The Thwarted Maelstrom

The balloon out of the magic of time, a sideways glance at them and they are us and we’re staring at ourselves.  Tiredness enthrals and time stands still but everything is moving. Lengthways he knew what he was doing; lengthways she ran out of the house in her mind. The balloon sidesteps the other wise clarity in the air, interrupting the day with the blue that out-blues the sky which went grey an hour ago.  Whirl in the mystique of time is this blue balloon; the mystique something we don’t understand but can explore, the balloon upsets the balance and sticks to the moment like a bad stain.  The kid here has a face that says ‘don’t give away where I got this from’, fun is a secret now and she’s not blabbing where she got this little piece of blue fun now and not next week either. ‘Run along adults, this is all mine and it can go about its day with me along by its side and I don’t give a damn if even the Earth complains.' Shards of sky fell into this kids eyes and she spat them out as a gift for the entire world to see. Rudeness in this place was a gift, something genuine out of the mist of contrivance and false-talk; you can’t wrap up spit so she let it fly from her mouth, an act of love not contempt that burst merry on the stage-scene of this frustrated landscape that needed to be disturbed by laughter.

Avalanche

The tears of 27 years throw down your hands and make love to me. Be my companion in the setting sun. Lonely and adrift out here amongst the deaths of intimacy with your melting ice cream. I'm all yours and set me on fire before going. Crying out and running out of time from somewhere deep down from the place that no place in polite conversation. Horrible things do not seem the problem; it is the absence of good things that is the problem.

The Colour of Love

She made marbles in the sunshine all day. Mixed up with the colours of the sand and the tears ran across the sand to meet the blood of a stranger and made love. The language of all the strange was incommunicado to everyone say making marbles across the beach.  The beach stank of other peoples tears all dried up the sun. Everybody thought if they kept crying someone would come and save them. The colour of love was unmade in the sands of time. Time carried nothing to them; there were no magic bottles with little messages pleading for help and to give them a purpose. The purpose lay on the beach in the hands of the marble makers. She took out her eyes and cleaned them and put them back in and saw what was happening and took out a pen. 

Imaginary Woman

And I wanted your words and I wanted the mouth that went with them and I wrap your words and my desire up into a bundle and hand them back as a gift. I like my emotions like I like my coffee, virulent as the taste in my mouth of the memory of you and a shudder like your words that shout through my stomach. Your face rang out through me calling me back to the amber nectar of a dream and wherever you may be, a daylight robbery brought into the midst’s of my mind by a death filled loneliness and we are back together in the attic of my emotions which crawled away with you into the sanitary cave and make up rumours about a myth.  Desire seems to bleed inside out blending in with your day-to-day life.

I caught the last bus to a dream and found my way back home aboard the vestibule of a donkey that cried beneath me wanting to walk side by side with me. That cat in the lonely land no longer smiled and was no longer pleased to be mad and bid me adeu across the lonely night sky continually inferring me on that ‘holidays have been cancelled here’. Now the night-time has come to an end but I can’t switch off my craving dreaming’s which terrorise helpful strangers at the edge of this morass of dark sand at this crossroads to I know not where. The cat bites of lust are all over me, but it’s ok you cannot see them. 

Mirage

Ghosts too can go on loving the living without them ever returning the favour. I have devoured my skeleton for a delusion. Come and find me when my silliness has devoured itself and I have started again. Who would have thought silliness could be so serious eating its way up through me with its games. Roll marbles over my emotions. Sparkling stars fuse out the quickest. Now I have only to grow flowers in the wilderness. I’m swimming to the bottom of the ocean so I can breathe again. Time tiptoes around every minute squealing what wasn’t. Daftness slapped in the face and seeing what I want is always somewhere else and not a place I can move too. Say hello to who I was yesterday if you ever see him again. The landscape out here is cold but the screams of my stomach keep me singing under the facade of my smiling face. Coming home to who I really am and the finally death knells of wishful thinking, well maybe.

The Graveyard in the Sun

26-06-11


I went on that day to find someone like you amongst all the other so-called sleeping prisoners. Cast in the sunshine I went wandering as some kind of exile in the horizon of the dead, this is the only place where the land is laid out to stretch, where there is some pretence of. Why are care and the community more thorough once you’re under ground? Headless angels and forgotten names are landscaping my day out for you if they are still there, you are not here you are somewhere else but I feel like visiting your compatriots is the best I can do today. This is the only part of the city where life and death are allowed to meet up in plain view.


