An ode to your little toe, and all those other things I never oded for fear of your scrupulous eye finding out the cracks in my creative foundations, the faultlines in my fictions, and discovering that what you are reading here is in fact (not?) yourself, ill-disguised and painted purple with sweeps of alliteration and pointillistic fragmented letters of your name in capitals where they should not be.
See I guess I always thoughted and maybe at times still thinkit that you are possibly the most complicated person I have ever met, like the knottiest knot in a three mile stretch of string or those four page equations I chose English Literature for never having to unravel… I guess what I am trying to say is that the knottier the knot in a three mile stretch of string, the greater the sense of achievement after unpicking. (I am not sure I want to unentwine you, however, and leave you straightened out but crinkly.)
There is letter space for the elevators of my nightmares and the common at your doorstep and the violet colour you stole from the garden, and possibly even your little toe and the hardened honey on the shelf, but mind the cracks, the paragraph breaks in which the you from the bit before morphs into a you which might be my father or even Dodo the Budgie.
(I would write you an ode but I am not the most poetic of people and you would laugh and then run away very quickly. Perhaps once I have reinvented myself as Philippa, the Pip of the neon fishnet stocking, of never saying never maybe I guess, the Pip of the carrot stick and the Pip who says no to the curdled butter, the Pip of the hidden musical talent and authorial genius, the brashest Pip in the apple core…)
by goddamn right
