Remember me eyeing you from the garden? I was playing at spite.
A fierce, filled-up infant. Picture Tink, piping red,
Watching the party. You were inside with another girl, only talking,
And though I knew you’d come to find me,
It was good to taste a tantrum
That charged my lips.

(I’ve always loved the smell of pub carpets,
The brown-water smell of boots and shots and fruited barley,
Skin clinging to a sticky glass,
Turns me into a liquid and I fill whatever I fill.)

I was pooling when you found me and took me to bed,
A back way between black, bending leaves.
At our feet your toys turned tough in the mud.
I liked your rolled shirtsleeves,
Your fingers shot the lock,
And your grip was big, and rubber and trembling.

We surfaced in your parents’ house,
All the lights left on. I thought it was cold and oblong.
Your room had a strange sink,
Like a bedsit. Like the flat above a shop.
Your rosy-haired sister met us in the hallway and smiled. No one else was home.

I’m sorry, Diarmuid. If I’d stayed, we could have drunk wine together
I’d have liked that. I latched well.
And I liked your blackness, your writing hands held tight fists with rooting bodies,
Ancient and underground.

But you smelled human. I whimpered and browned like a bad tooth.
I simply think wrong. In halves and honks. Like smacks on the back of the child’s thigh,
My flesh wobbles with the plosive in
I am bad, I am bad, I am bad.