Frank, Hannah and William go by and a cider bottle or a bottle of some fermented juice to drink away loss, and there I was I found me. It is somewhat odd to come across a gravestone with your own name on it. A married dead version of me it would seem. Frank and Hannah and William are odd company but not as odd as the headstone that has nothing on it, imagine being dead and anonymous. Is that a failure of a death? I count the ages walking by and play the sick game of finding the youngest death; I think I found an infant of several weeks. I then wander all the away across the graveyard looking for the opposite, it doesn’t ring out in your eyes as much to see ordinary sized deaths, the later the graves the later they die and later and later. What time is it?

The uneven graves hide under the wonderful day. So untidy up close, like the flawed contours and cracks are hidden by a conspiratorial sky and ‘our loved ones’ can keep up not having their flaws noticed. Going by me are a middle-aged couple, or a couple of people, a husband and wife, a brother and sister, two friends? Dead people have a habit of bringing people together, even if it’s the ritualistic and necessary cleaning people come here to do.

The Children of Grief

To go by your side and walk hand in hand, it’s how the love I have for you arose so strongly the moment you were no longer around. For you to take me away again in your car and spoil me on Sunday: We go on grieving and my grief plays games with the image of your face comes out of the abyss and says ‘hello’ and parts and leaves again. You make these strange little visits; hushed, quiet and brief, playing your love across my face and making me cry out in the wilderness where we used to go for coffee.

Upon your shoulders I used to ride high amidst our holiday destination, piggyback me back to anywhere so I am back here with you again. Temporality switched off with your death, my body shrank in the wash and I was five again. Then came being eighty-five and feeling the wars on my body and then back to age five with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. I pang with each piggyback ride through my memory but I see them more clearly now and with them you: the grief didn’t go away it went away and came back better, I no longer mind swallowing the meal of your memory everyday and every week and with it the twinge.

Their not you, they: But I’ve found a few now whom I can call home and who know me like you. I spent two years out of orbit, insane on the bliss of grief; that blue opaque sky is now the mapping ground of my life with you or your life with me. I think I can just about fit everything about you up there; spinning cobwebs of images and thoughts and snatches of voice your still quite alive up there, in the sky and in my head. The café did a dance without you and asked why you were missing, I had no answer but my stares at the empty chair where you used to me, the table and the coffee doing a negation through the air, pleading for clemency against reality. I know this is going to hurt but don’t hurt to bad; bring the crying after the coffee somewhere else where jurisdiction of pain in public does not reside. We bleed far more easily than we cry; no one ever felt the impulse to inhibit a cut. I sometimes feel like I pull blood back up into me for the sake of someone else’s embarrassment. After somewhere else is how I deal with you; lodged in the calendar like an exploding piece of time. They, them and it all surround me pointing the finger to suggest you’re not here but I no longer fall into the invisible trap where you are, I have what you were and the why and how to get me dancing around your absence and the game of hide and seek with your alluring shock to the system go on but I know they are all part of the exploding bliss of life.

Hoatzin

Hoatzin /hwaet'sin: n. a tropical American bird, Opisthocomus hoatzin, whose young climb by means of hooked claws on their wings. [native name, Imit] /








Sumptuous animosity gathered around the table; will I ever see you again? The prayers sent out never got any further than the jam and toast. I am a stuffed toy set beside the fire place for your pleasure.

Sat down on the hill with our lives and the world ahead of us; where's all the perspective lead, to one central point or just shapes we crisscross with our eyes and our lives and our hardwork.

Spartacus sat upright and gave up on himself. In the knitted armchair of your morality a chill went up your spine; was what you were doing goodness or good for you? A soldier camped out in their own home can't call for backup. Self righteousness piped out of your vocal chords as you kept yourself warm. But that chill makes you pace at night.

Floorboards

The delusion crawled across your mind leaving a snail trail in time. They'd all rather put the world on a flat tone and reduce the fires of the world; one stringed up silver bullet of dogma that they can roll across the floor.

The dynamic flowed out of me and I found I could always see the stars if I focused my eyes the right way. A world without memory sees no stars and the bitchin to find a bastard hasn't much to acrue. Constant fishing for an enemy brought nothing up from the bottom of the sea. So singular in their interests they bled the fruits of their own love and left the world dry.

