Saturday, December 29, 2012

Dashed

What if I leave and it turns out to be just another city?

Someday

For fear of my pulse fading, I sit hunched over a tiny notebook, dipping into it with a black pen, skimming the thoughts in my mind. One day they'll be pieced together into a story. One day.

Someday, when they're finished.

Thursday, December 27, 2012

Smiles

When your time is cut short, you learn to appreciate every second you have. And so it is with you. We only have moments, if that, to laugh, to talk, to smile, to inquire about the wellbeing of the other. Somehow in those few moments you've collapsed into a niche in my heart and planted a flag in the ground, proclaiming it as your own. When we miss our time, I miss you. When I don't see you, I miss you, like the you in your niche is tapping your fingers impatiently against your knee, wondering what's taking us so long.

And sometimes I think it doesn't mean anything. But then I'm leaving, hands full, and you're walking past. You catch my eye and smirk, and every part of me wants to drop everything I'm holding and wave. But I can't. So settle for trying to give you a smile back, though it turns out to only be half the one I'm giving you in my heart. But I hope you know anyway.

Tuesday, December 25, 2012

Breathing, Sleeping, Dreaming

You're sitting on my chest and stealing my breath away. I want it back; it's tiring going through life panting with every step. But I cannot wrest it away from you. You stole it from me, but I let you have it. I could not have stopped you if I tried. And that's the truth.

You're crashing through my dreams. I want them to be strange and crazy, and to help them assuage the loneliness. But you're there and I'm weak. You've cut me off at the knees and I don't want you to leave me alone. You're out there, swimming on the backs of turtles and screaming out from a stage, and I'm always here watching, listening, reaching for you. And when the morning breaks, I find myself alone in a too small bed, cold and with an aching hole in my chest. But that's what my life is now.

You're sitting on my chest and I want you to grab me by the hand and show me how your lips work against mine.

Monday, December 24, 2012

Big, Small

I am small and feeble and you are big. But you too are small, so you puff out your chest, raise your voice, and make enough noise for a whole army. It's in these moments that I realise that I am bigger than you.

Sunday, December 23, 2012

Dwindling

Time, time, it's slipping through my hands, dwindling even as it stretches on into forever. I cannot grasp it, I cannot look back either, and tell you what I have done with all my hours, my days, my years. I could not tell you what I did with my last minute. Because what if it amounts to nothing? What if I go back and try to add up the sum of my life and find the number piteously small? Wouldn't it be better to never know and think you achieved something, rather than die knowing that you didn't?

Friday, December 21, 2012

The Apocalypse

The clock struck midnight and it was unremarkable. The seconds ticked past, then minutes, an hour, two, more. Nothing.

No one really knew what it was that was supposed to happen, only that something might. Some thought it should. Others scoffed. Some shut their blinds, locked their doors and huddled down in their basements, among their supply of canned foods. Most threw a party to celebrate.

Celebrate the end of the world, isn't that strange?

We could have ended in fire or ice or dust or water, all of a sudden. It doesn't seem a thing to celebrate. All of life, gone in an instant? It's a tragedy. It's nature. It's the only way the Earth can heal its wounds. But people celebrated their demise. We celebrated our own deaths, knowing there'd be no one left to throw us a funeral.

We didn't die. But what if we had? People would have died with smiles on their faces instead of worrying, sick with fear. It's not a bad way to go, not with a scream, but with a chortle.

Thursday, December 20, 2012

Fragility

It's the thing that leaves you quivering, shaking from head to toe. It's because you know you cannot ever attempt to make something so delicate. You're afraid to reach out, even with one finger, to touch it, in case you shatter the entire fragility of the system. Someone beat you to it; someone else wrote the thing that could break your heart. You wish it had been yours, but you know that you're big and uncouth and bumbling beside the small, intricate, finely balanced piece you're looking at, listening to, feeling in your soul.

Maybe one day you'll find your own fragility and let it shine through to create something beautiful, but right now, you're too afraid. It might break you in half.

The After

Your hand reaches out across the bed, only to find it empty. It takes you a moment, but you remember that she's gone. The bed is too cold, too big, too lonely and your heart breaks more than a little when you remember that she is never coming back. Can never come back. Because she's cold too, and too lonely, but she's so small now, pale and hidden where sunlight will never touch her again. Her big personality cannot brighten the room and fill all the corners, and she will not brush your lips with hers. But at least you know, even if she's not here, she can still make you smile, even if the tears sting your broken heart.

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

A Word

I feel like I should spare you a word, just in case you're out there and listening. So here it is.

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Stuck

I think I better keep walking because there isn't a light burning in your window to draw me in. But every time I walk past, I'm going to check, just to make sure. I cannot deny that I'll be hanging on everyday, hoping you'll change your mind.

Monday, December 17, 2012

Solemn Love

I caught sight of you when I least expected it and found that I bore an anger in my heart. It isn't aimed towards you; it reflects inwards, on me, stabbing me with its refined point, driving the feelings home. I was trying to stop my feelings for you, but the anger reminded me that I could not. They're still there, stifling my breathing, roasting my soul above an open fire of self resentment and blacking you out as an impossible hole in the universe.

It's an inevitability that you know that I exist, who I am and what I do, but more importantly, it's an inevitability that you were never going to look at me the way I look at you. I'm drawn you to the way I'm in love with my melancholia; resentfully, but addicted in such a way that I am loathe to give you up.

It would be less painful to drive a literal knife through my heart.

Oncoming

There are thoughts I'd rather not have, but they're sloughing through my head and with their heavy arms, are knocking aside any others which try to raise their heads. It's a landscape of destruction and death and heartaching loneliness and it's eating me away, leaving me facing the trolls with the heavy arms, until they fill my vision and I'm consumed by the sight of them. There's nothing I can do. I'm alone at the edge of the battlefield and the destruction is coming towards me.

Friday, December 14, 2012

Nicotine Dreams

Today I woke up yearning for nicotine. I wanted the dark toxins to coat my fragile lungs and tinge my blood with acid. Lying in the half light seeping through my curtains, I could almost feel the smoke curling down my oesophagus and wrapping itself around my bronchi. The phantom cigarette sat in my fingers, comfortable, as though it had lived there all its life. When I breathed it in, my body knew what to do, as automatic as blinking.

Today I woke up craving a cigarette. But I've never picked one up before, never even tried. Yet after today, I cannot say that I never will. The balance is tipping and I'm falling.

Thursday, December 13, 2012

The Razor Edge of Midnight

She's a dancer. If you weren't already in love with her, this would have done the trick. Somehow you cannot stop thinking of dark back alleyways in the middle of the night where she stumbles through, drunk and dizzy, her smudged mascara masking her eyes from the light. You think of the leers she might get, and shiver because she's so tiny.

But mostly you can't help but think of her in bed, tangled between your sheets as you run a hand along her stomach. She's a dancer, and you hadn't noticed it before, but here, alone without the barrier of clothing,  you feel it in the defined muscles on her abdomen, in the way her firm legs wrap around you and pull you in, in the way she arches - off the bed and into you.You taste the alcohol on her and pretend that drunk isn't the only way you find her in your bed. Lie, and tell yourself that next time you won't answer the 2am knock on the door.

When she comes down, she tells you she loves you. But she's a dancer. And you're inadequate.

Back of Beyond

Restless hearts are never still and their beating always urges for another beyond. Slowly, fumbling and clumsy, I can feel my fingertips brushing against the wall of this beyond and my heart screams for the leap into another before it's too late. But it's hard to broach the void when you cannot find the door in between the worlds. All I'm left is an imagination whispering about what the next phase of living will be like and another tiny voice telling me I'll never see it.

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

The Howling

I fell in love with the howls of wolves at the end of the earth, the way their solemn cries echoed over the mountain tops and through the veil of the night. I knew I wanted to run with them, that if ever I were to find my soul in another animal, that it would be a wolf. Because they knew what it was like to feel loneliness while surrounded by a crowd. And they knew the beauty of the wilderness which raced through their veins. And they knew that the only way to assuage the things that kill us, you have to scream into the night.

Monday, December 10, 2012

Potholes


This road is full of potholes.

Sunday, December 9, 2012

Right and Wrong

Wrong. I've always known what it's felt like to be wrong. Every twist wasn't an opening to a new horizon, it was a brick wall with a mask that laughed at you, the sound echoing in the quiet alleyway so loudly that it didn't fade from your ears for days. It was a sense of confidence being shattered into a billion pieces to be ground into nothing, overlooked and uncared for.

Someday I'd like to be right. Someday I want that pit in my stomach to flood with relief, with pride and with the knowledge that life wasn't turning around to slap me in the face. Someday I'd like to be right about something major.

Today, all I want to be right about is thinking that we're not wrong.

