Mould and Mildew

You smelled like the sodden earth tonight,

when you skulked through the door, thinking me asleep.

Like an insomniac made man, I keep one eye open

always, now.

It’s foul, this smell,

like mould or mildew,

and no matter what I do, it cloys at my throat, in my eyes

and in the air, straight through the middle of the room. 

It grows and it permeates almost everything.

Your ingrate need to bring and be brought desire

has turned our home into a funeral pyre.

I am on top of it, the Guy, and in it I wait.

Peer out at the garden gate;

in nightmares I see you as slapstick: skipping through,

pleased with yourself.

Bolstered by tricks and dressed up in ridiculous Midas lies.

You believe yourself,

your clever wealth of cunning.

And so, running through the door like you won the whole solar system,

you nonchalantly bring in with you this festering

mould. Me, the dismembered cadaver, cold and unmoving,

watches you out of a blinkered eye. I spy

a lie. It’s difficult to discern but there’s a trace and it leaves

a stinging, itching, nettle-adorned scratch down my face.

You have taken a hammer and chisel and destroyed

the dam that was holding its guts back,

and the river breaks its banks;

brings with it its filth.

I goad myself to pretend to be half-awake, fabricate a sham of a snore.

It’s true I don’t have the wherewithal to care any more

but I can’t look at you without being sure I

won’t vomit panic onto the carpeted floor.

And the floor is infected now

with the spores of mould and mildew.

The horrid and dull and obnoxious smell

I will never be able to quell or eradicate.

Noxious evidence that no disinfectant can resolve,

no amount of wire wool can scrape to solve.

My fingers convulse, compelled to torch the whole house

when you slither in next to me, my spouse: a snake shedding

soiled and on-the-floor-clothing.

The gutter-smell is unbearable now, roving and I inhale

the tang of sweat, latex and pleasure.

It escapes your breath, unmeasured, and it’s in the strands of your hair.

Underneath the layers of deceit and decay, I smell her.

Perfumed, distinctive and anonymous and

stiff as a board between us. She’s the phantom

that brings that stinking whisper,

she hangs in and splinters the air, without being there.

I imagined I might share you, at first,

but then the damp got worse and worse and

you seemed to develop a thirst for it.

You went more than you came.

A pathetic fifteen minutes of fame turned into more

than a million crushing hours.

This mould now envelopes this home of ours.

It seeped into the earth and riddled the flowers.

Now, like those plants in the garden and this shanty-house,

I’m destroyed: a dried up insect,

a scorched and upended woodlouse.

A shell of a thing with nothing inside.

And oh, how I’ve tried! I’ve ignored, I’ve denied, supplied

what I think you’ve been looking for.

You still bolt for the door like you’re winning a race

and I’m alone in this derelict place,

embraced and clutched by mould and mildew,

inhaling and choking on asbestos.

suffocated by the scent of my loss.