Poems by Oz Hardwick

THE TIME OF MY LIFE

Smoking at the window, our elbows on the ledge, balanced like eggs. I was having one of those days where I felt like feeding my arm into a savage machine, just to add spice to a tired soap. She was having the house redecorated from top to bottom but couldn’t decide on the colour to paint her nails. Cumulus. Blue mist. Island sky. She coughed. Coffin nails. Our elbows brushed and swept the slate clean, and I couldn’t decide where to start rewriting the script. The analyst wants to know about my childhood. I tell her I’m telling her. Sitting on the edge like nursery rhymes, reaching for long-necked trees, our arms were rickety bridges without foundation. I was having one last cigarette before she tied the blindfold, an extra in a late-night movie. She was having a baby but didn’t know the colour of its father’s eyes. Coastal grey. Wedgwood. Boathouse blue. She blew a smoke ring out above the nodding trees. One of us slipped. One of us was having doubts and misgivings that would run and run like repeats of a 90s comedy show. All the king’s horses nickered on the verge of speech. The analyst informs me that my window is closing and asks if I have a light.


PLAYING DEAD

Remember when we’d cover ourselves with soft white sheets, as if we were furniture in a house locked up for the winter? Our young flesh – what it was to be young as sparrows in chimneypots – became worn wood, scuffed by hands and elbows, while our hand-me-down ambitions – the sea still called like a great bronze bell – adopted the shapes of dressers and longcase clocks. We were melting snowmen, briefly sketched ghosts, thought bubbles in comics still searching for the right words. We were bulbs that glowed in clean-lined corridors – what it was to shed our shadows – and we were foam fingering the nap of a bleached beach. Deep inside, we knew – sure as tongues trace the lines of taut muscles – we were bones and empty houses, but we still believed that when we stripped off those sheets – naked as the first word in a new language – summer would be painting all the windows gold.


HERE COMES THE RAIN AGAIN

Yesterday they told us that the weather would be restless and irresponsible, so we weighted down our loose garments – It’s funny, you said (or maybe it was me), how fashion’s more voluminous in disastrous days – to ride out its feckless shenanigans. But the weather was good as the gold in a rapper’s incisor and we felt somewhat foolish, shackled to the ground by retro threads and the heaviest household objects we could find: the bed still swamped in boys and girls from Christmases past; the corner sofa with our parents and grandparents tutting at the length of skirts on TV, and the chest freezer stuffed with enough roadkill deer for a greenwood banquet. You speak treason! you exclaimed out of habit. Fluently! I retorted as the fashion police arrived from the 80s in their white satin jumpsuits, a mannered breeze barely rustling their shag-permed mops.