Saturday, December 8, 2012

Another Soul to Carry on my Heart

The truth be told, I wasn't really falling in love with you; you didn't give me enough to fall in love with, except a beautiful smile and a quietness. The trouble is, I could fall in love with quietness and a beautiful, rare smile. But the rest, I have to admit, was all imagined. If people were personalities only, I couldn't pick you from the next stranger who passes me on the street, and it saddens me to admit it, but you and I perhaps have little in common. In another life, another situation, maybe I'd be brave enough to say something different, and you'd be brave enough to reply. For now, I'll acknowledge that this feeling isn't going away, but it's not one that's going anywhere else either. I'm going to let you roam the halls of my fictions instead.

Friday, December 7, 2012

Not a Precision Tool

I keep meaning to come out and write something, but it seems the words are forever going to be elusive, writhing out of the grip of the pen which struggles to pin them down to the page. Instead, I sit and think about what I want to say, letting the thought remain abstract, a vague feeling in my chest, rather than a series of imprecise words tied together in awkward, ugly knots. One day I might be able to touch them and have them rearrange in the right order, but it seems that today is not that day.

Thursday, December 6, 2012

The Potential Something

You like me.

Maybe it's not completely romantic, but it's better than the cold indifference I'm used to. And maybe it could be romantic. Maybe we're sitting on the cusp of friendship and romance - two almost strangers tying knots to each other as the waves of life tumble us around.

It's just that you and I make a moment last longer than the twenty seconds it ought to and that's not something I could accomplish on my own. It makes me think that you're putting some effort into making the conversation last too, so maybe there's something to this after all. I know I want there to be. I want this sitting on the cusp to tip into romance. Somehow I think you and I could co-exist independently of each other while still existing together in a relationship, and that's not something I've managed to think before. So either you're the first person I could actually have something with, or I've matured more than I thought, like a leaf turning brown before realising it had even turned orange.

And if it's nothing, at least I'll have a friendship to fall back on.

Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Recording

Whenever I feel a moment, I scratch it down into my notebook, recreating it in lines and words and a tiny picture on a rounded-corner page. Supposedly I'm a dreamer. I like to think I'm a recorder, adding my own hand to reality and putting it down as I see it. It's not a crime to represent the world as you see it, and I like to fixate upon certain things, staring until their details are impounded into my memory, never to be forgotten, even as they lie sprawled across off-white paper and are held together with a black elastic.

I'll never stop putting life down in books.

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

In the Wake of Dreams

My subconscious dredged you up again from its depths, and pranced you around in my dreams. You're like the silt which keeps being upturned by the ever crashing waves, never settling to be buried the way I want you to be. To its credit, even my unconscious self wants nothing to do with you and I leave you behind, watching after me as I go my own way, but it's strange to have you there at all, with all the details of your face still clear. That's what happens when your mind can't help but dwell on its scars. I don't know what it's going to take for you to be gone, getting your twisted hands out from under my ribcage, trying to pierce my heart, but I'm hoping I find the cure soon.

Sunday, December 2, 2012

No Fake Laughter Here

I could spend my whole life waiting for the day I next see you. I don't know if you feel the same, but I know you haven't thrown me out of your heart to freeze to death on the street, and it gives me hope that you and I might have a chance. After all, you manage to be there every time I am, and we always manage to share our words. And you laugh and I laugh and my heart reverberates with the knowledge that I'm the one who gave you your smile in that moment.

Giving Up the Ghost

We're going to pretend now, you and I, that you never meant a thing to me. I'm going to stop looking your way with covert glances and brief periods of staring when I think you're looking the other way and hoping that you'll turn around and catch me. Because you didn't. You didn't care.

I came to the realisation that when my heart starts beating faster, yours stays just the same, a regular pump of oxygen and blood and iron and all the other things your cells need to keep you alive. You never looked at me and saw in me what I saw in you.

And so we'll never speak of your beauty again, because it breaks my heart.

Saturday, December 1, 2012

December

I hadn't fared you well before you had gone, leaving a trail of memory and lost moments in your wake. I had wanted do bid you goodbye, but you had no time for that.

Instead, I'll greet the new month and hope that it will be good. After all, hope is all we can do. And December marks the beginning of the heart of life.

Thursday, November 29, 2012

But will I float?

This struggle isn't getting any easier, and I recognise it as the one I've had before. The one where I want to turn and run and never look back, where I want to hold someone for the rest of my life because there isn't any other way to alleviate the loneliness which manifests in my soul like a gangrene. It's where I want to bandage wounds which don't exist and walk around holding myself tall and fragile and letting people see that I am not ok.

I could be better, of course I could be better. But how to get there? It's like preparing for a disaster but not knowing what you're preparing for. Is it the end of the world? Sometimes it feels like it. Sometimes it feels like waiting for something and seeing it not happen again and again and again, so that all you ever learn to expect is disappointment and a nausea which makes you sick all the time. It's like seeing the projection of yourself walking the earth flicker and vanish in front of your eyes, so that you feel like you're floating, lost and confused with no way of getting back.

I want to scratch it out of my skin, out from behind my ribcage, and flick it into oblivion. I want it to let me go. Otherwise I'm letting the world go.

Suffering as Art

There's this aching, like numbness, which seeps down through my chest and infuses every cell with its calling. One after another after another they succumb to the purple sickness, suffering after a beauty but never earning a satisfaction. "A thing of beauty is a joy forever," some poor poet once said, but how did he not see that beauty isn't joy but a torture device which makes suffering into an art? Its effervescence makes the bile in your stomach boil and blub until it's rising up your throat and you find it all over your shoes. Its song screeches in your ears and threatens to make them bleed.

Oh, but it's so difficult to let go. Because even as its claws retract from your chest and it starts to float away, you're clutching after it like you're trying to grab the wind - a desperate and fruitless attempt. Because it's beauty, it's her, and though you hate yourself for it, you love the suffering because it reminds you that you're real.

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Counting

I used to lose track of days, not even blinking as they flew by, all the same blur of lilac walls and kitchen tiles. But now I'm stuck in this place where the days creep by so slowly that it pains me that I'm losing the time to eternity. I cannot lose track now. I'm counting them till I see you again.

Monday, November 26, 2012

Nexus of a Crisis

No one trains us in the words to express how we feel, to face that thing which matters most - a breakdown in the face of storms, because we don't know how to say what we mean. Keeping it all bottled in, with no way of showing what we want, it drags itself up from our chest and threatens to spill over in wads of blue and green and drip across the floor until it washes over us all. And then we're forced to deal with the fallout. But no one taught us how to do that either.

All we are is babies in swaddling, with no way out, no way forward, and a hazard of choking on the things which don't want to be said, but must. And I, I'm the map that can't be read, all dead ends and faded lines. Indecipherable. To date, no one has had the chance to give it a good shot, no one has even tried. No one wants to know. Because in the face of it all,they're all more concerned about the buildings on the streets which threaten to cut off their own oxygen supply than they are worried about how I might be dealing with being lost and alone and illegible, slowly fading from the view of everyone. Or almost everyone. There is the one who decided to see me. The one whose smile made me grin like I was sitting on a cloud, smoking a pipe which plastered it upon my face. I might be fading, but to her, I'm slowly coming into focus. And if that's not terrifying then I don't know what is. But we all have our time, don't we? Some day or another, someone finds out all the we are, pulling those secret words from the depths of our larynx and letting us plaster the walls with them.

Mission Accomplished

Oh but today I was brave enough, and I caught your eye and you didn't break the glance, and I smiled and gave you a two fingered salute, like you were a soldier marching after my heart. You put your hands behind your back, stood straighter and shot me the biggest grin you could muster, piercing right through my chest and capturing the heart you were after.

If you dared glance at me again, you'd find that I'd melted into a puddle on the floor, and all that was left of me was my inerasable grin, floating, Cheshire-like, in the air.

Saturday, November 24, 2012

Real Ghosts

One day I'll look up and meet your eye when you're staring, instead of pretending that I was looking the other way. But it's not today.

Because today, my heart still skips a beat, fluttering like bird's wings in my chest, and my eyes cannot help what they do, but look away, afraid that you might see the stilted pulse racing through me. Why I'm afraid, I cannot quite answer, except to say that I feel like a ghost in a world full of real people, drifting, brushing lightly past, but never making a real dent. Admitting the effect you have on me would be to let you pull me into reality. If you smiled back, if you took my hand, if you kissed me or touched me or loved me, then I too would be real. And being real hurts. People learn to rub you out so that you eventually fade. I could not bear the pain of becoming solid only to melt back into ghostliness.

Friday, November 23, 2012

Dead Living Weight

Sometimes it's a struggle to walk under all the lives I'm not living, hanging from my shoulders like little demons of dead weight. But, and let's talk of strange coincidences, when I see you when I least expect it, and recognition flashes in your eyes as you gaze one second longer than you should have, my back cannot help but straighten, and the demons feel like wisps of cloud. In those moments, if I looked behind me, I'm sure one would have fallen off, because that glance opened a door that was closed before. But I never look. I'm too busy staring after you.