The dual shoes fit perfectly on both feet as you walked the grounds; gravel littered your world like gravy beneath your thumbling toes like a fish out of water. The forest where people played were like the margins. Acres of inefficient beauty that you day today circumnavigated. Going around constantly what mattered the most.

Going for a walk was no destination nor no beginning; a timeless hug against your own arrogance. Playing tennis with the people you despise the most. But that bullet kept rolling over between your fingers and your comrades and colleagues, cleverly sidestepping anything that really matters. So long, I am going somewhere to find something else, something that really matters and something that is really really.

The walls between us

Who ever knew where we really were? There were no signposts amidst this land of bricks, you were right I used as I thought you were the potential scaffolding to the stars. The rations of desire or piece meal pain relief. I feel as though I am exploiting the Gods I don’t believe in. I never knew you were only human.

The Hour Glass

The me and I fell in together as they fell into the centre of you. The and the the came rolling into one another and made a complete sentence. Time was filling itself backwards harvesting its own self awareness. You vied for my attention within my own body and wouldn't let trivial obsessions get into the way. A glass cup of warmth that constantly refilled itself and gave of TLC without ever burning. I roll over and kick you out of my imaginary bed and it's an accident. I leave you waiting somewhere due to forgetting I was meant to meet you at some certain time in my sleep but I was dreaming but i only upset you in my fantasy. I made my way to please you in the middle of the day when it was dark in the real world and found sunshine and you in my dreams before i had to say goodbye and brush my teeth and let the day go by. I and me and you went for walk once upon a time with a made up picnic and I said everything there was that I wanted to say to you and could and you undressed your mind and allowed me to see what it was you were really thinking and if those emotions I caught gleams of like sequins in time were my good guesswork or the delusions of my own self hoping into your imaginary lap to curl up like a cat that needed you.

That picnic in time that never realy happened seems to have left as big a mark as anything that reality could throw my way. Like a bruise from the inside out forcing my blood to the surface. The moon keeps making faces when my back is turned as though it somehow had no idea that i knew what it was doing. The distinction turned on a head that somehow my dreams were squealing that these dreams should be out in the world. Like Pandora had leapt out of the box with something good to say. But seldomly Pandora got let out the hole with something to say as she'd ceased to speak years ago and was only a spoilt child. I had no nightmares to share with the world but only my nighttime singsong celebrating what hadn't been and my diary of delusions spun together as a potential bluepint of the future.

The Shared picnic ran out and the dream said yes but you had to go and i was left in the forests of my imagination with the hanging tree's of my creation lost without you the human cup of wamrth at the centre of it. But I light another cigarette and your gone. Can it really be true that it was actually it all coming true that i was so scared of all along? But picnics don't make themselves do they? I made and make patterns in the minds as a nice derailed train journey to actually geting on the right path. Roads feel so small and even with their goodtimes I can't sing walking down them. There's no jazz in the tarmac and maybe all along I should have just given up and gone back to bed. But can I bring my Aztec love out for you? I can't even from my scewed balance see things to argue about and I'd give anything for anything for that one argument over nothing for me would be the vestibule of nothing holding out against my own time but second servings of peace are nothing compared to having a mistaken ruckus with you. The stills of you go in and out of focus like a memory in the dark poorly lit. The photographs in my mind aren't good enough so i skip breakfast and leap over the table to find you. Before the cups of tea and the squeezed first breathe of hearing you I stay here amongst my toys in my imagination workshop where kisses against recalled images in the air will do.

Vertebra

It rides through your flesh like a snake in search of something in the middle of the night. Like a winding stairs that holds your head from your heart. I climb all those blocks of bone with my fingers as if my hand were a spider making its way to some safe haven over rocky steps of flesh.

That thing would kill you in the night. As if it were some problematic motorway through your body that you hadn’t designed. No one had given you the road map. In fact I was the only one who had journeyed down that path with my fingers saddled next to my thumb. It kept you together yet it caused you pain. It created hell for you but allowed you to keep moving. It was a physiological bridge that no one but me could walk down. My fingers and my eyes were jealous over whoever may have walked that route before. I’ve tried furtively to own your back with kisses but tenderness wont get me a passport into the feelings that crawl amongst the sea under that bridge. I’m in the same room as this house of ligaments but I still don’t know what it is that animates them into moving every day. I’m wondering all the time what goes through your mind and through your bones when you’re excited, what feelings are propelling you? What is that motivates you to get your spine moving and go running? The more pain that snake causes the more you seem intent on wanting to move its nest.

