31 Postcodes - Poem 11

 

Boiling

To a new set of strangers

up olive oil stairs.

In the cockroach kitchenette,

there’s no fridge, no freezer.

Just heat.

One flatmate proposes.

Hyped up on chocolate,

he wakes me at 4, 

his face pressed up to mine.

So I decline.

He strings all the saucepans 

high up from the ceiling,

makes music, of a kind,

in a broken sort of time.

He is lost.

Meanwhile I have 

my own madness cooking.

I’m stirring and poking

a spicy, hot pot. 

It boils dry.

RF 2021

Video/audio for this one here.

Early in 1986, about halfway through my year in Madrid, I moved to a different flat in Lavapiés, just around the corner from the first*. This one was a top floor flat up several flights of stairs (no lift, not that kind of building) and it was pretty much an attic with no air conditioning so very, very hot in the summer. The landlady was lovely but she didn’t really live there (I thought she did when I took the room). In fact she lived in the south of Spain with her much older artist partner and so the two or three bedrooms (I can’t remember exactly...) were let out to a range of different people during my few months there (all the other residents were men, as far as I can remember). The one featured in the poem was quite disturbed and often pretty high (‘chocolate’ is a slang term for hashish, for something like the Spanish pronunciation you could try here or the video on my Instagram). 

I was both very happy and quite miserable in this flat. My time in Madrid was coming to an end and a big part of me didn’t want to go back to England. Plus I was heavily in love with someone who did love me but not quite enough (I was only 19, it felt like the end of the world). So, in the end I did go back ‘home’ even though in many ways it felt completely wrong. I wrote a poem at the time (and I didn’t write many poems then) about my ‘mochila de lágrimas’ (rucksack full of tears). It makes me smile (and cringe) now but it absolutely did not then. After a year of difference and discovery abroad I was totally not in the mood for a return to formal English education but that’s where I was heading (along with my cassettes of Cuban singers, endless hippy scarves and new found tastes for things like coffee and avocados). What could possibly, as they say, go wrong…

*In fact, as Spanish postcodes cover larger areas than the UK's longer ones this is the only time in this project that a postcode is repeated.

This poem is part of the annual Fun A Day Dundee project where participants try to do something creative every day for the month of January. You don't have to be in Dundee to take part and there are other Fun A Day projects around the world. People post as much of their work online as they want to (largely on Instagram but it can be elsewhere too). This year I am posting a whole poem a day (one poem for each of the 31 addresses I have lived at, covering the period 1967-2021). Videos/photos of the poems show the places remembered in the poems but were mostly taken from recent Google Street View. The videos are on my Instagram, maybe elsewhere too. Use the hashtag #fadd2021 on social media to see other people's online contributions.