As a Kid
One Saturday morning,
I found a man who had been shot
in both knee caps.
Sprawled, wailing on the street outside his house.
His front door wide open —
I could see
he’d been watching cartoons.
As a kid
I lived for those Saturday mornings.
No school,
bacon sandwiches, milky tea,
fetching the newspaper
from the corner store for my father
and those cartoons.
I’d like to write a poem
about that man
and the blood that stained
the concrete
and his trousers
and the golden Saturday
morning sun —
so red —
seeping into everything
but all I can ever remember
are those cartoons
and how they made me feel then.
As though everything was
always going to be okay,
I could live forever
and maybe I would.
But I was just
a stupid fucking kid.
Red Hotels for Red Flags
Maybe I should have known how it would all end
the Christmas I found you cheating at Monopoly.
How you lied, overreacted, screamed and cried.
You flipped the board and
sent pieces of my little red heart flying.
You always won
at all the games we played together. .
But
really thinking about it,
maybe I should have known how it would all end
the first night we met,
after, cigarette smoke exhaled
through a crack in a motel window,
you told me
not to worry about your husband because he lived
in another country and
then told me
actually
you weren’t really married, just engaged, no,
he was just a boyfriend,
so it wasn’t like it was really cheating,
don’t worry about it, he wasn’t a good lover.
Annoying, immature and needy,
you were going to finish with him next week but
half a year later you still hadn’t.
Or
maybe I should have known how it would all end
the time you stood me up
on my birthday because we’d fought, you were
in another motel with another man, and
then told me it was rape
when I found the messages and the photographs
you sent him of your naked body. One month later.
If they’ll cheat with you, they’ll cheat on you,
a friend warned me and
I never listened. I should have known
but
you were just too much fucking fun to play with.
No one played
Monopoly quite
like you.
I still find a red hotel occasionally
behind a book shelf or underneath
somewhere I forgot.
I don’t smile
looking down at the
red piece of plastic like a scattered piece of my heart
but
I don’t frown either and
maybe that means
I won
finally.