I sometimes wonder if in a thousand years if archaeologists were to find your body trapped and frozen in ice that had survived some second ice age what they would make of you? What would they do once they had dug you out of that hulk of ice? What would the twisted vertebra tell them about you? Would it say something about your own personal neurosis you tried to run off every morning or would they take it as a sign of the twisted qualities of mankind in general? Would they make a killing and display you for children to come and gawk at some ancient human prize. What will the children of the future make our little human ways? Will we horrify them like some are frightened of the ways of the medieval, will we appear medieval to them, or will our back aches be a source of nostalgia for something they never experienced? Will they still have love or will that be too costly for them to afford? I can see those future archaeologists seeing your tattoo glowing black through the ice as the frozen box melts in the future sunlight.

Love Sickness ii

And we wished we could keep our loved ones in draws, ever close but just out of sight as we play pray in the wilderness of so-called maturity and ourselves we don’t need other people. They called for us from out from the old backyard and we came running in and found nothing waiting for us but nothing was our playground.

Love Sickness

One word flew out of the morning and in one second everything they had was broken in two. Who noticed?

Janus

Draw a line down the middle of my face and then I can tell you where ending is the beginning and the beginning is a start and then I can have a start.

I skip childishly between a thug and being a butterfly. But the butterfly can cut you too if you get too near. I’m the cat that sits on your lap, I’m the cat that turns and bites your head off. Don’t think I can’t scratch you and love you at the same time.

Drawing a life out of inks of black has an ecstasy that only we can see; In my dreams and in my bed where life does not exist. Things existing somehow were not good enough. I watch myself from the outside. I’ve put away my life neatly into compartmental draws stuffed safely away where no one can see them. I made a coat out of my own skin this morning, someone else can wear it now.

Epiphany

And she came out of nowhere and kissed me in the darkness. It was strange how nowhere always felt like somewhere. The ties of meaning wrapped up neatly in one second seconded themselves into one sweet little bow.

Those ties came undone and spread themselves like an imagined angel of darkness spreading itself out to go to sleep as though in its rest it was the most alive. Pain was normal, it spread itself out and went to sleep taking your dreams and your nightmares with you.

She’s still there in the darkness, my lips see lips but i can’t see and the sea of darkness surrounds us like we were two twins sharing the same amniotic space.

There was something that went click and all of who I was fell out of my homeland. Time is on no ones side and if God that isn't there was a she it wouldn’t be on hers are either. Firing bullets out of my own mind that were imaginary. I’d want to be wrong so people could shoot me down out of the sky. Taking your marching orders from time the clocks have eviscerated millions. Governments are factories and factories are governments and they have a different design now but imagination can’t dream up a delusion good enough to unmake them and we have now only the making to spin something, perhaps better if only infinitesimally small and only to be blown away by the confiding hands of the clock that we are all running away from. Always remember to ask the victim what it’s like to be beaten and what it’s like for the vigilante to get away with a kiss when no one was looking. The best I can do is to remember my Amnesia.

She made honey where my lips were, the acres of space in my head shot apart by an electric spark. The darkness past a gaping doors; is this a dream, a fantasy, a memory. All we ever had was the gaping door and the acres in our heads and what is in our hands now, an electric honey that makes me cry and bite. The cut and the bliss drove by me and through me like a bus sauntering off to crash somewhere else but even if it was only ever crash that was delayed in our own predictions where else are we to go? Love and Liberty can never be evicted from each other’s bed or minimised or made remote from responsibility or kissed out of sight. In the end we all do it to ourselves and maybe we never deserved it anyway and we have yet to come to terms with life not coming out of the darkness to find us, we have to go into the darkness and find it, where ever it is.

The tongue sat in the fishbowl of the mouth and what the hell is this, a kiss? Someone your senior kisses you, this is no more than a handshake but somehow so much more. The hands on my face or on me anywhere in time are bigger than any fuck and twice the mark.

