At five past six on a milky morning in November, naked

from the waist down, dripping

perimenopausal sweat into my first black coffee

of the day, I wrote:

     Be who you want to become

     But first, know who you want to become

Jesus Christ, I hate it when I channel Gandhi at the crack of dawn,

the grainy difficult dream in which I’m trying to fuck Atticus, a lover

who left twenty-four years ago, still prowling my mind like a starving shark
I want to become Tyler Durden without the mental illness but the only club I belong to is

the one-parent-dead-the-other-has-dementia club

but I am trying to become ambitious so I read a story in a back issue of New Scientist,

     To touch and taste a comet

and am so underwhelmed by the picture of Comet 67P’s bulbous shape

marked in cheap primary colours where sunlight falls or not

that I could never guess Comet 67P is a wildly alien landscape with only a few spots safe

for landing

and I think Christ, there’s a metaphor for life

The world is a kind of nothing place and I am like a rubbish pile inside and yet

To touch and taste a comet is written in font more elegant and bewildering than any

comet that I feel something I have no language for that may be out of my reach forever 
I am striving to become brave and write good poetry

which means I must write Christ and Atticus three times

in this poem because three is the number of betrayal, Atticus

oh Atticus, who gave me a garlic press when you left back in ’94

Made in Switzerland, she has forty holes where the flesh worms out in a pleasing way

You held her higher than a trophy and said this garlic press is a metaphor while I hid

behind cheap red wine, not knowing what the garlic press was a metaphor for and

feeling too scared

     sad

     bored

     stupid

     to ask

I imagined my intelligence as tooth-sized back then

shrinking to flea-sized in the sober days

with a surface as fragile as fresh fallen snow
Some days the garlic press reminds me of a speculum

Reminds me how careless we were back then

How you lost your mother as sudden as a gunshot

How seven years later my father went, twin towers fallen

How that house with its glimpse of the dirty river from the enormous

red-bellied bathroom got demolished but the garlic press, she’s lasted

Her hinge a little loose she remains what she is without striving to become something else
In the end I want to be truthful

     useful

     hopeful

but ending is always the difficult part because fucking is not a metaphor

and we were always somewhere in between, Atticus and I,

his name always too much on my tongue

our pain always too much in my belly

which is almost definitely literally a metaphor but some days I still don’t know what –

Like my mother, I would like to be forgetful but my dreams won’t let me

I want to touch and taste the comet