​The child inside the grown-up me
still relies on the one lullaby you used to sing
to send me off to sleep when I was small and shocked
to life in the middle of the night, terrified by pictures
in my mind that I did not want to see [misty ports,
men in cloaks, sunken boats, choking on soap]
“Picture yourself in a boat on a river”
and I would try so hard,
I’d scrunch my tear-stained little face up
(I remember once I told you that “I can’t”
that I can’t picture myself in a boat on a river
and you told me that I just wasn’t trying and I cried even more
because you were disappointed in me, you didn’t believe that I couldn’t
see anything other than my baby brother being eaten alive by a dinosaur)
​I’d try so hard, concentrate with all of my tiny might
on imagining tangerine trees and marmalade skies
​(I remember lying once
said that I could see the boat / river / trees
because I didn’t want you to be angry at me
or think I was silly but, still in my mind was a coven
of evil witches not looking-glass ties)
and you said I was your girl with kaleidoscope eyes
and I agree tonight, coked out of my mind
sad / drunk / traumatized, no sun in my eyes
“and she’s gone”
realizing that my baby song, my lullaby, the first and only enduring comfort
in my life was really just a record of psychedelic revelry that, when you sang it to me,
probably made you think of when you were young and free dropping 100%
pure liquid acid on your tongue and really fucking living, man
(I hope that you can’t see me, can’t see what has become of me
in your absence: Dad, I’m so fucking sorry. But what if I was destined
to reach this state? my brain creating fucked-up dreamscapes from such an
early age, perhaps I was inadvertently trained to hallucinate, to escape
whatever’s scaring me in my brain by conjuring things in a different reality?
but no, I am still and always will be terrified of the Blue Meanies.
I can’t beat them in dreams or nightmares or real fucking life, man)
​tonight, your girl is wide awake
no boat / no trees / no sky
there are no diamonds, only violence
and thoughts of dying and she’s alone
and frightened, whispering lyrics to herself
​plasticine porters that grow so incredibly high,
rocking horse people towering over your head
in the wrong order because the only way a daughter
can ever calm herself down enough to fall asleep
is to sing a fucked-up lullaby about a trip on LSD
that her Daddy used to soothe her when she was just a baby.
​​
HLR (she/her) is a working-class poet, writer and editor from north London. Her work has been widely published, most recently by Emerge Literary Journal. She is the author of prosetry collection History of Present Complaint (Close to the Bone) and micro-chap Portrait of the Poet as a Hot Mess (Ghost City Press).
header image: Ron Lach via Pexels