Stately the stars sit there doing nothing as though they were waiting to be pinched out, they’ve done enough already. Stars and angels mean nothing to being kissed in the dark. Doors opening up and the darkness comes at you quicker than the light. When did darkness get to be something bad by the way? Several million years of passion spill out in the mouth. It is not my desire, it is your desire filling me and making my desire. My darkness has a full stomach now, its safe now to look.

27...

Does 27 years all come in one second, all the blankness confiding itself into one moment. 27 years and counting. All broken brain a set of scattered parts glued together. I take off my skin and there’s no blood beneath. They take a sideways glance and their eyes go right by me. 27 years and counting and I’ve been evicted from my own body. My one second is seeing the sprawl of the day and the years before them which go all the way to that day to tell me I’m 27 years old and counting. The seconds have crawled in through my stomach and up my spine eating out what made me human and spat themselves out through my mouth. 27 and no longer human, I’m a spider watching the world, give me the word and I’ll jump on you. Does 27 mean anything or is it just the number before 28 and the one after 26. The sideways glance backed out on me over a childhood, over adolescence, over adulthood.

A human tide comes annually over me like a brutal love, maybe I’d rather have a slap, a kiss or a caress run away with me. This adulthood is a game I have sleepwalked through, come and meet me where the rain isn’t raining I can hear my stomach screaming, I cut out my stomach but a anew one grew in its place and said the same things. It was singing all of today and yesterday. Like a scarecrow moving in the wind 27 and fucking lonely. The powerless need a place to go, Where the signposts go to hell. It must be better than this, the demons moved out ages ago, even they couldn’t bear it anymore, lips like honey keep trickling into my memories but so does the blood and the mouths that spit seconds of glass, life here is a full of a stomach of hate. The hate cut out a smile where my heart was and now I’m grinning.

The Climbing Frame.

We condescend and are arrogant to the people we love too easily and obedient and dutiful to the people we hate who deserve so little less. Hatred and hierarchy have twisted your sadness and hatred into the shadow of something you call love and made your love hide in a darkened closet and scream out in your dreams where no one can see them. This is all well beyond having tattooed with a knife across your spine all the things you assume you care for or think are buried beneath the skin of your underside where no one can read them. Up here we mount the climbing frame of time and with things that last that little bit too long at least we have a better understanding of them. Sunshine in out own time makes years of rain welcome and even seems to make sense.

We make our way up monkey ropes, which should be ours, and equality of opportunity is to be on the higher end of the pole as you are sliding down. Blink once and we are gone, time carves out a think slice and meats it self out neatly but briefly. Tie up your horizons into a polite bow. Put away all your dreams neatly into draws and nice little compartments that everyone will approve of. Do up the buttons of your own applause and make them around you happy by doing what they expect of you. The sand we played in was the place where we shaped out our dreams but they never told us and made us think the opposite that the world outside was a place of continents where we could shape our lives like that sand in that sand pit of our childhood’s.

The Ornamental Tree

Love wrapped up with sex and sex wrapped up with love. I cannot see the ending and the beginning and the rolling colours of you upon my mind and you in my life are desire criss-crossing across the sky. So far away and a strangers shadow that I follow I feel as though I’ve known you all my life. Stitching in and out the threads of time and you still remain at a distance but fill the vestibule of my heart. In days gone by being a fragrant plant in my hunger was enough but that didn’t make you enough and made the beautiful skins of which you really were peeled away like an anguished onion. Once upon a time whatever or could have made you cry might have been statistically pretty or images upon the pillow and waves of my mind. All that was feminine curled up like a cat in my mind and was a self-saving drug of the mind. To cut out ones sexuality is to cut out the stem of humanity and do so impossible. But there are times and places that are beyond mere rapacious thirst.


Languages and cleverness and warmth Wisdom and innocence and all my badness and goodness and everything else curl around each other. If love means anything its this place where arrogance and grandiosity fall away. Where does this go on the love calculator? Am I spider crawling towards a fly? Are you more than skin and bones if your intelligence feels sexy? Droplets of your emotions drip out annually onto my hands. I go for them like a starving cat foraging for crumbs. Where is the alarm bell for delusion? Where can I know where I know I ma not just another asshole. I’ve only got artefacts of you and your name comes at the end of the alphabet.


