winning arguments without crying
Three years ago I liked you and now I think you’re hideous That’s really all it is. Crumbling stone above your sink in a houseshare bathroom that feels like an aeroplane toilet. A corona of snakes that couldn’t be saved by a beautiful tragedy. You have to train them, you see To bite beautifully and in a tragic sort of way A literary way You can’t just wash your red hair and let it dry like that. I would know. Mine are revered and I think people are afraid of them but in a beautiful sort of way.
That’s another story that I’m trying to write and I wish I could block you from the pages like I’ll block you on Instagram.
I think you’re hideous A gradual and then very sudden descent into a cramping hatred like the way you think hot weather is just fantastic and I think the sun is fucking obnoxious Like you A loudly epic microcosm A study in how to learn to hate a stranger measured by unprecedented times and a handful of afternoons eating blue cheese and crackers on London grass waiting for the time to pass If nobody likes you and everybody likes me then does that make me awful too? or does it just mean I’m right
You glittered like a mirror for a morning our sisterly reflections in mourning A summer snapshot from the lens I’m still in charge of Now you’re a black hole or something worse probably an empty shell pretending to be a whole person. Boring boring boring Everything about you is boring I’m bored with how boring I find you This poem is boring. It’s boring to talk about you but I can’t stop none of us can stop we’re all awful. You were a mirror and isn’t that funny considering how much you fucking love looking at yourself now Is this fucking play about us? as long as it’s all focused on you Tell us to knock the f-stop back as far as we can until it’s just The You Show again but you’ll say you hate the lens I’m standing behind. Apparently it’s all so condescending of me but I think you just don’t understand what that word means and what you actually mean is I’m older than you and know how to win arguments? What you actually mean is I can fight without shaking and my face doesn’t turn red when I’m angry? and I’ve always thought that a very lucky trait to have I think I probably got that from my dad although he doesn’t really get angry. I think you should write a poem about what you got from your dad But you’ll never do that even if it’s the easy pick to the door you say someone else bolted you behind screaming. I unpicked mine when I was twenty and I’ll always shoot if someone slags off my closet And you think you’re the gunmaster here
But that’s a totally separate conversation and I can’t be bothered having it with you so can we just move on because you’re too narrow to get that.
The most caring person in the world until empathy starts unearthing your enemies As if you don’t already have a thousand. And none of it feels important anymore so I’m embarrassed that I even care but it’s not a caring sort of caring. If you’re compelled by right and wrong I’m compelled by love and hate I think that’s my coin and one day soon I’ll stop spending it on you But for now I’m solvent Even if I’m letting you steal from me and your steel city state is richer than my ancient woodland but your vaults are beneath iron girders of fantastic and thanks so much and so it becomes a girlish and quietly-biting sort of coin that burns lips and makes everything taste like copper mine is just a mist and then you accuse me of being non-confrontational when actually I’ve always quite liked confrontation.
It’s something I’m good at
and yet you keep trying and honestly I find that mortifying But you’re a child so I don’t even care. Maybe I should swaddle you but you said you're wise beyond your years so I guess let’s go with that? And if everyone hates you and nobody hates me then maybe you should go back to your mirror and look there instead of at your front-facing camera because that’s mortifying too and you should’ve gone to university because you would’ve met other mirrors there And at least I know I’m a bitch
I met my mirrors ages ago.
But you run from reflection and choose your front-facing camera instead because it does that thing where it flips the image and you get to pretend that you’re the opposite thing to the thing you actually are and you get to tell yourself that you’re so tiny and the world is the Big Bad pecking at your nest. But you’re the awful thing And everything is backwards And everything is mirrored to you And if I saw myself in you then send me the invoice and finish your email with thanks so much for teaching me how to be something else because honestly if I became what you already are I think I’d just die I can see you rolling your eyes on the playground because someone else was enjoying the swings but in a stupid way and the tarmac was hotter in Germany but that doesn’t make you more interesting. God I wish I could tell you that.
I told you once that sometimes I pretend I’m on Graham Norton when I’m in the car I thought everyone did that but apparently they don’t But that’s fine I think and you didn’t need to laugh about it with your fiancée But she's left you too and I found that funny So let’s call it even.
I dive headfirst into the oil when it comes to you because it feels so hotly delicious To nestle in the anonymous ranks of whatever armies you think you did nothing to provoke You’ve got spears for crutches but your armour is accountancy note paper With lecture notes too boring to comprehend I don’t think you’re actually interested in investment risk and taxation or fraud analytics Is anyone? It’s just something else to put on your brown sash and on your HER profile. Tell them about how you’re on every battlefield and I’m just softly at home writing a stupid poem about you And if you’re reading this now because you keep tabs on everyone and everything and if you were waiting for me Don’t flatter yourself. This isn’t about you. Because I already don’t remember how old you are but I think you get a notification when I post an Instagram story of myself as a child.
I have a pitchy black well of everything that you don’t have and I throw myself into it and you screw your face up lime-sour when actually I think you’d love to build one for yourself but you can’t stop looking at your Instagram followers for long enough to work out How to cast bricks or divine water or whatever else you need to build a well
You don’t even have the land for it yet.
I’d rather write a stupid poem than be your blank piece of paper I’d rather write myself as a villain than play your antagonist Write me out of your boring story I’m begging you. It’s been a year and you’re still looking up how to spell my name Between notes about investment management and derivatives And I don’t even know what that means Thank God. God it’s so boring But I’m laughing at the idea of one day forgetting your name.
I can be rotten but I think the thing that saves you from Hell is the welcoming of the rot and if I can be this but also sleep with my friends and love my American cereal and the little squares of sun my mirrorballs cast to my blue walls Then what does it matter I don’t think it matters. But you can’t be told about any of that Because you’re too busy romancing your front-facing camera and one-hundred-and-thirty-three people in fluorescent ceiling panels who won’t ever clap at a volume that fills you So I’ll leave you waiting for your lean applause And I’ll just be lighter.
I watched a video today of my niece on a ride-on lawnmower Grinning with my dad in the field behind our house and that was me twenty-two years ago. God I love that I can love.
