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the poet
Raised in troubled Northern Ireland during the 1980s and with a foot firmly on each side of the Irish Sea, Alex Smith has taught at some of England's most socially deprived schools. His stark poetry appears in Twyckenham Notes, Tammy, Clear Poetry, Bonnie’s Crew, Abstract Magazine, Ink & Voices and Okay Donkey, as well as in his collection I dreamt I wrote another me. Alex recently ventured into non-fiction memoir, and a taster of this is forthcoming as part of The EDGE journal.
the poems
All that remains
So I tell group that sometimes the tightness feels like
I’ve moved into the house across from you
but the walls seem further away and
I can't remember which memories are mine.
I say there's no anger any more, that
I've just opened my chest and let the trauma in,
stood down,
bald and stunned, with liver spots for eyes.
They all seem nice, the perky one
with Vaseline lips, she says things like
‘reasonable precaution’ and
‘You did all you could’. She’s good like that.
At lunch, we spin stories of the worst we’ve ever seen
and all the pain mirrors
make us seem interesting
like esteem is binary or something trite.
VaseLinda tells us about the Baemba,
about the growth hormone and that stress levels are highest amongst
trauma sufferers and their smaller brains so I think –
is danger excitement? Was it like that for you
when you wanked while your dad hit your mum?
They have their own codes here, like super spies,
to protect us adults from what you went through at six,
MAST STRAP Encompass Hollow. So cool
to live in the limits of a penstroke.
You smelled of lilac and the past.
I promise that when I go, I'll give the chair a spin.
Timber fences;
empty freedom
You were five when the world shifted
when you told me you wished
we were never made.
There was a time before those words
when the world was broad and
apropos of nothing.
Those words changed the world,
like pregnant did,
when we lost
some other words,
and the ones in the hospital,
the cancer ones.
Since the words, in this new normal,
we take a moment to breathe
and fear the empty time.
We were younger last week
and the world came with us.
Us, a couple with everything to prove to
everyone else but each other.
We’re the youngest in the waiting room,
fearing the universal thump
of timber fences; empty freedom.
I asked a stranger why she had to deal with
a cochlear implant and
how is that fair?
Asked another where she grew up,
she said in C ward when
my mother saw my wrists.
It didn’t hit us then.
Not until
we cried about how good our friends were
and how terrible the rest had been,
did we see the control of words and
smell the rain a day off.
I can’t remember the beginning but
I guess I’m here, and
I hope to God the end is better.
We wait on the amber light
and ignore people again
missed calls rack up
I run my hand along the bathroom tiles
undulating
till the grout is thick with skin,
the places where the rain gets in
we overrun ourselves
live in inference and spatchcocked time
we make God in our own image
and then damn Him for it, the
latticed ornate last line full of yesterdays
the first line since the diagnosis
drinking boneyard lattes in prurient despair
and I’m sorry your toast is burnt but there was this
bit in this song on the radio and I just lost it for a minute ...
In this new dawn,
post-creation,
the evolution of the eye is proof or disproof of God.
But I can’t even complain I wasn’t told, I
just didn’t listen.
And here we are
scared of the silence and open spaces
just co-codamol and coffee in the car,
the Adam and Eve of a rotten Eden.
Here, amongst the women who look at me while
they kiss their partners, I
can’t shake the feeling I’m owed, we’re
just a man and a woman
not allowed to fall apart, and in
all the blank years
after the diagnosis,
what’s left to worship but the words.
The Visitor
or
Not Quite Flesh
I never thought you existed. You were a fight
in another room, a moon landing, someone
else’s problem.
But now you’re here. Recumbent flotsam
gone sour on our sofa.
And now, it’s like you’ve been here
the whole time, crouching behind
lonely larder tins, nesting in the
plaster cracks. You make us into you
and your
not quite flesh.
I’d offer you a drink,
coffee I suppose,
but the cups are full with
blister packs.
You were in our bed this morning,
muddying the womb of the place,
warm and
heavy as a sleeping child.
You’re in the strangest places.
I know you’ve watched me in the shower, squeaked
love hearts on the frosted glass, grabbed ringside seats
at our love making, left
popcorn kernels for naked feet to tramp,
each its own
little death.
I’ve caught you in mirrors, whispering
imagined infidelities in her ear,
retuning guitars an octave low, breaking all the
major keys.
Uninvited, you leaf through
books, records, trip trap fingers delicately
dripping scorn
for still-faced ornaments, pronounce our poverty,
pick your teeth with cutlery as she cries
on vinyl floors.
Sometimes, I want to
kill you. Pitch you on your back,
push a thumb each side of
your pitted windpipe, squeeze
the life and pulse until you
pop
gift air
incontinent
skin balloon.
But what’s the point?
Besides the dust, you’ve dislodged
other things,
embryos
we hoped buried.
We keep the kids out now. And other guests as you are
a shy intruder. You hide in petticoats
so they’d never know.
You’re a secret bruise,
cuff pulled down on
red raw wrists, weak
eternal canker, the moment just before
a door
slams
shut.
We know you will never leave.
What discord then
that we endure your tremendous
vacuum,
file your teeth
and castrate you
with acceptance.
I wonder, if we were to
take the shards of us
and carve and mould
some other selves,
would you remember us
and come again?
Publishing credits
All that remains / Timber fences; empty freedom:
exclusive first publication by iamb
The Visitor, or Not quite flesh: Okay Donkey
(January 9th 2019)