Currencies

Maybe I'm chasing a hopeless dream, because there are days when human interaction is out of my reach. Words form but fumble out of my mouth in the wrong order. My brain wants to say one thing but my tongue produces other sounds, stupid and irrelevant, so that I sound as though I'm trying to impress you. Maybe from now one I should stop talking and leave my words hidden in smiles and waves.

Still, maybe idiocy is worth it to make you laugh. Because I think you want the conversations as much as I do. I think you are as glad for my presence as I am for yours, so that the words that are exchanged like a tentative currency of love don't matter, only that they're swapped and collected in our hearts as vague memories of each other. Because in the end, I won't remember what you said, only how you looked when you smiled.

Thursday, November 22, 2012

Explosions in the Sky


I couldn't take the shattered sky and piece it back together. The razor sharp shards cut my hands and let me bleed across the heavens. My blood dripped down, fast and wet, and exploding in your vision into bursts of a million colours. You were awed, you sighed, you laughed and you elated, but you didn't know that all beauty is a result of someone's pain.

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

How Broken Angels Walk

I feel as though I'm stuck in a whirlpool, being taken around and around and around. Up is not out. Down is not out. Neither is left nor right, nor any other way. And the scenery doesn't change, and my emotional landscape stays the same, all arid rock and scraggly trees, sand and the haze of heat, fencing me in on every side. If I accept that angels exist, and that one time, they fell from heaven, then this is what I expect they would have felt - chained to an earth which changes, but where the situation stays the same, where the wondrous beauty and power of their wings is gone, lost in broken feathers and in the stubs of shoulder blades where they used to be. Chased by silence, they're kept company by loneliness across the spinning earth, knowing that there is no future that they can return to.

I imagine they walked till their feet bled, unused to touching the harsh ground. I imagine they grew tired and collapsed under the savage sun, unused to a harsh reality. I imagine they despaired when they tried to beat their wings and found that they had none to move. I imagine they threw themselves off cliffs rather than live half the life they used to live. I imagine they regretted their fall as soon as they left the clouds.

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Unutterable


I think. You think. Everybody thinks. But no one expects what is coming. Everything I thought I had collected behind my stomach and bound up in silence is threatening to burst the dam and spill into the world. Apparently there is only so long you can swallow them down and keep them chained to your rib cage. All of a sudden they decided it was time for the unutterable to be born, and are clawing up my oesophagus, tearing holes in the cartilage of my throat, so that I choke, even as they hiss through my teeth and push against my bottom lip, coming out in a garbled stream, vile and unstoppable. I was learning to life a half life, but now they've ripped the whole world apart.

Sunday, November 18, 2012

Closer

I tried not to look at you as you looked at me. I was afraid of being too obvious, too curious, to wanting to show you something which should stay hidden for a while yet. But your eyes stared at me from beneath long lashes and I wanted to leap out of my skin and show you what I was made of. I wanted to smirk and flirt and play act behind a wall of confidence I didn't feel.


But we're not ready for that yet. Because I'm a blade of grass and you could trample me in a second.

Saturday, November 17, 2012

City of Washed Out Colours


Someday I'll make it to this city with its washed out colours but infinite personality, where the skies are almost hidden by glass and steel, and the air is heavy with the thoughts of every person who has ever walked those streets. Someday I'll walk the underground tunnels, filled with the sounds of the homeless snoring and the penniless praying for a coin in song. Someday I'll meander through the park, or dance across the tourist sights, touching, skimming, flirting, but never landing, because there is another something around the corner or behind the next tree, or through the next door. Because there's something new in a stranger's smile. Because there's something new in me - an unbroken wanderlust for a new hometown where the streets are old and dirty and crowded, but vibrant, and where every corner is familiar from a vague, out of focus memory.

Friday, November 16, 2012

My Chords, Your Song

Put your fingers into my chest, beneath my sternum, and with the gentlest caress, pull from me the chords of my heartbreak. Splay them over your operating table and press them between the pages of your favourite book. Take up brush, take up song, take up pen, tell me how you read them.

Is it real to you? Are the melodies of my heartstrings visible enough? Are they true?

Turn back to me from your workstation, your creative niche, your personal space, and explain to me that I am cold and broken for a good reason, that beneath it all, there's a solid beating heart, hot and passionate and brave. Then press your bloody fingers to mine and remind me that there are songs I still have left. Trace a path down my face with my own blood, and bring your lips to mine. Show me the proof. Don't put yourself on a pedestal, because I might knock you down in my self pity. Just stare into my eyes, hold my hand and pull my close. Talk to me about never being alone.

The Problem with Duality

Some days I'm in love with her.
Other days, I'm in love with him.

She is legs.
He is morning stubble.

She is purple streaked sunrises and moonlight shadows on sandy beaches.
He is the red and white blaze trails of car lights in the night and the constant murmur of thousands of voices.

She laughs and the sun shines.
He cries and the world stops.

She runs a finger over my lips and I sizzle with anticipation. She leans forward and we meet, soft and smooth and hungry and desperate.
He tugs gently on my shirt and I flush with heat. He smiles and pulls me tight, strong and fragile and careful and rough.

I long, I weep, I fear. I cannot have both, but I cannot have neither. I worry that they'll disappear into the twilight where none of us belong, and I'll be left to drown in the echoes of their touches.

Thursday, November 15, 2012

Waiting

Maybe you'll never know it, or maybe you might've guessed, or maybe you're hiding the same secret. Either way, I'm sitting on the other side, holding a pocketwatch in my hand, watching the seconds tick by as I wait for you. My tailbone hurts from the hard seat, my head is drooping from the lack of sleep and my eyes are raw and bloodshot. But I do not have a way of giving you up. You crawled beneath my skin, between the sinking cobwebs in my heart, and spun a new web of sullen hope, pulling my ribs in tight and painful. Now I'm not sure how I'm supposed to breathe, but I'll keep sucking in the air, because I don't know, but you might just turn around and smile at me. It's not as though my heart hasn't shattered already. Quite frankly, there's nothing left to break.

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

The Vacant Parking Lot

Sinking lethargy starting in the back of my head and creeping down my neck and behind my eyes, knocks at the cavity of my brain and asks "is there anyone to let me out?" But there isn't anymore. All that's left is a vacant space, an empty parking lot for forgotten and lost thoughts which crawl through abandoned streets and congregate there, hoping to be picked up again, like tear stained love letters or grimy orphan children. But no one ever comes. Soon the asphalt is littered with bones and dust of dreams.

Monday, November 12, 2012

Tideline Death

You'll never understand what it is to be dragging your feet through the tideline, because you're up in the mountains, pretending that you're king of the world. You breathe the clean high altitude air and I wade into the shallows. You stretch in the sun and I sink beneath the water. The sun starts to set and it glints of the calm surface of my lake, bathing me in fire. You turn your back and prepare for sleep, while I prepare for sleep of a different kind. You close your eyes, I open my lungs. By the time the sun has sunk beneath the horizon, lighting the way for another world, I'll be following its shadows. You'll continue in your mountain niche, not knowing that you're just as alone as I was, but at least I'll have had a beautiful death.

Saturday, November 10, 2012

Crumbling Ocean Wall

Who had ever known true love before they had learned that the black waters of tears would follow them all their life? Who had ever known love before they learned to float in an ocean of loneliness? Who had known love before they realised that all it took was the briefest mention of the most abstract part of the sea to remind them of the one their heart was missing?

Who, had they known this, would have still let their walls crumble?

Friday, November 9, 2012

Tidal Suffering

Sometimes it feels like riding a tsunami, feeling the wall of water bearing down on you, screaming of death. You're stuck in the middle, trying to crest, standing on a flimsy piece of wood called Hope. Your heart beats in your chest so loudly that you can barely hear the wall of water calling your name. Your hands are curled into fists and your muscles are tight and tense; you could be a flesh statue, if it weren't for that pulse beating beneath your skin in overdrive. And you know if you don't make it to the other side, to where the rage of the wave abates, you'll never see her smile again.

There's a determination which pulls at your chest, pushing your ribcage outward until it fills every cavity of your lungs. Even when they start to poke out of your skin, sharp and white and painful, you ignore them and keep going. Because in the end, you know the only thing worth suffering for is her.

Thursday, November 8, 2012

Dust and Tides

For every time I think that I can stem the flow of my feelings for you, the tides rise and overtake the thought, drowning it in their rapids. I'm helpless in sight of you, praying that you might turn and catch my eye. But you don't.

In many ways you're on the other side of the universe, a speck in an ocean of dust, sending me winds which turn my world into a nightmare ride of updrafts and long lulls. Just when I try to find my wings, you send me another gust. I'd be glad to endure if meant I'd make it to you and you'd let me hold your hand.

