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.