I'm ripe with things to say The words rot and fall away. If a stupid poem could fix this home I'd read it every day. - Blink 182, Stay together for the kids.

Oven chips tonight.
Again.
How many bags of chips is that now?
Just the idea of a home cooked meal gives you
Heart burn.

Monday morning hangover.
Tuesday morning hangover.
On Wednesday you wake up with the wine box,
on the pillow next to you,
empty.
Your new best friend.

Here in this bedsit, you and
your red wine blues live,
Anonymously
Lonely.

A slice of Saturday morning heaven.
Weatherspoon’s breakfast with the kids.
You’ve looked forwards to this all week,
Purposefully didn’t drink.

The silences.
The awkward newness of it all.
You tell yourself it’s not their fault.
You didn’t want to leave.
The bitter vines around your heart
Sqeezing tighter, all the time.
Pushing bursts of desperate vehemence,
through your,
clenched,
teeth.

The memory of it drives you back to drink.

You tell yourself it’ll get easier.
(and it does)
But it’s hard to believe
When your alone in the evenings
Scraping with your demons.

That’s what no one tells you about divorce
The evenings you’ll spend alone,
The terrible contrast to those evenings
You spent at home.

X

Death Rattle.

A hairbrush dislocates and slips from the praecipe of the heap. The Heap. My original thought was pile or stack, but both in some degree suggest rationality or care. There is no emotion here among this heap of tiny tombs.
     The slap of brush on brush in the death row silence is alien and intrusive. The hollow bang of distant shots ringing into the present. The echo of bone on bone in the pit. Then quiet. A stopped breath. I cannot take my eyes off of its descent. Stolen autonomy.
    So many hair brushes. Each one someone’s last possession. Each one someone’s last link to humanity. Normality. An ordinary object but each has it’s own unique DNA, and here they lie all lumped together. Each one a representation of a human life.
    As I stand and stare a creeping wind blows between the spines of the brushes, catching at stray hairs and raising them skywards before abruptly abandoning them to fall back, alone.
        Goosebumps on the back of my neck.
        A silent scream.

Another short writing assignment from class. I can't really remember what the actual assignment was but I know we had to choose a picture to write from, and I chose the hairbrushes. This piece is a bit shaky and I can't seem to get it right for some reason but I'll keep on trying.

"Nobody saw them falling." - Beloved (p. 182).

It was not the sight of the dead dog that brought it back. I have seen worse things in my life than nature taking its course. It was his smell. That rotten, dead smell. Or perhaps the fact that he was not dead at all but dying. Slowly dying in a stinking puddle of himself. How long had he been here? Did it feel longer?
    It’s long when you’re dying. Nights are the worst and it was always night. We had no windows. Those long long hours at sea.
    All the while I was standing there the dog was dying, each breath coming harder than the last. Dry mouthed. Some days we got no water at all. Are parts of him already dead? Is it just the mechanisms in his body keeping him going now? Slowly winding down till he reaches land somewhere. Parts of me too are already dead.
    Was disease killing him? Like it killed some of us? Creeping slowly from one iron muzzle to another, lingering in open flog wounds and ingested from shit dirty fingers. I was one of the lucky ones. They took the sick ones, chained them up, and threw them into the sea. Damage limitation. You see dead slaves were still worth something as long as you didn’t tell that you murdered them at sea.
    They buried us all at sea really, one giant coffin for us all. Dead soul chained to dead soul chained to dead soul. I learnt later that it took a court of white men two trials to come to the decision that we were people.
    Poor dog. The lucky ones always died at sea.



Short writing project about Slavery and ideas of memories and remembering. Quite a difficult subject to write about but I am quite proud of this piece.