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Change

How much foresight must we have before we acknowledge that the future is now? How many steps do we have to take before realising that we're carving out our own path? How loudly do we have to shout before we realise that actions speak louder than words? How much longer can we seethe before we boil over and explode? How much longer do we hold back the words we're wanting to write down? How many people does it take to change the world? How about how many it takes to change a country? A state? A community? A family? But the most important question is this: how many people does it take to change a mind?

The answer is: one.

One person. You can be that person.

Monday, November 5, 2012

Paper Commitment

Pen skirting lightly over paper, making marks but never indentations. I'm too afraid to make a commitment that solid; the words I write now might be the words I so desperately want to retract later - it's happened before. Why cement things down which will only have to be torn up again? It's lots of rubble and dust and debris for nothing but starting again.

Sunday, November 4, 2012

Unforgettable

Don't think that I'm leaving you behind. I'm not. I'll carry you with me forever, that perfect scar zigzagging across my heart; white flesh against pulsing red.

New Paths

You see, this is the thing: I think you and I could get along very well. I think we could talk and laugh and flirt until the sun came up, if only we had the chance. Below the surface tension there is something which isn't quite defined, a vague magnet pulling us closer together, though each of us is trying to ignore it. But I think if I close my eyes and bite my lip, you would understand the point. I think if I were to meet your eye, smile and wave, you'd realise we were on our way to something else.

Friday, November 2, 2012

Confrontation Imagined

I wouldn't know what to say if you walked up to me right now, with your lips carved into a smile and your eyes flashing like knives. You'd steal the words out of my mouth with a kiss, rooting them out with your tongue. And then you'd make me forget who I was, tempting my essence out of my body by raking red lines along my skin.

But this is taking all the mystery out of the situation. Who could you be to me if you already knew everything that I could give upon the first meeting? What could you be to me when your name is as elusive as your gentle caress?

Thursday, November 1, 2012

Set of Instructions

Close your eyes and listen to the melody of the howling wind. Wonder why it appears on this night, of all nights. Open a window and let it in. Shiver in terror as you think of what else might be entering alongside it, riding on its back. Reach out a hand, palm out. Receive the touch of the dead as they walk with their invisible steps along the dirty ground.

Sunday, October 28, 2012

Masked Colours

I don't want to be your virgin martyr on the cross, dripping blood and tears as you dance around in loincloths, clutching spears.

One day you will look at me and you will fear because you will realise that all this time, you didn't know a thing. One day you will look and you will see a stranger.

For now, I will masquerade under a mask of visibility, pretending to bleed in colours my soul does not possess.

Saturday, October 27, 2012

Half Hearted Apology

I'm sorry. That's the beginning, and that's the end. I'm sorry. Two words which could mark different sides of the spectrum.

There's an invisible wall between us, pushing at my chest and forcing the air out of my lungs and the courage from my muscles. I can sit and wait and hope all day, but that won't mean that when the time comes, I'll shine; it means I'll probably crawl into shadows and cry myself to sleep.

This is what I get for being a child of spring with a soul of winter. I enjoy the bright colours and the tang of life, but I'm most at home once the trees have shaken off their leaves and strewn their fragmented selves across the ground, ready to wither and rot and fade into oblivion. I've not the hale of summer, nor the mirth of spring. I have the poetic soul of fall and the invisible nature of winter.

I'm sorry I cannot break free from the lines which melt around me and wrap me into the background. I'm sorry I could not come forth and speak the most simple words of simple words. I'm sorry I passed up an opportunity that I may never have again. But then, it was a tentative opportunity anyway, full of awkward potential. Perhaps it is better unrealised.

I'm sorry. I should not always be the one apologising.

Thursday, October 25, 2012

Bodily

I want to lie in a room, with the light bleeding through the blinds, white and fresh and beckoning. I want to ignore it, and run my fingers up you body, over your navel, along your collarbone, and over the curve of your lips. I want your contented sigh brushing the palm of my hand, a promise of a happy life. I want the look in your eyes and the quirk of your mouth that silently exude a love and affection like I'd never thought possible.

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Grizzly

We're hanging onto cobwebs, dripping from the sky. They might break at any second, and we'll come crashing to the ground, splattering across pavements and cars and roofs.

But as long as your blood is mixing with mine then I think I'll be happy for it to happen.

Monday, October 22, 2012

Is there any help?

What do you do when your thoughts threaten to overwhelm you?

Full Empty Spaces

I'm not sure what I'm supposed to feel, but I'm going to guess it isn't this. Whatever this is, it feels like delirium. I should be able to think of you without my chest hurting. I should be able to see you without my breath hitching, my heart thumping, my arms losing all muscle mass. I should be able to pass through a day without hoping to see you, even when the chances are impossible.

But it isn't so. What am I supposed to do? I feel like crawling into myself all the time, taking the corners of my skin and folding them in until I become nothing - an invisible spot on the horizon, something that would give you an excuse for why your eyes gloss over me.

This, I'm giving you honesty. It's too bad there's none of it in person; just words on a screen in a place you'll never see them. Ah, I suppose you don't care. But I wish you would. There is nothing in the world that I hope for more. Wildest dreams can wait. What's it going to take? I can't force you to love me. I can't force you to care. But I can hope.

There's that fucking word again: hope. It's a disease, I tell you. It stalks you in your sleep, and crawls on your back in the day, the little demon child whispering in your ear that things might turn out the way you want them to. But they're lies, trust me. So far nothing has come of that demon's promises.

Do you know what this is? This is a little girl curling up inside her head because there's nowhere else that'll have her. This is innocence reclaiming the child through terror. This is me.

And that is you. Over there, somewhere, indistinct, blurry around the edges; utterly beautiful.

I thought I was lonely before, and then I had the misfortune to find myself wanting you. You're sitting on my chest, crushing my ribs, forcing the air out of my lungs. You're killing me, you know that? Somehow I'm getting a pleasure out of it. Somehow I wouldn't want to die any other way. But that isn't to say that I wouldn't rather life. Trust me, there's nothing more that I want than you to get up of my chest and take me by my hand, pulling my ragged body to its feet, and having your breath blow some life back into me through the part of your perfect lips.

The demon child says it's possible. My brain fuzzes and my eyes transition in and out of focus and for a second I believe it's true. And then the circuits spit out their spark of interference and tell me to stop hanging onto someone who'll give nothing.

I guess nothing is what I'll get seeing as nothing is what I'm giving. Because I'm over here, and you're far away over there, and you don't know that I ache and buzz and shake and hope that our eyes will meet across the empty space filled with people. You won't know that this place has become a ghost town, because you won't know that you're the only one who shows signs of life. You won't know. You won't know. You won't know, and it's all my fault.

It's my fault my world revolves around 'what if's'  and 'ah, but no's'. It's my fault that my whole life has become a dedication to someone who's oblivious. What I wouldn't give to know whether you think of me every once in a while. No doubt I don't walk across your thoughts as often as you cross mine. This imbalance is unfair. But the adult me knows this; it's the child who cries out from the trauma of the delirium. It's the child who knew better, who loved better, who saw clearer, who gave more, asked for less, wanted for nothing but what could be made with patience and two hands. The adult has moved on to games of wordsmithery, and has found it leads to nothing but brick walls, especially when words are hoarded, kept inside and let to bleed. It's the adult who knows that walls are of your own making. It's the adult who's afraid to tear them down. And it's the child who's trapped inside.

Sunday, October 21, 2012

Beginnings and Roads

It always starts so well. Beginnings are the easiest part, despite what anyone says. It's the motivation to keep going which is the part which stops most people. How do you continue when the whole world is a trap, jaws open, razor sharp teeth clipping at your clothes and eating into your willpower?

Baby steps; they always make way for the larger steps, after all. But they're just as hard to take. I guess it's willpower. I guess it's two grams of willpower for a wealth of return. I guess it's consistency. I guess we'll see how long this road lasts.

Saturday, October 20, 2012

Some of Us

Some of us seem sturdy, but we're built on shifting sands.

Some of us seem solid, but we're hollow in the middle.

Some of us seem happy, but we're faking the smile for you.

Try distinguish us - you'll never get it right, we're too adept at pretending. You won't hear our screams in the night, you won't see our wounds in the day, You won't know that you're seeing one of us until we tell you.

Sorry to be the one to tell you that you're comfortable in your blindness.

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Tired Minds

Ah, the things which slip from tired minds. We sleepwalk past deadlines and things we do out of habit. We bump into things and grope at walls. We stumble before steadying ourselves against doorposts. We nod, but slip into dreamlands.

Monday, October 15, 2012

Nakedness

And I'm putting on my pyjamas, but I really, I wish I were taking off my skin.

Sunday, October 14, 2012

Funny Things

It's funny that what you think you feel can be turned on its head so quickly - almost as quickly as you walked in and right back out, leaving a shaky me in your wake.

It's funny how determination fades and you can't remember your original reason for resistance.

