By Rob Yates
I
Point when you notice there’s a face in the stitch-bent pattern of a cardigan
you’ve worn for years. It’s like you’re carrying a different world with you.
A different person. A different world to face the person-world that meets.
The shop assistant recommended therapeutic moonstones, cosmographic gems,
peripatetic riddles on string theory, the blues. I was unmoved,
yet keen to cipher what help actually means in this particular umwelt.
Crimps of colour ruining the walls. Gritty, perfumed monks.
You pay more for the howling stone, the one that, when you click on it, says:
‘Give up on all that silence’. All of it should be on a t-shirt –
of course, it won’t fit, ever. Not even once will it fit.
II
I jumped off the dock like a holiday in high wind, sank cold, deep as a croon.
The tipping point turned out to be a dinner reservation that never quite made it.
They stared at us like rude squid, like we had bells.
Take those scattered atoms with you, they said, take that silence
somewhere else, that mood, we don’t much rate celestial gloom,
people who swallow more than the brief life they’re given.
You pay hard for the harbour view, the blue nets cast like flies under the evermore.
III
And so – back we look to a time we weren’t convincing, convinced that we were.
The fire comes out only as reflection, water and weight and net
known only by reflection, and if a ship goes down in the night
as you watch, that’s free, good for you.
IV
Clap when you notice the noise from next-door down is a song
that won’t let you catch the first beat of each fleeting bar.
Without that vital step, you’ve neither name nor chance.
Metronomic ideas, guesswork, a microwave meal for two.
Finally, you get called out for being just as difficult as life
itself – ‘We all tick along in the same shallow boat, so stop trying
to blame it on living’. Living never did nothing, it just endures,
V
and that’s how endless weather becomes war. Glass
works best when we forget it’s there, or when it’s loud, thick, misty
with colour, proud of its bubble and heft, wanting to be
blown, watched, stroked, dropped – even the inanimate goes in
for all that stuff about the soul – and here we are, clean through, a sound
that made it out the thicket, bending to break, wild in the weight of the open,
dripping with dark green weeds, leaving the septic tent, a prophecy, a choral dawn,
a gargoyle spouting water, guarding moons. Nobody should be encouraged to sing,
least of all we mammals, blubber and mud and muscle, grinding it out in the pond.
But we were only ever what we did
and you are only ever what you do.
Rob Yates is a young writer hailing from Essex. He previously released a small collection of poetry entitled ‘The Distance Between Things’. He has also had work appear via Agenda, Bodega, SmokeLong Quarterly, Envoi, and other literary magazines. Some of his writing can be found through www.rob-yates.co.uk.
Hot Pot Magazine 