PROSE…

‘Please, Do Go On’

It always starts the same way.

‘Let’s try each other out for size’, they say.

This is my therapy audition. My third in as many weeks.

Some therapists flirt like strippers.

We giggle as we cut off each other's sentences. Coquettish.

No, YOU hang up.

Like small talk in a porno.

I mentally draft a thank you card to add to the others on the wall.

She tells me I’m safe. I hadn’t thought otherwise.

‘Please, do go on.’

Show me where it hurts.

She teases my history out in front of her.

An ingrown hair. Rancid. Suspended in the light.

A giggle screams from her throat and she slaps her mouth shut. Her eyes flickered above her spectacles and settled on me.

My face fires. Nails itch. Legs quiver, so I lock them at the knee. Spiders crawl out of my mouth, so she spins a web for me.

‘What is your earliest memory?’

I tell her of a time playing in bomb craters, sucking a wooden dummy.

‘Further back?’

I walk her down the line on my pregnant mother's tummy.

‘Please, do go on.’

She lays me flat, spreading me out on the table.

Mapping out my future from the ley lines of my past.

We travel back together. A two person rope team.

A memory traversal. A decades-long, time-lapse reversal.

She guides me through the ruins at a rising trot. Rising and jolting as my history is repackaged episodically.

Scatter gunned and pockmarked.

She breaks into a canter. A silken mare leading a three-legged gelding.

She hands me the lead rein.

‘Oh look at me doing all the talking! Tell me in your words. Am I along the right vein?’

You’re on, lad. Good job you rehearsed.

My words weave a solemn shimmer as they jeté, posture, cluster and land.

The musings of a memory hoarder bequeathed in date order.

A wizened star of the stage giving his Fool under a dusty spotlight. A trip hop evensong. Skipping off the tongue.

I’m ever so pleased with myself. Head bowing gently to my audience. Falsely humble with a face pricked by hubris.

My feet drumming out staccato applause only to be halted by two embarrassed tibias.

I exhale. Newly horizontal.

Reaching for a cigarette as vaingloriousness drips off my torso.

The shrink isn’t so lucky, she is hamstrung by detail.

A police horse terrified by disorder.

My words change her physicality. She’s weighed down.

Beached.

Flailing out of her depth as she screams in the shallows.

A rabid dog scratching all its skin off to find one flea.

She’s annoyed at herself and, by extension, me.

I’m shouting for her to keep up. Shouting for her to stay with me. Giddy.

She waivers so I carry her in my soft mouth, but still she wriggles free.

A drowning mermaid leaping from the sea and suddenly salty towards me.

I come back from battle to a different castle.

A cold pervades the room, lassoing my tongue. Her eyes no longer meet mine.

‘Well it was nice to meet you but I don’t think I can treat you. I can handle one disorder of the mind but four is far too many, I find’.

A star once high rising now a controlled demolition.

The stag that shat himself.

Country dancing with an erection.

The history I layed out on the table isn’t noble, but something shameful and inferior.

A still life with bacteria.

The receptionists take it away. It’s now a health and safety concern, they say.

I’m left alone with the Thames eyeing me warily. A wretched, desperate creature, pores filled with tarry, foul-smelling shame.

Wide-eyed and slip-sliding on broken hind legs. Newly exhumed and slowly suffocating.

Children are nudged away from me by concerned mums in athleisure. Lionesses protecting their treasure.

‘The man isn’t well’

‘He’s not well’

‘Poor thing.’ Poor man’.

But the kids don’t want to go. Don’t want to miss the show.

They want to see if it sings when it drowns.

The train picks me up by the puppy scruff and clenches. Defiant.

The noise of the tracks is rhythmic and mocking.

‘Please, do go on.’ ‘Please, do go on.’ ‘Please, do go on.’ ‘Please, do go on.’

I hold the kettle as it boils, unsure how I got home.

’Any good?’

‘Nah, not keen.

’Another one?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Oh well. Haha’.

Haha

Haha

Haha

Haha

‘Please, do go on.’

For whatever it’s worth 

We’re all just a hop, a skip, a slip off a curb 

A skin bag of vapours, perturbed

Forever flailing around in our afterbirth.