CONCRETE_OLYMPUS_

Dads at home with the blinds shut BBC news livingroom lamp Stained T-shirt and pyjama bottoms hanging The toilet seat is dirty and the oven’s seen a fire He tells me about a long lost friend  She’s been living in America where she made millions Now she’s back to England to look after him - I’ll show you her text, he says  I’m worried that there isn’t going to be a message - worried that he’ll be confused - but he finds it - here you are- The message is from my ex-wife just saying hello She’s found me, he smiles … after all this time He’s on a loop - Speaking with clarity about family, past jobs and partners, but then a fog drops - like forgetting why you came in a room - And he goes back to the same delusion  The slow dissolution of boundaries of his memory- time and faces bleed - mould  is growing in the corners  He tried to save a baby from a fire, but she died He had to clear up the pieces of a suicide inconveniencing commutes, he says An ...

Sunday: I’m turned on by you. Your breast full in my hand, the sweep of the groove of your pelvic bone and the warm home of your corner of the ocean  - calm now, the water flatly bobbing. It’s too soon to be breathless -  to have a mind anywhere other than recovery, so I want to kiss you, feel you, and leave you to rest. I listened to an Irish poet - half listened And I thought he described romantic love between people as two tides meeting, moving away and then together again.  I thought about this - How we romantically and intellectually meet and how we can then be two tides out in our own seas and it’s all temporary. And it’s all constant. Monday: Tommy dreamt of the four of us: You, me, Flynn and him -  Walking up a spiral stone staircase You leaned too far forward to look down and fell He dreams of us, and is worried about you Love and anxiety - hand and glove I’m sorry that you now share some of the melancholy of missing them when they go ...

It’s not hard to become strangers  It just takes time  Two lifelong friends could spend a year in neighbouring cells and come out as strangers  When the only thing happened was time passed And the looping tidal movements of our thoughts and opinions continued  I was married to this person for 14 years  Saw that face and heard that voice every day And now she’s a stranger  Look at your loved one  The same could happen Our relationships exist between us  A fulcrum between two sticks Attuned to a balance held by everything  And it just takes something For there to be nothing at all

I said goodbye to my car Watched it leave on the back of a truck It’s turn for a piggy back A man with large hands and dead little eyes walked around it tutting a conman’s maypole dance  While I stood in the rain shrugging the tuts I love that car But it was my divorce car The picking up and dropping off car When no one had a firm idea of home My dads divorce car was a Nissan Bluebird I liked to think he was always in that car I didn’t like the idea of the quiet of his bedsit The bowl of soup at a table for four  Nicer to think of him in the Bluebird Dire straits loud on its tape player A free man Not a lonely one Then I sat in my own divorce car The car that leaves with you There every heartbroken time you drop them… Back, home? It took me a while to say “to their mum” Because back and home is me too I don’t want to be the dad in a car Tail lights saddening  I’d see them waving in my rear view mirror And it broke my heart a bit more each time