It's funny how all of a sudden, you do.

It's not funny when the guilt bridges the gaps between your feelings, reminding you of the obligations you made yourself. Somehow there was a commitment without a commitment.

But the feelings haven't gone. But new ones have arisen.

It's funny how the heart can make space for two, but the mind forces us to believe that there's only space for one. Or maybe it's not the mind at all.

Saturday, October 13, 2012

Fuel and Fire

Just a little drop of disappointment, dripping down from my brain, and collecting in between my shoulder blades. It pools, oily black, unshakeable - the gasoline from which hope burns. But all fuel must finish. One day I won't have any hope left to light the way.

Friday, October 12, 2012

Immutability

I am who I am now, who is not who I was then. And who I will be is shrouded in mystery, a blurry figure with an indescribable appearance, and who I will have been is just as big a puzzle. I am who I was, but I am not who I was.

Thursday, October 11, 2012

Blank Maps

You, me, a hand, a touch, a pull into some unknown direction. We'll walk through the mist, tethered to each other, and if we have nothing else, at least we'll have each other, fingers entwined, moving through uncharted territory.

But let us be honest; nothing between us could possibly be familiar. Each step we take will be new. We can't choose a direction, because right now, all we have to stare at are blank maps.

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

tú eres mía

It's gnawing at my lungs again, and sitting on my chest, this little black gargoyle which likes to stare me dolefully in the eye as it drains me of my will. It flashes me a sharp tooth grin before resuming its feast on my happiness.

I know I should shake it off, maybe stake it through the heart, but it's always a temporary death. Always it comes crawling back to my torso and settling with its claws dug into me. I look down but see no wounds on my flesh; isn't that the worst, knowing that something's slowly killing you, but never able to show others the signs?

So I look down again, see its greedy hunger, feel the ravenous tongue and possessive claws. The glint in its eye says "tú eres mía", and I'm struck my how that proclamation rings like a death knell.

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Life on the Road


Ah, to have tyres chew the road and spit it out behind us. To chase a horizon that never comes any closer. To stop anywhere, which is nowhere, and down a bottle of water, basking in the silence of no other cars traversing a stretch of highway.

Sure, to sleep in bed bug ridden motels where the chill creeps up your back in the middle of the night. To have to learn to urinate in the tall grass otherwise untouched by humans. To eat cheap food which enters a war with your heart. To not shower for a week until the next motel stop.

That's the reality, yet it doesn't clash badly enough with the fantasy to make it undesirable. Because in the end, when it's us and the road and the never approachable horizon, it's laughter and a heart freed from its strings. It's buoyancy and random turns on the road to towns barely on the map. It's unfamiliar wilderness and untouched beaches. It's sunburn and fatigue and loneliness. But it's life.

Monday, October 8, 2012

Stolen Portraits


Fumble and stagger through the wretched landscape which is my heart; I'm sorry that it's so deformed. Shriek and cover your eyes and I'm apologising for all the horrible things you see there. Shudder, writhe, hug yourself tight; if I had a choice, I wouldn't show you the dark secrets and twisted truths which lurk in the dusty places where no one has ever set foot. What did you expect when you picked a trip into my dreams? There are no barriers where you've gone.

I'll take the camera out and point it in your direction while you're looking the other way. There's no way you'll make it back into reality unscarred, so I should steal a picture of you while I can. And it's selfish of me, but I like it when you venture into my nightmares, because I feel less alone, and at any moment, the door knob might turn and we might walk into Wonderland. If you leave even the gentlest brush of yourself on my battered psyche, my whole life will be better, and I'll cherish the memory forever.

Snap.
Click.
Whir.

I'll photograph away until you're quite faded.

Right Words to the Wrong Person

We laugh and talk and argue until he leans in and softly asks "can I love you?"

The question pierces my heart with a pin and devoids my chest of joy.

"I'm afraid I wouldn't love you back," I reply and the words shift on the breeze, rearranging the expression on his face, until we're tinged with a sad knowledge of the things that can never be.

Sunday, October 7, 2012

Spectrum


Who knows, when up is down and left is right, which direction to choose?

When there's only a spectrum splayed against glass, is there any way of knowing which colour is you?

They say that there are plenty of other fish in the sea, but let me tell you how the world actually works: we each are one of the billions of different colours, each of us our own unique shade, seeking for our perfect complementary partner. And let me tell you, it's not easy; there are some who will pretend, some whom you will think "yes! this is them!" but who only turn out to disappoint you. There are some who look a lot like the one you're looking for, only to become the most wrong person you could find. Indeed, everyone is wrong - let's not lie about that - except that one perfect complementary shade, drifting somewhere, a subtle nuance in the spectrum.

Saturday, October 6, 2012

Muse

And even when you're here I'm missing you because you're never close enough. What's fair about this? Me trailing along in your wake while you glide ahead, unperturbed. All I have left is a throbbing space in my chest where my heart used to sit and my pen to scribble useless words. You don't know this, but you have my heart tied to your finger with a string and you drag it along behind you, bruising it with every step. And you don't know this, but my useless words fill pages and pages, dense and black and with my soul staring out from between the lines, hoping that you come across the tattered pages that flew from my hand and were strewn along your path.

You don't know this because I'm too afraid to tell you.

I'm trapped in this cycle again; I sit, I stare, I bleed. I groan, and glance, and hope. I write these entries, doused in melancholia, ready to go up in flames at the slightest spark and thrown to the wind. I run out of words, though the feeling continues on, until I feel like bashing my head against the wall.

And the worst part isn't that you don't know you do this. The worst part is I don't know how you feel. If I could tread another person's thoughts, just for a day, an hour, a minute, I'd wind my way through yours; anything to find whether you're slowly being scarred as much as I am. Why is it we must be separated from those we wish most to know the best?

This is like walking a knife edge - one slip and I could end up falling off either side, either with you, or without you, cut and bleeding. But that's the thing about the razor edge of a knife - even as you walk on the narrow path, the blade sinks into your feet until you feel you cannot go on anymore. But I'll continue for a while yet, because eventually I'll either pull even with you and claim back my heart, or fall, half dead, into your arms.

Friday, October 5, 2012

For Me

I'm doing this for me, because I need the confidence to be me. No matter what anyone says, this time I'm not giving up. I'm tired of feeling not good enough and not proud enough of myself.

Thursday, October 4, 2012

Tell Me

When do you walk out of my daydreams and into my arms? Tell me that the time is coming soon, that all this impatient waiting was worth something. Tell me that I'm not wasting my time slowly falling in love with you. Tell me you're not going to be a hand's distance away from me forever, completely untouchable. Tell me at some point you reach out too. Tell me "I'm glad you waited. I'm going to be the girl who changes your life".

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Work and Work and Work

How do you know what you want to do with your life, when you know your entire life depends on creation? What do you do when there's no such thing as originality? What happens when the world has sucked out all you have left?

Digging deeper and deeper, hollowing out all the areas beneath my translucent skin, finding fragments I didn't know existed, twisted, distorted, bleeding. And others, slivers of hope lodged in the most inconvenient of places, impossible to get out and throw away. Maybe someday this will all amount to something. At the end of the horizon, maybe I'll find the fabled pot of gold that wasn't at the bottom of the rainbow.

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Here, There; Me, You

I hope that you do not think that I don't notice you, for there is little else which grabs my attention. If I look the other way, it is not because I don't care about you, but because I fear that you'll see that I care too much. The only thing I can do is veil myself, in fear that knowledge of how I feel will cause you to punch a hole through my gut, pulling viscera from my stomach's cavity and letting free all the butterflies which have taken up residence there since I first saw you. It might sound violent, but isn't that love?

Trust that I would turn and stare you in the eyes if I were more confident about where you stood in relation to me. I want you to be close, though I fear that you are farther than I would like, and this keeps my feelings locked behind the cage of my ribs, beating a steady rhythm in my heart.You're there, I am here, and one of us must surely be in the wrong place. I cannot help but feel that you are building your confidence as you are building mine. Perhaps we'll begin, not with a whimper but with a bang.

Monday, October 1, 2012

Wells

I'm floating in an inexhaustible well of tiredness, and I do not know whether I can ever make it out again. I don't think that I want to. Taking steps hurts, pushing on hurts, waiting and hoping and dreaming all hurt.

It isn't possible, but most of the time I wish I could exist without existing, like sleeping forever - here but not. It's a mental tiredness, an emotional tiredness, and a physical exhaustion which creeps into my bones and freezes them solid.

Today, tomorrow, ten years from now, it will be the same. You can't outgrow a mantle which grows with you.

Saturday, September 29, 2012

Skinny Love

My dear, I could try speak to you in my own words, but I find others more eloquent. And so I think I've found our anthem.

Please love, don't let me waste away on this addictive skinny love. Either cut me loose or come and take what I've already given to you.

