Home Leave

Melissa Lee-Houghton

 

Your car is pillar-box red.

Nobody will die in it.

I sit by your side and say nothing, my hands

bunched in fists in my lap.

When the lights turn

I feel you breathing.

The motorway gapes.

We are on our way to the hospital

where they greet me like a donor-

like I’m giving away both my eyes.

You are happy

when I come home with something bandaged

it looks like someone has done something.

Some weekends I come home to you.

I fill in the form

that says I don’t feel guilty, hopeless or paranoid.

We watch TV until I fall asleep

and we go to bed

like children after hot milk.

I am filled up with pain,

there’s no room for anything else.

You think you have done something wrong-

I don’t tell you otherwise.

In the morning

you pop my pills into a decanter,

a little pink plastic box

with all the days of the week.

You lock the pills in the safe.

In the heart of a safe those pills

can’t call out to me.

I can’t be tempted and

you will not be to blame.

I write poems in the hospital.

They all bang on about images

but I have nothing-

there are fourteen of us staring at walls

and scratched reinforced windows

that don’t let in the sun.

We put too many sugars in our tea

and don’t listen to anything.

Not anything that you can hear.

I pray to God.

I pray for mercy or a knife.

You come with clothes and I

brush my hair for you,

and for a moment you look so happy

I sit on your knee laughing

until my chest hurts.

 

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Home Leave was highly commended in the Lupus UK Poetry Competition 2012