“Where I’m From ”

III LITHIUM

1973. 19.15pm. I turn the dial. The crackling hiss settles and a voice announces; “The Adventures of Tracy Dark.”

My fifteen minutes of freedom before the forensic skin of you. I recoil back into the stark bruise of mother: a careless juvenile snide retort to the backhand return of a wooden brush snapped in half to my jawline.

This is a room long unvisited.

The sheer metallic face stares at me from the marble basin, blank as the razorblade alongside, on the small wooden board: Naked, conspiratorial; waiting for Her.

Such foliage of misery And inexplicable dereliction.

I’d wonder about the ugly secrets only you and she shared: What lay beyond that slicing? Was it the razor curl of tongue or the cigarette burns bringing Dad to heel slewing insults from coal bunker sunk in gin and doused in orange paint?

The crackling hiss and the radio voice; “Until the same time next week, thank you for listening… “

In the compound earth of her, she still is the brute grief in the broad build of my own road pebbled with cancer, spiked by murder, ripped up by suicide.

She placed her kisses so much lower down. Her own mother had her believe she wasn’t made of finer stuff: my haven and war zone. My sombre admittance of that me brokenly touted by scarred knees and scuffed knuckles, the first of my toughest knocks.

Her perfumed secret self and unapologetic slivers of Lithium.

She had no need to explain the threads of her ambiguity, fibres so incongruous as to make some read her ambivalence as straightforward indifference.

It’s the residue scattered through Curvaceous mind tissue that tears most candidly yet damned to render injury visible, too confessional or wayward when the absurdities of it are true.

She had a knack for entertaining others and stripping truth to the bone: Stop blocking fire station lines with whinge(y) calls, she told a friend once.

Said to get on with it, if she really meant it. Even handed her the gun:

“At least make it a clean shot, we’re short on time to clean up after you. Riots in the townships and all that. Their dead are real at least.”

Stopped the woman dead in her tracks.

P.S. All human clues to you peel thinly; a nutshell crumbed to the touch. Your body crime scene littered with clues. No way to read them but bite marks of memory:

The wigs, the pills, your birds and your garden.

Your open house. Chemo. Childhood tales. Days of endless sleep,

Nights outside whispering to stars; the silences, talk of reincarnation. So much life yet so little living.

I glimpsed your real glamour between Valium ‘n Coffee: Just once.

Had you lived, would we be friends?

_____________________________

Part Three from The Aviary. First published in “20/20”, a poetry collection on exile and identity with Mario Susko, 2015.

A reflection on growing up with a mother who suffered from clinical Bi-polar depression and an alcoholic father.

#autobiography #lives

Photo credit: mine, from a recent trip to London.