O Cleopatra, darken your eye. I loved you how you were. You are a cell. Whittling while I work you shovel fingers down your throat in the camp with the million dollar views: a silk to stain the moon by day. Every time an egg lets down I lie awake all night. It took me years to find the pattern in this sleep. No book engages me. I’m unengaged. This latest round child, fretted slightly spurred with its impending age lets go – a sigh – a whisper – and commutes to the city centre. The after-dinner binges I transliterate with costliness to because I’m worth it from self-loathing. Buying the expensive tub. Buying the organic. Standing in the hall of mirrors naked as at some reunion This is what I have become, I say. Laying out the cloth for one. I’m tired. It’s tidal. Love is a black bear rarely sighted. Childless celebrities who can never retire gaze wearily from their pages. Everywhere a campervan can go, a moon can follow. I wrap my woundedness in towels. I have cake. I’m a psychologist. My kitchen drawer a door cut in a glacier. But though I don’t eat standing at the sink and though there’s silverware involved this is not luxury. It’s barely sensuous. I’m tired, it’s tidal. The remoteness of the stars and moon and all seems to me at such times quite unremarkable. I wish I liked chocolate. It’s cheap, it’s always available, it’s legal: it’s a cult. A solitary habit wiping masturbation’s loneliness it’s duty wrapped up as a treat lace trim, pole dancing; mascara. Such poor copies of girl power. Like a bride or childhood’s Arab I wear tea towels on my head. Scissoring beauty spots at great expense from glossy magazines. If I freckle far enough I’ll be brown all over. These are my thirties, this is love’s sad second honeymoon’s dry hollow where I rest my hand. In the master bedroom I am mistress to my fate. The striped with sunlight sheets embrace me like a visitor. Lake Eyre, Tasmania. I wear a placemat on my head. Upstaged by death and hopelessness – and hope – I toss, grinning in my sleep with sly humiliation. The Last Post plays again outside – a long, drawn-out farewell. I am slow and strobe the sea labouring, like a soothsayer, to please the always-visiting man. Meanwhile across town somewhere – on the internet – he sleeps. Oblivious in sleep. He heals himself in sleep. He’s going to leave his life who doesn’t understand him like I do. As I peel the ceiling back and the ceiling on top of that the stars are pearls who freckle the night sky my hair curls in the water this bath is my bed until soaked skin reveals my sixty. Candles rim the tub. In so black, so restless an untrod world the firelight flickers on the can of VB my intended holds catalogues floss the slumping fence and intermittently, Christians knock like the 360 days of Christmas. Soon enough midnight feasts on me – then 3am. – then dawn. I rustle at the liquid sheets. I sight up the streetlight’s moon. Fucking might have saved us, if we’d done it long enough. But we used imperial for a sum so wretched small it could only be counted up in centimetres if at all. Put your hand here, put. The lizard pulse of reproduction’s tawdry old tired old art form rises and falls like France. My red-stained palm grasps the pillow I’m a mess, I’m a disgrace, and at my door from India telephone salesmen offer plans the way swards of India-rubber trees used to offer India-rubber bands. Crumbs on the sheets keep me awake, for I am sensitive. Until ten months ago I was mistress to my fate. And years of needling pricks have pierced me threaded but not awake. Now like childhood’s Arab I wrap tea towels on my head. Lake Eyre. Tasmania. The straw scatters and sinks. Sometimes I’m angry but there’s no mileage in it. My grandmother’s Christian name – shortened to Aud – meant ‘I have studied.’ She had studied, she was bored. Her porn name if they’d had prom night in those days might have been Winkie Cawmore. I turn and turn again. Give me the keys, she said, and shut the door. A child’s abstraction of a bear worn thready at the ear, I did. All the little trees along our road were polite like soldiers. We tore apart the family home for good, just having fun with it. Happiness is hereditary (she said) and I’m not done with it. Cathoel Jorss
