Two Small Lives

Canal Christmas – a prose poem (listen here)

At the carol service during While Shepherds Watched – still undecided about how best to get through the next forty-eight hours – I am re-living being Gabriel: the frock made of a sheet that I tripped on while climbing up the back of the crib-scene to get above the baby and open out my sheet-wings. How magical it all once was.

The vicar talks about protest, loneliness, corporate greed, his face up-lit by a candle. I don’t know what righteousness means. Saviour I understand as a basic human need. When he reads about those who live in a land of deep darkness, I know that place. When he ends with the promised advent of the Prince of Peace, I want that man

but instead I meet up with you at the anti-capitalist encampment in Centenary Square. Bright snow has cleaned everything; sky glittery, incredible, behind Sheryl on her makeshift platform addressing passers-by about a better world. We are you, she cries out to the dark city, but only the two of us plus a homeless Polish builder smoking in front of the tents hear her, and it is anyway far too cold

so here I am, after all, on your houseboat parked in a canal basin, hanging lights round this cactus, putting out a stocking for a man who doesn’t even do Christmas, who is off alcohol but I nonetheless open champagne

and in the morning you are embarrassed that I have filled you such a big sock that spills everywhere, gift-wrapped packages interspersed with little chocolate Santas although you’re also off sugar. I say – just a few bits, it’s nothing, thinking, no sock big enough for everything I want to give you out of guilt at feeling so sad; you saying – I really love you; me saying – oh Rowan, don’t, and as we’re having sex (all the little gifts getting re-parcelled in duvet), as someone embarrassingly calls out Merry Christmas from the towpath, my eyes are closed; I may never come to this houseboat again

but, obliviously happy, you take me to the Festival of Political Song at the anarchist squat where a reunited nineteen-eighties women’s chorus is singing new lyrics about menopause symptoms as well as the old ones about men’s inadequacies, till a Marxist rocker I vaguely know takes over, his theme exploitation: call-centre workers, cockle-pickers. He does a big strum for the end of the socialist dream but grins as though there is no greater thing on Christmas night than to play a guitar on this podium on the second floor of a derelict woollen mill; these women who are newly grandmothers, this man who sells car parts; he, the boy in the playground who would pinch my arm or ignore me altogether when I tried to play at fainting, when all I wanted was to be saved.

[now published in KUNST]