Mr Fucking Rocket tires of saving for a mortgage
By Susan Bradley Smith
I thought things were wrong:
it manifested in me buying
and wearing Ulysses blue
eyeshadow. It didn’t suit
me. One day I stared into
the mirror at the caked crystal
of smudged me and said ‘You
look like a whore’. I was cheap,
cheeky, comehithersome—but
clientless. Makeup remover in
hand, I finally admitted that you
had left without me. That you
weren’t coming back. That the
rocket we’d saved so hard for
belonged to you alone.
On the moon, water tastes
like oysters and makes you
orgasm when drunk and vegetables
are as small as the teeniest seashells
yet pack a bomb of good—one
mouthful lasts a week. The sky is a
new colour, a colour called star,
it is a secret worth keeping. The
ground is sponge. You bounce
everywhere. You, you dance through
life like a Premier danseur noble
a luck-soaked Latvian superstar,
strong, unbound, dramatic. All this
is true (for you). I am jealous.
So that’s dickhead you, on the moon,
with your new diva life. Up there.
Away. And here I am, on earth, ever
unable to afford a home, washing
our old, faded towels, still stale
with your secretly spent sperm. I am
working my way through the pile
of leftover you, leftbehind me. It is
more satisfying than you’d credit.
Are you happy there, homeless
but free? Duty has its own splendour, so
they say. I’m pretty busy. But missing
you—that’s my next chore: to mark
that unmapped galaxy.