things are not okay at home in the past tense but the verb is obstinate and innervated by wires crossed a decade or so ago and here the Frankenstein that won\'t stop lurching to get some shut-eye because he\'s beastly tired with no-one\'s sleeves to tug at that wouldn\'t rip under the pressure of his great stupid brute strength as he stands now a hollow tower in place of a trampled sandcastle
things in the past tense are not okay at home and my hands have inexplicably shrunk, so mindful of the old truth they have all but spun themselves into silk moths to stop the ransacking of the nest before it can begin again, taking no light into account lest it carries more broom handles and flapping blankets, all a-tremble against the barking that\'s been left unmuzzled long enough to tire itself out and go to sleep tail-in-mouth, unprompted by scolding.
at home things are not okay in the past tense and I put my cold small hands in my mouth before they can begin their agitated storytelling assault at everyone we come across but they grow to juggling size again once they\'re tucked up inside my throat and I have to rip them out before they can do the same with my sternum- that surface hollow where little children with big imaginations swirling inside me go to misjudge the depth of their dolphin-dives and wind up broken-necked with dreams of being at the losing end of sexual violence... this sternum, shallow and lacking in substance, which just so happens to be the centre of me...
things are okay at home but not in the past tense and I do not want to hand you over the body just yet. How do I know there\'s no more malice when these hands keep trying to gut me of everything? Not all shame is better in than out, some was designed to stuff the gutted sheep of you with rocks so you can continue to stand on the grass without wilting like a tired balloon, after all, you want to stay in the party don\'t you. No I won\'t hand over the body because I can\'t be sure that you\'ll look after it all that well without weekly inspections by some probation officer or other who really seems to love you this time. 6 years of vandalism does not speak highly of you. Whatever name you give it to shrink it down to human form, Josh Reid with the bandages will always be staring at you with his blinking blue eyes as you push through the exam, forever trying to drag you into the toilet with him and not to watch the danger flush down the drain.
A now-adult woman walks into a bar and says, the past-tense children inside me want to go home but things are not okay there. Not yet their parent, she is in nonetheless in love with someone who doesn\'t expect her to close the takeaway box right the first time, leaves space for fumbling and pouting preamble, doesn\'t go to break her fingers or finish the task for her but delivers a kiss when she\'s done. It doesn\'t even take that long, so she has to wonder if it ever did. The clumsy children swinging their legs into the watering hole along the bony banks of her sternum pause and clutch each other\'s hands in glee.
things are not at all okay in the past at home and the hands want to blab about it so much now that the brunt of it is an object in the rearview mirror, but I keep clutching them and making him clutch them and they quiet their moth-like sounds and furl up their wings to sit softly sighing on the old dog\'s head who has been, for all intents and purposes, forgiven for something he never did in the canine realm, but that\'s how forgiveness tends to go; in one ear and right out the other, like the hippity hoppity exit of a tic, or the sob one tiny child in a now-adult woman\'s body makes in the dark just because
she could have been, and almost was,
that kindest of the meanest dogs