Errata

I wanted to be clean.

By clean I mean:
no residue, no transfer, no trace on the glass.
A kind of ethical hygiene.

Love entered as it does –
without credentials –
and put its thumbprint on everything I called mine.
I called it fate to avoid calling it appetite.
I offered it my best hours,
then watched it keep them
with the calm of a ledger.

Anger arrived wearing efficiency.
It worked.
It had instructions.

An efficient tool –
a match struck too near the curtains,
a sentence made to land,
to bruise,
to leave proof.

There were days I chose the sharper sentence
because it reorganised the room.
I liked the click of that.
I liked that the room obeyed.

Pride: a posture mistaken for dignity.
It lifted my chin
while the rest of me required movement.
It trained stillness into virtue.
It taught fear to stand straight.

Music was a different kind of evidence.

A pedal underfoot.
A folded handkerchief in the strings –
to dampen.
To soften what no one was meant to hear:
the damage inside the sound.

My father stopped it early. Two words, offered as care:
poverty, mediocrity.

I keep returning to the grammar of that.
A prohibition framed as forecast.

He meant to keep me safe.
I took it as permission to disappear.
I could have played anyway.
I did not.

This is the part I dislike writing
because it removes the alibi.

So I learnt in public:
love, anger, pride –
without a practice pedal,
without the small muting
that keeps the damage private.
The stains were legible.

Sometimes a smear lifts.
Sometimes it sets.

Sometimes you become carefulness,
touching everything
as if touch were transfer,
as if the world were a white shirt
and you were always wearing it.

Perfection:
unmarked surfaces,
unmuffled sound.
I wanted that once.
I wanted it as proof.

Accuracy turned up late, out of breath,
bringing an after-image
of what I said
and where
it showed.

And this is the plain correction I can make:
I was there.
I touched it.
It took.