Blow a kiss in my ear and whisper the meaning of what it is at the same time. I came home and climbed up the tree of who you really were and fell asleep in your sweet understanding. With you and with this I can know intelligence is not a place of ruthlessness and not a place of counting the ways of how people can curl their cynicism around each other. On a moment like one of these drinking up darkness which has become second nature and I have become a sadist to myself rather than a masochist your communication brought back something I had forgotten. Memories of places and feelings like spring gardens felt like they were dying stars.

An Angel with problems who gardens and no doubt brushes her teeth. Playing games of guessing how many foibles you might have doesn’t distract from this bizarre trick of the mind. This is hopscotch in the night and it’s a relief to know your human. But everything I could do would be a mistake. The person you love is an animal and the desire saves no one from the fallout from hitting against your domestic reality.

Your angel is not real.

The Ice Road

As little as you are and as little as I am and as a speck that’s unseen in the universe and with no safeguarded promise of living forever we act as though we were living forever in this accidental minute that comes from the deliberate bedtime ravings of centuries. They don’t tell you about that genealogical lineage at school now do they? A pathway from darkness to darkness but if a light of our own devising and the accumulative but constant of the candles of the universe. The sequins of a temporary explosive time that lasts longer and all of us combined but seems firmly tatooed against the sky like a permanent painting.

We crawl and push and jump and scream our way through our own universe. We know there’s a meaning to the universe but we also know it won’t do us any favours or answer our prayers.
Who pays again for that ancient accident in the Garden of Eden when you have Eden down the road or outside your window or in your home?

When we children did we not run around in cement tunnels like there was no tomorrow and lick lollypops as though there was nothing to please others with. With your gods eye we are a baby trapped within a baby trapped within a baby. How can you save for a rainy day that you do not know will come when whether it is with or without a celestial hand the rain is the paint of the world. What are we stick men and stick Women and creatures of clay for some other things desire or free people with our loves, our ethics, our lives and our lollypops which are ours.


The ice road was a prehistoric bridge over a place of danger and uncertainty in an Antarctic wonderland that scared you. This is the glacial highway you walked miles of pain and grief across. The ghosts of your life doing a Mexican wave of consolation were ever beneath your melting road. Who’s going to ferry you across this flood of tears now, without your road into the heart of your God?


Draw a dream together with the sowing machine of your imagination and then be happy to be bones and ash and stockpile your memories before you disappear forever. Do you remember the moment when you awoke from sleep and couldn’t remember a moment ago in the world where your eyes were shut? That’s what it would be like. Did your imagination go weeping on the real roadways that weren’t built out of ice and didn’t carry with them thousand year-old tales to warm the dying in winter? Would you rather be alive before you die or wait to be alive after you die? Or moving chess pieces over the frozen wilderness of your mind in anticipation of making a mistake or doing something right. Or make a frozen road melt and make it not a crossing to somewhere you cannot predict but merely a pool that you are swimming in and let those ghosts die.

Broken Flesh

Broken flesh and sweet kisses and of the scattered memories that stick in you and the memories that burst in your mind. There’s a picnic in my mind and I’m trying to get at it. The long lost thing that you always wanted at the edge of the forest of my drives. I’m waiting inside and can perceive some place not too far away where I no longer wait and I can carve out a life with a pencil or a pen or take a photograph of an emotion. Is crawling in human emotion somewhere between the animal and the android, both a prism and a magnifying glass.

It said it better than if you had said it outright
One part fiction and the other part who you really were.

A song or a dance or a handprint was your way of getting around the responsibility of words. A language that left no breadcrumbs to follow all the way back to its leader.This was your way of skipping over crocodiles, leaping about their backs and moving so swiftly that they did not have time to steal your feet. Questions were preludes to vilifications that I deserved, like curiosity should have been out of the question. I fished down into your mind and caught my own prejudices and you handed them back with painful understanding. I think you’d pull out your nails for fear people might notice but always put them back before anyone could notice.

‘Notice me’ they might cry, but don’t say anything. You have a wall about you and were only suddenly aware of when people accidentally find themselves trying to climb it. Those times were like moments when something precious and needed blows away in the wind and is caught at the last second. I caught your desire for me between my fingers before I had to let go of it. My syllables are my only way of scratching my name onto your mind and leaving something in your memory, not so I might own what is yours but so that you might remember me.

