How to Account for Personal Wellness
By Olivia Burgess (@light_green.eyes)
They vapourised the tree off Chestnut Avenue and left a thin paper slip
to account for its absence, the printed signature’s lip curled from the constant repartee of frost and wet and nailed on the naked trunk it stood there
stamped onto the mottled log and left for certain death in someone’s driveway. You are thinking the grapefruit looks like skin as you toy it about with a teaspoon making it dance along the membrane, pilfering flesh,the spit of sour catching acetic early morning on the kitchen counter. The blunt knife, the coffee ring, the vacant stare out to a garden darkened. Just a few more months to witness where the shade rises the sky to choke it.
I am smoking outside the wake as a fine mist is settling on my work-issued wardrobe and I am squashing imaginary beats per minute between my fingertips, as I have done since childhood before I knew how to freak out when lost in large groups of people. A drunk auntie has just clutched my wrist and told me to savour it
and I know she meant more than a couple cigarette drags but I believe her wholeheartedly, almost to an embarrassing degree, that my twenties are for flirting with everything that could kill me, that I should tell the low budget tourist sleeper bus to step on it careening down a pitch black motorway and ignore the bosses dancing around deeply necessary asbestos appraisals. I am a perfect bad example to the kids wobbling on bikes as I throw my hands outwards to sign a song,
and when I am nearly run over on my favourite route home I wonder if my appearance could be risque enough (to make up for it).
The underground smog, radiators, crisp packets, metals in hair dye,
metals in tampons. Elsewhere, children are surviving the real life apocalypse that Hollywood has grown tired of forgetting and the ski slopes, in this holiday period, start to sing.
There are enough microplastics in my body that they could build a second human. I am making an assumption, a hypothesis and a conclusion. I believe it to be true, eating the self-same breakfast, browsing racks of identically rolled underwear. I have swallowed pink pill capsules and hatred, words that would get me fired, the cesspool of my hip-flask. Earlier, I had to shove my way through the sudden onslaught of rain, myself completely defenceless as it battered down needling and unselfish, slashing at my eyes
and something in me sang and started strumming in my gut without pausing to ask Why, why any of it ? and in that brief second of silence like the plink of the tap at midnight: Oh god. Laughing & laughing & laughing.
Olivia Burgess is a word chef meandering in and around London. She enjoys occupying a liminal space between comedy and poetry much like the co-existence of comedy and tragedy in our world.