Gravitational

What are we heading towards? You, me, spinning in separate worlds, designing our own universes, stopped by the limits of ourselves. Stopped by the limits of each other. What would you say if I told you I wanted you at the centre of mine?

You're still a blurry image to me, slowly coming into focus, bit by tiny bit. Every small discovery is a fountain of delight, every encounter as terrifying as the one before, but more enlightening. If I was a photographer, that's how I would take photos of you: focusing on the details of your body, so close it would be impossible to distinguish the rest of you; so close that every body who saw them would think themselves your lover and ache for you, though they know not who you are. I'll make them see you the way I see you. I'll make them want you the way I want you.

And you, oh, it's a struggle with you. How do I quell the addiction that I've formed with you? How does someone break a habit? For now I'm content with this slow gravitational pull towards one another; the problem is that I'm counting on a collision. What if we're two ships who just pass each other in the night, completely unaware of the other? I might not be able to put myself back together after I've crunched against the shore. What am I supposed to do if there's no more you in sight?

You're still standing behind a veil, you're still impossible to see. I have an outline, a general notion, but little else. What's going on behind those beautiful eyes? What thoughts do your neurons relay? What sparks desire, what stokes lust? Better yet, what entices love? Is there an edge that you're standing on, looking over the precipice down below? Do you feel the urge to step over it, into the empty space? And is it me you're hoping to see at the bottom? Are you, too, hoping that gravity will cause us to collide?

Friday, September 28, 2012

Lightning and Thunder

It's lightning and thundering and I am thinking of you. I wish you were here and I could light some candles and read to you in the dim firelight. We'd leave the window a little open to smell the earth dampening from the post summer day rain, sighing in relief as it cools.

It's thundering and lightning and I am here without you, thinking of all the empty spaces you leave.

Saturday, September 22, 2012

Yours, Mine, Ours

I would like to do something for you - I would like to make you proud. There's nothing more that I could possibly want than the thing which I could present to you and say "this is yours. I did it for you".

Sunday, September 16, 2012

Trinity

A whisper, a tear, a heated accusation.

A yell, a pause, a laugh.

A minute, a silence, a memory.

A scent, a touch, an obligation.

A moment, an action, a history.

Bellows

You every so often fan the flames in my heart, till they flare and sear my lungs. And every time, they die back down, hoping that they'll get the chance to rise again.

Friday, September 14, 2012

Night Dancers

Let's have us a dance at midnight beneath a shimmering sky; you and I will twirl and your dress will billow out behind you. We'll stand at the top of a rich baroque building, monarchs of the sky, watching over those who do not possess what we have. We'll have the company of the statues which line the roof, and the moon, who smiles at us, her children.

You in a black dress, with a blood red flower in your hair, me in a three piece suit and a scarlet tie to match. We'll be a pair, don't you think? Rake your nails along my arms and I'll bruise your lips with mine. Recite murmured poetry in my ears and I'll growl you lascivious suggestions. Let your hand creep across my bare stomach and I'll start nibbling your neck. I'll pull you into me and push you against the balustrade till your dark hair fans over the precipice, staring into the beckoning space below. We'll become vertiginous, but not because of our height above the ground; I promise we'll be riding a different high.

No one will look up and we'll have only the stars to reign over us, winking as they watch our encounter twist and turn and writhe in pleasure. We'll choreograph as we please, changing the steps every time. If we wake up in the morning, purple where fingers grasped, then we know we'll have passed an excellent night.

Monday, September 10, 2012

Would You?

If I pretended I was a drummer, would you drum along beside me? If I pretended I was a wave, would you crest with me? If I pretended I was a flower, would you try to kiss the sun as I do?

Could we create our own beat and crash with our own sound, and touch a warmth that belongs only to us?

If I wanted to be a lover, would you let me be yours? Could I trace a forefinger along the length of your arm, down the centre of your chest, from your larynx to your navel? Would you shiver?

If I wanted a best friend, would you volunteer? Would you laugh at nonsensical statements and jokes that hardly make sense? Could I talk to you at midnight and be sure that you wouldn't mind replying and comforting me in my loneliness?

Would you laugh with me? Cry with me? Make fun of me when I deserve it? Would you talk about books and films and music with me? Would you invite me along when you go places? Would you smile when you thought about me when you were away? Would you miss me?

Would you say yes?

Saturday, September 8, 2012

Bodily Illusions

It's not about the moment, it's about what comes after. It's not about the blood, it's about the scar. It's not about the pain, it's about the feeling of healing. It's an illusion.

Sunday, September 2, 2012

Skeleton Walking

Sometimes it would be nice to just rip the skin off my bones and walk around, a bare skeleton. Whatever festers inside can slink out, a mass of black tar against concrete. There'll be no more burning skin where a blade has scratched the flesh. There'll be no more fingernails to dig into layers and layers of cells until it reaches bleeding muscle. I'll have a life that I didn't have to dream of walking out of.

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Persistence

It takes the tiniest of steps to get there. It takes agonising hours and meticulous detail and the recognition that some of it is rubbish.

Sometimes we have to start again.

Sometimes we need to rework what we have already done.

Always we need to pursue it, lest it jump out of our grip and disappear into a rabbit hole down which we cannot follow.

Monday, August 27, 2012

Devotion to Passion

Sometimes to succeed we have to take the tag and attach it to ourselves. We are what we name ourselves. If I scoop out my heart and plant it in the soil of my passion, I could say that it is my passion that keeps me alive; as it should be. But it cannot continue to beat unless I tend it, therefore we must spend time doing the things we love, accepting the name of our passion and turning it into an act of love and devotion.

Thursday, August 23, 2012

On Writing

From somewhere in eternity came some easy words. I grabbed hold of them and rearranged them on a page. But just as I reached to grasp some more, they disappeared, melting into ether. I cannot leave the rest of my sentence unfinished, the rest of my story untold, but I fear that this is what I will do.

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Edges

On the edges of memory are quaint little corners of the world where the old and the beautiful collide with quiet gentleness. The lanes are filled with the aromas of freshly brewed coffee and baking bread. Strains of half forgotten songs in foreign languages float down the narrow streets, flirting with the breeze. Poets scribble on yellowing pages as they sit on rickety chairs, pen in one hand, mug in the other. Artists set up gallery and studio on the smooth cobblestones, capturing on unmarred canvas the fleeting light and beauty that only the dreamers can see.

If I could steal just one moment with you, I would press my lips to yours and remind you with a caress of these places. And I would hope that you would see that we belong there, and together we'd embark on a plane there to dance on the antique streets by the incandescent light of ancient lamp posts.

Sunday, August 19, 2012

All That I Am

I feel as though I'm lying on a bed of words and they're bleeding in to me. They whirl around beneath my skin, an unrelenting current, more real than the blood in my veins. They rub against the inside of my skin, they seep deep into my muscles, my tissue, my bones, and they itch against the tips of my fingers, willing me to let them out. A vortex in my mind urges action, to let the words escape in perfect, precise order, to capture them forever upon a page.

I cannot say that I am made of flesh and blood; I'm created of blotted ink and paper scrunched into balls. I am unheard poetry. I am untold stories. I am unsent letters. I am wasted potential.

Only You

I'm not asking to be able to read minds, but I'd really like to know what goes on in your thoughts. What secrets are your eyes hiding? What thoughts make your stomach churn and your heart flutter?

Once I'd hoped to read every book in the world, letting the words flit through my mind before shelving them in a library, vast and vanilla scented. Now I'd be happy if you were the only book I could ever read again.

I don't want to fall in love with every second person I see on the street, even if they're gorgeous, or adorable. I don't want my heart to be a temporary house for someone to rest in for a little while before they pack their bags and find a better place. If I'm going to let someone in, it's going to be you, and I'd hope that you will treat it like your own.

Somewhere I stopped wanting everything that mattered to me, because I found you were the only one that really did matter.

Thursday, August 16, 2012

Half Starved

Turns out secluded life is dull after all. It turns out that the big bad world is only as big as you make it, and you can make yours very small. It turns out that after a while you start to yearn for more; at some point you want a bit of what others have, until you realise that their dose isn't enough for you either. At some point the craving is going to turn deadly and I'll spend the rest of my life starving.

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Warzone

Shuffling feet, bent back - it's hard to get through this day. Heavy limbs, burning eyes - this isn't an unfamiliar tiredness. What if it is back? What if that sliver of damnation that I have wedged between my shoulder blades is inflamed again? What if it's wriggled further inside and is poisoning my blood with black? I'm afraid to find out whether it's true; it feels like it might be. The future's hard to look forward to when the present seems like an immovable weight crushing your chest. There isn't anything to be worried about, but anxiety eats at my stomach, worse than the most potent acid; I'm half afraid it'll eat right through me and my innards will fall out of my sides, a red glob of mess, stinking and putrid from the rot that's infested them. I can't let this get me. It's been a long war, but I haven't lost any battles yet. I can't afford to; one lost battle and I'll never face another again.

