Long Poem

Katie Proctor​

 

Not all love affairs are supposed to last forever, but you’re
immortalised in a long poem, and I don’t write those. I don’t
have the metaphors in me, but it’s for the nonchalance, the
trains north to south joined like a paperclip chain made absent-
mindedly by wandering, ambitious hands, and the vending
machine pad that’s still in my bedside drawer, coughing
and crying in the hotel bathroom. I write the long poem for
the knowing I’d look back and feel it in glimpses, the
bubblegum-aftershave taxi cocktail that got me drunk before
I knew how drunk felt, washing it out of my hair every night and
not knowing how to say goodbye, so not saying goodbye at all.
In the long poem I’m half the person I am now and double at
once, mystified and growing and learning a city in two weeks,
a chameleon in the dim light, double life, cool and off-white
and yellowed peach. The long poem lives in one room, four
walls and a Tesco sandwich that I couldn’t taste, staying up
just to watch the ceiling: I can’t lose a moment of this, not
a single one, because it’ll never be the same again. It’ll
be me out of here soon, out the rickety window and past
the pylons on the worn seat, and I know I won’t ever let go
of this because it’s the best and the worst thing in the world,
an explosive labelled handle with care but there’s no touch
that’s gentle enough to keep it right here, that feeling. In the
long poem it’s not nearly as specific, as picture-taking,
obsessive memory-making; fourteen and too aware of how
I’m a curse and not a blessing, mutilated phrases that can
never get the little things quite right, the touch of thermals
against my bare skin, a cold Coke in the shopping centre and
a jigsaw making a picture of sweets, pink and green and let’s
keep her occupied, it’ll be a long morning. The long poem doesn’t
end, just keeps going in folded towels and performances of hope,
crystals lined up and prayers in an empty bath. It keeps going in
love letters and anniversaries and rugs and train carriages,
and isn’t it sad that I can’t let go, eighteen, still clutching at the
crumpled up cardboard and wishing on falling stars in dreams
that are achingly lucid. I think it’s just that, serial killing my own
story, no phone service in the woods and it’s a good job nobody
ever heard of me anyway because I’ll die here, right here in a
pile of falsified rubble. The long poem is the legacy of a fantasy
and a navy blue suitcase I can’t empty. I look at my wrists and
their fluorescent veins that bloom like borderlines on a tissue
paper map, a long poem with a tenancy agreement stapled to
my skin. I love you, I think. It unravels, an emergency cord. I hear
it clatter on the tiles in someone else’s room.