Life after Death

It wasn’t that ashes were ashes and dust went into dust.
The ashes were laid on top of the ashes and the dust was mounded on top of the dust and sat as a mountain in my every room.
Everywhere I went you followed me like a pesky pet that cuts you as it nuzzles your tummy with its claws, your departed love stings.

You are unavoidable. You are everywhere, you hide in cupboards and manage to be lying around in photographs on mantelpieces when I least expect, always ready to jump in on me when I am going to sleep, why do you disturb my dreams, can't you leave me alone at night? I think you’ve overstayed your welcome, you’re like a rude guest that wont leave when you have been politely asked to. Can’t you get off the premises? Why won’t you leave? But still your mountain of ash hangs around lingering in my eyes. I love you but your not around to be loved. That was the jarring paradox that happened between breath and the cessation of breath. When your skin changed colour and your love expired.

Your unavoidable I know. I could bury or burn all the things that are mementos of you but the mementos are meaningless without that one memento I cannot discard of that is the one I have in my mind. I can feel myself becoming more like you, is that genetics or just sentimentality? I even smell like you. You with your body and your smile and your thoughts and your love and your annoying habits are all gone. I don’t even have the luxury of having you here to hate you. Now you’re inside me but I have to put you on the backburner, you’re missing somewhere upstairs in the loft rather than down in the basement for the time being. Sorry but that’s where you have to stay along with the mountain of ash and the feelings they ache of.

Torches in the Dark

I’m out here playing with my visible friend amidst where leaves and trees and juggling images in the rapid glimpses of brief light. Lets stay out here all night until they find us. This is where with my friend I found out I as dangerous as i had feelings found out frightened people more than war or an unjust economy. The torches swivelled across faces and the faces caught each other’s eyes and made contact. Terror and desire snapped into place in one moment and then neither of us knew what to do.

I’m with you aged 6 running through this forest our torches our little pieces of twentieth century electric progress lighting our way through the centuries old charm of the forest. Out and about in the memory of being this age again. With you and into the forest and into one night that we didn’t have together, I caught your eyes dilating. We can’t cross the chasm of friendship and we would rather stay here in this place in the cold where we can cope. Our solace is our torches out here in the darkness and maybe the matches we play with. A home amongst the trees we failed so much to do whatever it was that we should have been doing that night. But the recognition between the torches and the dilated eyes said what no one would say.

For crying out loud.

The sticks were broken and the stones confiscated but words like extraneous ghosts made circles and joined hands. They clasped like they were playing a game and a chant of 'ring a ring roses' as though rose and torment were stacked one upon one and it was like watching a strange child mounting bricks.

Expectations in the afternoon

Did time dry up in the rain? Was one glimpse of intimacy a stroke too many.Kisses and kindness always seeemed to fall out of the sky. Love was made up ten parts of ubiquitious accidents. Closeness to you is like putting my hand out through a mirror. A long time has wrapped itself around my mind and your mouth and the words that pass through it are the only thing that can burst the cement open.

The time on the wall

The time on the wall stood still watching us as though it had nothing else to do. It was waiting around collecting up all the seconds of our meeting where we had nothing to say to each other, you’d somehow found a moment in your diary where you could come and find me To say nothing to me; you’d deliberately scratched out a day with your disintegrating pen where you
Would have the time to tell me nothing. But the nothing said everything that you didn’t want to say.

Your refusal to speak screamed out our previous five years of silence. You played a game with your hands as though you were trying to figure out what they were for. The time on the wall reached out and said Four O’clock as it was sighing about the fact that it had to do something it had done a million times before. You synchronised your stay with me to end as it struck four, and leave me and my life as the time on the wall ended another hour for me, your hands changed from their game and picked up your bag and left. Now I was left with the time on the wall waiting for another hour to be over. This time the hour was without you.

Polity

We find our own way back to life with imagination, what is life but a recycling of the wheels we found loose one day of someone else's bicycle turning over and over your once used brain to make what your brain had already made before. My turn came to turn down the offer of the cowards who had not the courage to be themselves and made our lives hell for not confiding in their lack of tenacity and lack of backbone which in the end would never back them up in their own fight with themselves.

They took flight them that life and lived like wolves except they were on the inside of the community of the forest and not lurking on the outside. It caught us slap bang in the middle of the face that it was those on the centre in the middle of the universe acting like savages massacring savages who ventured outside of their control. It wasn’t curiosity that killed the cat, they did.