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Fallback

I let you rent a fissure in my mind, and now you leak through whenever my thoughts perchance upon an idle vacancy. You dance merrily across my glassy eyes, tapping out the tune to my heartbreak. With a whistle and a grin, you hop out of my daydreams, pulling me into a darker reality. For one sweet moment I lived. For one sweet moment I hoped. For several long moments I imagined and fantasised and let you have your way. And then the door shut, and I looked to see the windows bared and walls padded with white; you've institutionalised me. I'd bet a pretty penny that I've made no impression on you. But I wouldn't be willing to gamble away any future sightings and two seconds of conversation. Just in case.

Monday, August 13, 2012

Cloud of Bliss

All I need is a moment. A moment of courage would be brilliant, a moment of nothing but utter bravery to face my fears. But that's not the thing moments are good for. Even if I have just a moment of glimpsing you, a moment of saying hello, then all is well. It might not be the moment that I'm building up to, but it's a moment I've been waiting for nonetheless.

I'm happy to see you. I wonder if you feel the same. I wonder if you catch a glimpse and double back to make sure. I wonder if you hope with pounding heart, or if your breath catches for a fraction of a second. Even if it doesn't, and I'm just another not-quite-a-stranger stranger to you, it doesn't change the fact that you brighten my day like someone swiped the curtain away from the window and let in a stream of light. It doesn't change the fact that I live on a cloud of bliss for a little while after I see you. You're my personal brand of drug, and there isn't a high better than the one that seeing you gives. Maybe if I'm really lucky, one day you'll confess that you feel the same.

Saturday, August 11, 2012

A Serve of Masochism

What a terrible realisation, to recognise the masochism in myself. All this time I must have been just another stupid person who puts themselves in situations with a flicker of hope in their hearts, knowing that the only thing to come of it would be a searing pain and a renewal of gut-aching sorrow. I should have known. This isn't the first time, after all. This is why I keep my distance. This is why I never really put myself out there; I would rather deal with the potentials, the possibilities, the fantasies, the projections, than the reality that's staring me in the face anyway. The truth is that I'm never going to have you, am I, my dear? But that won't stop me from turning my head every now and again, just to catch a glimpse, even if it means that I might see a heartstopping smile that hits me like a knife tracing its point along my insides.

Friday, August 10, 2012

Underwater

Pen in hand, its tip scratching across the surface of an off white sheet of paper. This is a dream being realised. Words flow. Thoughts crunch and grind to a halt, allowing the imagination to take full control. The hand directs the mind, the mind directs the hand, a mutual cycle, a symbiosis, making real a world unrealised. Some of us can only stop drowning when we let go and let ourselves get swept by the current.

Relief Bequeathed

Today no icy hand crept up back, nor left bloody scratched against my skin. Today I had no need to look over my shoulder. Today I  found that an otherwise inconsequential moment in a day could be momentous. But I also found that momentous as it was, all I wanted was for it to be inconsequential - what made it momentous was its sameness to most other moments in a day, when it could easily have stood out. Today I was fraught not with nerves, no jitters in my stomach, no sweat pooling in places on my body, no pounding heart in my ears; a simple statement was made, realised, accepted. This is the wish I have for the rest of humanity.

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

City Rain

The world is not so bad a place as it sometimes seems. The rain soaked streets are blurry with the light of an alternate universe; it offers us an insight into another reality that most of us steadily ignore. My head whirs with tumbling thoughts, some that appear from nothing, flash brilliantly in my mind, then fade away into nothing, leaving but the after image of their presence burned into the retina of my mind's eye. Why can I not dip my pen into its inkwell and have it ready to capture those thoughts? They escape every time. The words to recreate beauty teeter on the edge of my mind, ready to spill across the page, but as soon as I raise my hand, they are fled. Beauty perhaps, is meant to be viewed, caressed, experienced, but never captured - like the luminescence of city streets in the rain.

Saturday, August 4, 2012

Your Hell and My Hell Are Two Different Things

Give me a better reason. But no, you won't. You cannot, because you haven't the slightest idea about me, or how I think, how I feel, what I want. Ideals differ from person to person, we understand that, but we are so far apart it is hard to make sense of the fact that we even exist in the same universe.

I don't know what you expect from me. Is it respect? Because you might as well throw that idea out the window, set it on fire and sacrifice it to Satan. It is the kind of nonsensical thing that you might do just because we don't see eye to eye about things that concern me but not you. To have my respect, you need to earn it, and you are as far from that as you could possibly get.
Or is it obedience that you want? Well I'm not your fucking play thing, and I'm not your property. I do believe you live in the wrong century - maybe if you lived three hundred years ago, you could have this stupid control over everybody that you crave. Or maybe you need to sit down and think hard and re-evaluate what makes you feel like a man.

But you haven't even scratched the surface of me. What I am open about hides the secret I keep buried, locked behind impenetrable doors when I am around you. Oh, it gets aired, for it's not so hidden around those I trust, but you don't fall under that category. I don't care what you think, or what you feel, except that those feelings will probably swing around and slap me in the face with a vengeance. If I thought I could get away with telling and you and the worst happening was you never speaking to me again, I would do it, but I fear that worse will occur. For now, I keep myself to myself, and you get to prance around and think you're high and mighty, but one day I'll leave and you'll realise that you knew nothing at all about me. I hope it makes you feel like a failure, because that's the only thing that you have been in this life of yours.

And don't worry, if you die, I promise I'll leave you in the gutter to rot. It's petty, but it's the worst that I can do, considering there isn't a hell for you to spend the rest of eternity inside.

Friday, August 3, 2012

Stale Tragedy

You left a you-shaped hole in the universe when you left and I was content to leave it be. It hid in the shadows, a blankness that used to be you, but slowly, without my permission, someone comes along and tries to colour you back in. I'm done with that, I'm done with you, please go back to whence you came, before we had the misfortune to meet and let our tragedy play out. I'm tired of having to explain that story line to people. It's gotten stale.

Thursday, August 2, 2012

Transformation Transmutation

How do we become ourselves? This is the ever baffling thing.

Am I myself because of how I look? Am I myself because of the itchy jumpers and tight pants I wear? Am I me because I think about things the way that I do, like, yet unlike, hundreds of others?

Am I made of the other small things, the moments that flit by like light upon a fragment of water? Am I myself because of the way my breath catches when I see you standing idly in the mornings? Or because my stomach churns and flutters when our eyes accidentally meet, strangers on either side of an impregnable wall, yet more familiar than we dare admit?

You'll walk one way, I'll walk another, and maybe someday our hands will touch, our eyes will not scamper away from each other when they meet, and we'll decide, simultaneously in our hearts and heads that this is where we ought to be.

We'll look back on the dark, and find that we did not become ourselves, we simply shed more light on who we already were.

Saturday, July 28, 2012

In Preparation

You see, I have a bag full of things that I hardly ever used, tucked away in all the pockets, waiting, hushed and ever ready. My shoulder aches. My fingers itch. My mind reels. My soul longs and lusts and pulls at my innards, urging me on, into some great unknown. But I tried. I took one step, then two. I could not go on. For, you see, I found I cannot leave until I have you beside me. I am the basket case, lugging along their whole life in the hopes that the moment of leaving will arrive.

Sunday, July 15, 2012

My dear, a letter

To you,

This is a note, a letter of sorts, undelivered, of the kind that brews beneath the surface of your skin, pulling and scratching until it finds a way out. These words spill forth, wanton, brash, untempered, and I could not stop them even if I had the temerity to try; I would be beaten raw, bleeding from the inside. Already my breath comes out ragged, and I could swear my heart is mangled. Yet through this all, a small pulse continues, a tiny nugget of energy, a hope that strings me forward, moving me like I am at the hands of a puppeteer. But this is irrelevant. This is to you.

You who stand so close, yet so inconceivably far away, as out of reach as Tantalus' grapes, as unreadable as the sea. How did you manage to bewitch me with nothing more than the fact of your existence? Never have I been under the thumb of such torturous feelings as I am now, when my thoughts, when my body, when my heart demand you. If I stood close enough to reach out a finger and brush even the tip of it against your skin, I could not do it. If I were within your earshot, my voice would crack and crumble under the weight of your presence. My breath rasps, as though I were an emphysemic old man, and my back hunches like the trunk of an ancient tree, my eyes darting off you as quick as yours find mine, as though I am searching for something lost. In truth, I am, for have I not lost my heart to you? It elicits no surprise then, to find that they are so often drawn towards the place within which I have lost an essential part of myself. You stole from me and I blindly let you.

I would not change that for the world.

