

Eating icecream and shrieking with laughter 

Knee deep in fast flowing water

Can’t end

Until you decide that it’s over.

And you

Have all of the time in the world.

Ju Jitsu

Is the use of the others’ strength

Against themselves 

The triumph of the weak

Against the strong

Through strategy.

When we met, you seemed so strong.

A martial arts expert!

Where I would cower if threatened 

You’d warn “ju Jitsu!”, strike a pose

And watch the bullies wither.

As time went by
And as our friendship deepened 

 I learned about your battles

The ones that made

The ones at school

Seem nothing.

The stepdad who would throw you against walls,

The mum who’d starve you

Tell you just how little

You were worth to her.

And soon you turned your fight against yourself.

I tried to help

I couldn’t.

Ju Jitsu

Is the use of the others’ strength

Against themselves.

I wish that it had worked 

For you.

Some days, disappearance is a seductive notion.
——–
Sometimes you just want to walk away 

From the masses
The mess 

And the meddling.

A bike would be faster, and so you start pedaling.

Reveling in the transient freedom of

“Nobody knows where I am”

And you want to keep going 

But you can’t stop thinking

That the freedom of nobody knowing

Is just for a while

Unless you take that one step

That one extra mile

The one where you never come back.

But there are still people you’re willing to sing to

And there are still days that aren’t hell,

And there are still one or two threads you can cling to.

So you follow them back to the life that you’re aching to leave

And you try to believe it

When they say you’ve “been found safe and well”.

Another teacher poem.

____________

In 1991 I was excited 

I was starting a new school and I was beyond delighted

To be leaving my old one.

I thought the next five years 

were going to be golden.

Holding on to the promise that I was 

Clever.

Even though

Top of the class doesn’t mean much

When your class is the class full of rejects.

And they swore to my mother that they didn’t stream it,

But all of the freaks

The boy who licked legs

And the girl who didn’t wash for weeks,

The truants, the trouble, the weirdos, the weak

Were all lumped in Y6R

Presided over by Mr O’Hagan

A sort of Lancastrian Fagan

Who between twanging bra straps of girls unlucky enough to need them

Liked to spot insecurities and feed them.

Reading aloud? He’d spot any stammering

Lead the whole class in a verbal hammering.

Mental arithmetic? He’d never ask a kid that might shine

The answer he wanted then was always mine.

But there was that one time 

When he raised my self esteem

Because in his room full of losers

The innumerate clot always lost in a dream

Somehow turned up

The school’s first ever y6 reading test perfect score:

With a reading age of at least 15.

So when Mr O’Hagan said I was

Clever

I thought it might just be true

Because nothing would make him lie to make somebody feel good.

So when I left to start anew

I believed I might be 

Clever.

And the next five years

Were going to be golden:

How little I knew.