Red bricks through hand prints on car glass.
Our excited breath fogged fingers.
But that was not the beginning...
Rewind down narrow roads
Passed sign posts for towns we never heard off
To the house that was once a church,
Its tiled floor so cold
chill crept between the pores of our feet,
Or,
The house where we battled walls.
Pebble dash dripped until we saw stone underneath and grew bored.
Five people sat in a room,
Warmed by a father's glance,
"Well what do you think?"
Should we move, again and again?
And again...
The ground left my feet.
Hands held in the air so I resembled a student
Screaming with the right answer.
I imagine my mother nodding
like some one buying an expensive painting,
auctioneering herself for another turn.
Maybe she averted her eyes,
My father looked at me, "okay then."
I like to think he clapped for dramatic emphasis.
I was eight years old.
We thought restlessness was his trade.
Insurance sales man in a race against recession.
He had the gift of the gab.
Lithium was a foreign word then.
Hidden within a medicine cabinet,
or dissolving in a father's body as we slept.
So moods stayed in the middle of the sea saw,
Neither up nor down,
Unless those night time rituals ceased
and we saw the cracks torn apart by uncertainty,
A break down they called it.
I think of cars needing a service, an oil change
But each time a part of him stayed
In that building crouched behind excessive walls.
It was a kind of betrayal sending him there,
whispering to men in white that he lay,
Conversing with Jesus,
Tonguing smoke towards the sacred heart,
We saw reality slip,
Like a piece of clothing that no longer fit,
Held him up, to take him away,
And left the figure of Christ to stare at an empty bed.
