Washing Powder

FIRST DRAFT, NEEDS WORK/EDITING!

Washing Powder

I couldn’t tell you why the taste
of early October that
freckled my lower lip through an open
bus window beside a building site reminded me 
of your Saturday late-afternoon
kitchen, but the heater beneath the tiles
that warms the edges around the floor 
where I used to sit in front of the 
tinned food entered my mind just then -

and soon after came the broken beams
on your stairwell and your neighbour’s gate 
creaking in the winter, and Bernard Black
mornings with scrambled eggs and 
the coffee thing,
the cigarette thing,
the garden shoes and stolen
QE2 bathrobe thing,
the polite cat on the footpath
thing,
the royal blue, turned up collar
thing,

and it’s easier to do this
if I pretend I was just your summer
girl; it’s really not your fault that you
found me
in the spring.
  
So we would have never
made it to the Cotswolds on a bicycle,
or done the “picnic on the Guild Wheel” thing. 
I know how to be outside, after all, and 
if I was your summer girl you’d have ditched
me in the fall,

which makes it easier to remember the 
painting on your bedroom wall, and the story 
she wrote about it in the back of your 
tab notebook, in your basement in 
Liverpool two years before
the picture of you laughing,
shaking hands with Paul
Mcartney, and I know you thought
you shouldn't be there at all so

you blushed when your parents hung
it on the hallway wall. 

 

I remember her sitting on the edge
of the sink, and she said she 
must love him, really, because she felt it
in her bone marrow but then
she doesn’t know how poetic
she gets when she drinks.

And she asked me if I thought we’d 
remember these times when we were
old and on our own and I knew then that
we were living out our good old days; the
stories we will tell when we are fully grown. 

We will look back on these memories 
and know we had it good; days were warmer

we were thinner and we’d go
back if we could. 

And I’ll remember the five of us in our booth or
plastic bar seats, drinking cheap cider while you

bartered your talent’s worth in number of
paid drinks and ignored tab receipts,
and here's a boy I've known forever but
when I speak he'll just speak louder,

so I'll think of the night we sat on the floor in 

my living room, and I kept your head on my
shoulder until I could smell the washing powder.