Your Mug. Poem by Simon Lawson

If I showed up, right now, at your door.
What would you do?
I don't mean the small-talk and wonder at my trans-locational appearance,
I'm talking
a hard kiss or a resounding awkwardness?
Because right now
I feel as though I'm crawling towards you,
I'm in the ditch at the side of the road,
Watching my god pass by.


What did you put there?
In that place where I tethered my soul to yours?
Did you put a block of ice down?
Like laying a weight across an artery, until the blood on the other side grows cold and the limb dead.
Or did I weather that tether until it was all too easy to suddenly pull and snap?

What happened?
You used to be easier to talk to
Than the voice in my head,
Kinder too,
Loving to a fault,
And now,
Well,
I wouldn't be writing this if you were,
Now,
You're just this sensation in my throat and heart,
A burning and aching,
And images that flitter across the mind,

I talk to you, but what if I showed up at your door?
Would you push that stone out of the way?
Could you? Could we?

We could both burn and ache and cry into oblivion,
At least it wouldn't be alone.



You used that mug,
That day.
You drank from it smiling,
I made you the cocoa.
It was good,
I tasted it too,
When you kissed me that morning
and we laughed
there was a bit of cocoa powder at the corners of your mouth.

I lay in my bed that day feeling every single cell burst, every ligament twist and writhe, every bone splinter and fragment, from the inside out.

Nothing but grief wracking through my body,
Airless agony,
A stomach and trachea full of ice,
A heart as light as air- drained completely of blood.

Making tea was hard this morning,
When out of the cupboard, I pulled out your mug.