I was uncontrollable in the way I behaved around your family: lineaged with allotments, sloppy, expensive jumpers and inherited wardrobes.
I once pulled up a season’s crop of rhubarb in your father’s allotment as I was not familiar with the concept of growing my own food. It is a sign of the wealthy to cultivate an idea of plain living; I had no clue such time could be spent on meals.
*
Houses gilded at the edges, that were never ending upwards. I was told I was hysterical, so obvious the trope it feels like a timestamp, generic as a b-movie. You had a punishing aspect that tried to smooth me down.
Money is a laundry softener, but I just became more abrasive, like a square of sandpaper. I felt like a novelty in the pastime of those in wealth, there is no pastime in poverty. You told me your family had no money, that everything was tied up in property, in surnames. Money has a metaphoric quality in this way, to be called a certain thing a certain way proves wealth to those who also have it. I am painted the opposite.
*
Sorry was the language I learned.
I had followed you too far into the ill-green of your mind. Green at an angle, scaling up in colour, green of a plane’s still shadow, darker, on the lattice of field. Light joins in a continuum. Frequencies occur, a flash between my eyes.
When I stand in one position, I can imagine you stepping off a train and the limits of this come into play, it frightens me to imagine you alighting a train. How one green tree’s stem and bark represents the logic and order of my own perspective. Is a branch or a tree in this way like deep feeling, unboundaried and usual? I was told one way was green and what I saw was not, although I was sure.
Objects thrown.
What about that livid green over there in the shape of a diamond? The sectioning parts of trees? Suddenly it stands out, an unnatural green, as if there can be such a thing. It is chessboard and hardware store green. The green of a swing bin or car door. But it is planted and skewwhiff in shapes, someone’s garden of entropy, someone’s flowering bit of temple. Sorry.
*
What is it to love a person? Or a virus, a prophylactic acid? A trouble in the systemics? Which is like a riot in the municipal architecture of a body? How emotion and clinging affliction makes a way through sinus and back out again?
I was pushed to breaking point as I liked being used but cannot say it, hand pressed over a red-hot grate – your mother in the doorway would tell me about the things she did to you – things that may explain his behaviour. She never ate and clicked her fingers at you when you ate too much. I’d console you after the fact. Old steamy photographs.
I am passing through the aches with my cilice shirt on.