He who came crawling made pacts and acts no wolf would dare even consider as though their abuse was the only law of nature. We found out crawling was the highest art of kings and men who wanted everyone to crawl below them. Maybe at the time it seemed like rain or air or snow or wine or tears to make other people do for them that which they could not obtain through persuasion. We couldn’t understand the last fortnights brutality let alone one thousand years but we also had and have a sense that he might not turn out to be so natural after all.

She went about her business not knowing that her business was business but that business in question was never hers. She ransacked cleanliness and spun a meaning out of duty but the duty had slowly killed nine billion before her with some going quickly and some going slowly as it was the dutiful thing to do just to hang on a little bit longer. She wondered to herself late at night in the late afternoon of her life could you un-train the oppressed, but the train coming to get her was coming that following morning and she could not miss it as missing it meant missing being without her family and she did not want to let down her mother who would as far as she was concerned let down her Father who she had spent the last twenty seven years trying to prove herself too even though he had been dead and gone for the last twelve years. The hopes of the he’s and the she’s and the theys leapt up an invisible ladder back through memory. Back through history, back through genealogy, collecting up the dust particles and repetitions and flaws of learnt experience that no one whether it was a he or a she or a they could remember. But this polity of a family living room, of a community, of a couple or of two strangers making love weren’t remembering to recollect what had once happened they were remembering to forget.

We on the other hand couldn’t be bothered with all that. Wearing the right clothes seemed silly and they never quite fit anyway. So we stood back from a distance whilst the games of history took place and we tried to play dot to dot in its grey absurdity. We were traitors to where we were from but they in the end were traitors to humanity garnered by thousands of years of betrayal.

Yet we still wonder where we find the place that is the most us even if it is only inside us, let alone if we could manage to stay there.

Summer Dolphin

A clay that is no longer my clay and taken away from me and passed to someone elses hands. Someone else smoothed away paradise for me within their hands and within five minutes and thought it was help that had fell out of heaven for me .

Summer 1989, a boy did me a favour. A Summer Dolphin as blue as the sea sits in front of us. I'm saved again but is this a help or a hindrance that has been made with someone elses hand?

My brain is indebted to this help and trapped in it. Oppressions are riddled with ambiguities and I'm always saved by the thing that is slowly killing me by the summer Dolphin swimming through my heart.

Faith.

Your skin fell off in the middle of the night. Like overly worn out pyjamas they just fell off. You had no flimsy thin skin of deceit to cover you up anymore. I could have helped but I left you there naked with no defence. Your thoughts burst forward so often in your head that you could no longer digest them anymore. All your ideas would roll back upon each other and your dreams would somehow not discard them.

I tried to make my own landscape for you in time. Mark out a geographical space where we could sleep; a peaceful cubbyhole away from the staring eyes of reality. In a house of wood or a house of brick or a house of straw or the remotest wood your emotions made your skin feel like an old coat. I cut out snippets of seconds and minutes and hours and cellotaped them together and we made a tapestry of time together that involved picnics and piss-ups and hangovers and marriages and upsets and fall outs. The more reality cast down sunshine and snow the more you became aware there was no hiding place. I couldn't’t provide it. We are in the second century of our love now. Faith for old dead men is starting to wear thin. Who are you going to replace it with now; Old dead Women, People and things and ideas that have nothing to do but get you through? Are you going to by accident one day crawl into your old forest of delusions and find a reality of freedom with its worms or crawl backwards looking for picturesque dictators who will kill you?

.

Glass Puzzle.

Our morality and our passion was broken glass we spent our days trying to knit back together. As we rearranged it in a numerous number of ways with blood on our fingers we occasionally caught sight of who we thought we were in our temporary reflection. We didn’t know if it was us who we saw staring back at us in our disjointed glass puzzle or reflections or an error of desire.

All our idolatries have packed their bags and left this morning. Is the sympathy of tears and reciprocal recognition of each other’s bad times all we have left now? In the glass puzzle of your voice, of your tone, of your words, of your passions stencilled on your emotions I see the conjoined heaven and hell of everything you are and can’t be. The cracks between the glass are both the joins and the gaps between the promise and the jovial screams against your own reality and I don’t mind at all.