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Where we eat we’re also on display and here you are to look. I’m used to that. If I crash huffing to the ground and cuff my sister it is part for show, and part so she should understand priority. I eat first. Do stay. I like a chat. If I didn’t I would take my lunch and go. There are places we can have our privacy. I could vanish in the spirals of the climbing dome, or walk the field that stretches down below with follies, ha-has, an expanse of lawn. We are a well-to-do community.
You think we are shut in? I don’t agree. We keep intruding visitors at bay with fences. You’d be sitting on my straw helping yourself to what there was to snack, your children shinning up my tower without these boundaries, I suspect. Freedom has its limits. Once you call a place a home you have something to protect. If I drew a line to show your passage through an ordinary day would you not go round and round a fairly beaten track? It’s often so.
Sometimes, you people ask if I feel torn, missing hot forests where I spent my youth. Odd question. I was born not far from here, in Kent. In the thick of dreams it’s true, I push through trees where ripe fruit falls into my hands, the air steaming, dense, the sky deep blue. But then, there’s not a soul who doesn’t hold the myth of some lost Eden deep inside him. Even you.
This was my house. I look in at the gate. See a stranger locking up his car.
Branches fork like serpent tongues. Scales rattle in the breeze. Amber oozes from the wounds on all the monkey puzzle trees.
Father in the scullery, bent on mending broken time, clocks tumble into cogs and coils intricate as skulls and bones in pellets from the throats of owls.
The branches of the puzzle tree are spaced like ribs upon a spine.
Children shiver, faking the splash in the sink of a winter wash. Dragon smoke billowing in the sitting room air. Children forbidden in there.
I could explain to him, that once his trees were mine.
One brother butts his nose into book after book in his bedroom like bags of oats. His glasses thicken up a shield between us and his eyes.
The other escapes by moonlight via roof, fence and rain barrel, skirting the dark streets, prowling the night ocean.
And my room. Almost safe.
Amber leaks like golden blood to seal the wounding of the wood
Scorched messages, page after page, my pencil running hot to calm my complicated rage. Parched leaves compressed half a lifetime in a wooden chest, tapping, tapping S.O.S.
monkey puzzle shakes its head, whispers ‘shh’, whispers ‘shame’, but scatters leaves like little tongues, which tattle underneath his tread across the crazy paving path that winds from gate to door, the same,
Now they burst the box and spread, hot words implode in tongues of fire they sweep across the garden bed spark the leaves and sear the wood,
“Intruder, impostor, liar, thinking he owns the estate, thinking the stranger is me, staring at him from the gate. Sorting a fistful of keys taking the house in his name”
The monkey puzzle leaps with red. Nothing saves him from the flame.
My sister self it takes the surgeons hours to part, to settle on where I begin, to prise you from our muscle heart, to make this lung my lung alone. The air you breathed on me is gone. Where we were close I have no skin.
From where you stand you watch my faltering feet brush tentative across each step, establishing they don’t come yet, the obstacles that wait to trip me into fright. You pity now my yearning hand that palpitates the empty air, and dare to mutter in the presence of my lost and open face that I don’t walk as surely as I might. I say to you who travel past me through your world of sight if you had known the dark from which I came then you would call this light.
Across your talk you hear my flattened tones risked in the room unmonitored by ear, The modulation tutored by slow patience, I aware I may give out some strange unearthly noise, and all but I will know when I am doing wrong. I may be an intrusion in your world of sound but there is one who crossed the torrents of my silences and she would call this song.
On to my hand the flow, the chill flow, into the flow she guided my hand, over and again, patterning with her fingers on my palm in letters — water, water. Around my wild arms her strong arms, into the flow she pushed my wondering hand, on to my palm she patterned over and again in letters — water, water. Into my hand the flow, out of her hand the patterns until my sense woke, the darkness broke, A shell cracked, split and fell back, until the thirst rose, and her hand spoke, into the flow she pushed my hand, until the tide burst and there was water.
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