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.