The softness of slightly warm air;
The sultry hair of my mother’s city,
Dancing across the backs of my palms as I walk beneath velvet leopardbarks.
She has a sandy-blonde type of heat,
Filling my mouth with the slightly sanguine taste of the promise of the sweltering summers
Of my memory.
Nude little boys prancing across a cracked lawn.
Singlet Christmases;
Cigarette smoke filtering across the patio,
Across the disappointingly almost-prickly taste of Coca-Cola, half flat and opened half an hour ago.
It smells good, in my memory – Not like the acrid exhalations of the old Italian men who sit and talk
About fraud, but the warm feeling of sating an itch, embodied in a smell and a taste
That fills my six-year-old lungs
With anecdotes, and bingo on the patio, and the spiky sensation of slate,
and silence for the 6’o’clock news, and curried mince.
And Grandma.
Cicadas set against an orange sunset;
Black silhouettes of Grandpa’s rainforest – an island of tranquillity that sustained a six-kid family
through the many years I’ll never remember.
It smells like mum-made Santa sacks –
The soft odour of hardly-used fabric that twirls in spinnerets across the top of my tongue.
Cold feet and the silent anticipation of darkness.
A 3.a.m. morning after a night where I hugged them both,
Sitting in front of the TV on those funny old black reclining ‘70s chairs.
5.a.m. dawn, filtering through in fingers of blaring white light – But a soft blaring,
The kind that hits you hard in one spot, then undulates softly about between the thin tree shadows
On the grey carpet.
Memory has a solid grip – If he gave you a handshake you’d be shaking your wrist out all day.
But a handshake would be too pleasant – Memory has other plans;
And so he grips hard on that bit of your throat till your eyes well up with tears;
He throws his fist, A lump against your oesophagus, and holds it there.
He holds the past against you as a transient mess of feelings and thoughts and places and people
You can never quite touch, or taste, or smell.
He taunts you – “It’ll never quite be the same”; he says.
He lulls you into believing for a second that it might be though.
And so you sit in a silent moment, the mental space in a crowded room
where you suddenly want to curl up and cry;
Cry because you tried to get there, to punch on through the paper wall,
Only to fall into a pale imitation – a repetition as farce,
If we redefine farce as an empty disappointment.