I'm forced to wonder whether you have any notion of the fact that I yearn after you like a starved orphan yearns after warmth after years of bone aching cold. Sometimes I think yes, and that you too have let your heart wander to where I might happenchance upon it. I see this, I feel it, when your eyes burn into me, bearing the knowledge that soon enough you'll be forced to retire once more behind glass walls, where the distance between us is even greater. You try to make up the lost time by the intensity of your gaze, and my heart leaps, my hands shake and my resolve melts into oblivion. Why, I believe I am all yours, more so that you do not know it, and I am convinced that I could not shake the feeling even if I were to rub my skin raw and draw out all my old blood and replace it with new. You are ingrained into some shadow part of me, my soul, a hidden corner of my consciousness which cannot be touched. If I should die tomorrow, or in a hundred years, I die with you there.

I need you. Any hope I have for salvation lies in your hands, for I have tried, but found that I myself am no match for you. But it seems glass walls are not as transparent as they seem, and I know you not at all, nor whether this is conjecture, whether this is imagination, or whether it is hallucination. But I would like to find my way to my grave, years hence, with your name still in my heart, your voice in my ear and the taste of you upon my lips.

Saturday, July 14, 2012

Nymph

Oh little nymph who flits and flirts in and out of sight, a wraith, a sprite, a million things I could not name or tame, will you not bequeath your little wildling heart to me? Coax with soft spoken words the latent life which lies hid beneath the topmost barren soil in my soul; a beautiful garden is wont to grow, should it be entrusted to your hands. Your voice sounds like the murmuring of a brook over a stony bed, soft, nurturing, sparking to life an oft leashed happiness, and with a few words, you could paint me with a smile that no one else could hope to endeavour to reproduce. Without you, I may seem that I am already smiling, but my hooded self stands with head bowed, cowed by the solitary emptiness which surrounds me. Should our eyes meet across the space between the weeping willow leaves as they billow in the breeze, then I perhaps will cease to fear our distance.

Wonderful water nymph, tree nymph, fire nymph, Goddess of Untouchable Things, we too shall meet Death along his well worn path, cloaked and shadowed in the billions of souls he has claimed, but if we dance along the way and take part in merriment, in joy of each other, could we not say that a sleep is needed?

We must begin in, for who but us could take the first steps in replenishing our thirsty, withered selves? One glance is all that is needed to spark a life long encounter, and we have had more than one. Though they have been brief and short lived, no more than a deliberate meeting of the eyes and an embarrassed flickering away, our bodies unable to withstand the conditioning of urban solitude, they showed that there is more than nothing, though something less than a solidity between us, and it is ready to melt away at the barest hint of uncertainty. We - I - cannot let it, for without you, my dearest nymph, I crumble again into dust and ashes, my solidity of self evaporated in the wake of your presence.

Thursday, July 12, 2012

Uncleanliness

Sometimes I cannot bear to wash away the dirt at the end of the day. I stare into nothing, soil streaking my face, blackness under my nails. The energy to move has long since left me. And so have you.

I cannot clean away the dirt when it reminds me so of you. If it the last remnant of us that I can keep, then I shall never stir to remove it. Slowly I become a husk of a person, a shell without a soul, with a heart that beats but once a day and each time for you.

Monday, July 9, 2012

Invisible Places

There's a world somewhere, one that is not the one I keep forcing you into, which is perfect for you. You fit it and it fits you, matching pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. But I, looking on the outside at you both, are finding it hard to consolidate you; wherever you look, I see someplace else, like an ill-fitting cloak draped around you, knowing that it is wrong, but unable to find the right piece of clothing to otherwise clad you in. How do I find the right place? How do I alter my perspective to see you in the world you claim to live in? I'm tired of seeing you as I do, all wrong and mismatched for this life.

Sunday, July 8, 2012

Judgement Day

This is too easy. Someday, and I feel this in my bones, someday there will be retribution; someday we shall all be called into the pit to explain every little death that we caused. Because every little death is in fact a big death - every cell, every spider, every torturous comment, they will all asked to be accounted for. Who shall survive the judgement? I don't think I shall.

Saturday, July 7, 2012

Crumbling Houses

Vague memories, blurry photographs, a hand that reaches out but cannot touch; they all remind me of you. There's a sliver of you, buried where the sunlight cannot burn it away, stabbing my heart with every breath I take, pleasant, sweet, unbearable pain. To dislodge it would be to lie on the surgery table of hours, my insides cut open and revealed to you, gurgling blood, red, blue, pink - black where I am slowly rotting away. You would not see what it is that ails me so, for you are blind to what you can do, unaware that someone could have let their life grow dependent on you. I'm a house on a bank of sand; either the tide will take me out to sea, or the sand will suck me under. As long as I'm alive, as long as you fall on the other side of that uncrossable line, you shall be in my heart, a splinter, a damnation, a blessing - the most beautiful thing I've ever beheld, and the most painful I've ever tried to hold. We're crumbling houses, but I could be content if I crumbled beside you.

Thursday, July 5, 2012

Laws of Physics

Hurtling through space at impossible speeds, the gulf between the stars widens. Everything is getting torn apart. Down here, we cling to each other, trying to be closer. But don't you know it's in the nature of the universe to be forever wrenched apart? We tried, but even we can't defy the laws of physics.

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Portrait of Me

Pen to paper, poised, waiting, a transmission device. The clock ticks by, the paper remains blank.

This is it, if a portrait of myself were to be painted, that is what I would look like, suspended in a state of thinking, but never doing. My synapses seem to have stopped firing, nerve ends silent, no longer singing with the sound of electricity, thoughts. Everything is ready, except for the mind, which cannot put forth one idea to translate onto paper. A life without a magnum opus, is that a life at all?

But I want to sit there, steady, ready in case something comes cascading down my mind, an avalanche snowballing all my other thoughts, wrapping them up in this one, the one which will put me aside in history, among the greats. Will it arrive? I cannot say. Inspiration has to find you working, but what if the first stroke of the pen is the most impossible?

Complexity; humans are complex, and then there is I, who cannot summon a thought to pen. They flee like a flock of birds disturbed by a laughing child. Perhaps if I sit still long enough, the elements will petrify me, and I shall become a sculpture, entrapped forever, a different great work - not mine but nature's; a joke.

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

The Wrongness of Reality

Something sits on my chest, heavy, suffocating. Have you ever stopped and thought about something you'd always taken for granted? Did you ever realise how much of things you invented in your own head? That is what this is - it's a realisation, and it's slowly killing me. That's what I get for making things up, without a shred of proof that they exist as I imagined. The mind creates perfect people - why stop it? Except for the fact that reality will set in and shatter everything you thought, nothing can go wrong.

Sunday, June 24, 2012

Draining

No. No one gave you the fucking right. No one bequeathed upon you the monarchy, the dictatorship; no one gave you permission to be a tyrant. You do not have a say in how people run their lives. Look the other way, it's the only thing you're good at. Go on, walk away, I beg you. But you won't, will you? Because you think you have the right to stay and demand things of me, you think you have the right to tell me how to live my life; you think you have the right to make choices and assumptions about me when you don' t know the first fucking thing. Don't pretend it's love; don't masquerade it as something it's not, because it's a lie that doesn't sit too well with the truth. You're power hungry; one day I'm going to let you starve.

Saturday, June 23, 2012

A Lamentation of Parting

I tremble with my lamentation, recognising that I live is a state of perpetual yearning, unrequited, unknown. What chance do I have? I shall merely sit by the wayside and watch yet another one slip from my grasp. She'll leave an invisible scar on my heart, and a piece of her will never leave, even as she follows the road to another destination. Nostalgia already knocks on my door, asking to be let in, but I'll have none of it while I still see her, even if I am scrambling for scraps.

Friday, June 22, 2012

Unshakeable Lies

"Where are you right now?" she breathed against my ear.

I found I could not explain that I walked a thousand miles away, along an abandoned road to nowhere, chasing dreams and visions from my mind, which danced before me, tantalising and alluring. I could not say that I was lost in a place untouchable, for that place did not really exist. I dared not shatter a moment deserving of more attention than I was giving it. So I leaned close and looked into her eyes. I took her hand and I whispered "right here".

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

The Subordinate Hours

Sleep, dreamer, sleep. Fall away into another world, a realm of infinite possibility. Keep yourself there as long as you can; don't face the waking world with regret. Stay strong, your day will come when you shall lie amongst the dew covered grass, staring up at the cobwebbed sky, clasping hands with your lover, the one who walks in your dreams, open, unabashed, lovely. That time is creeping, slowly, ever so slowly, but even the slowest travellers must arrive sooner or later. Until then, dreamer, sleep.

Monday, June 18, 2012

Places

Sometimes I feel as though I belong in another place. There is an irritation, a persistent tide in my heart, gently tugging me away to distant shores. They lie out of sight, over a horizon I cannot touch, but they claim my heart, my soul, my dreams; they are a waking nightmare, a too-good fantasy. If I can wake up tomorrow a different person, then why is it I cannot wake up in that homely place?

Saturday, June 16, 2012

Invited Words

 Come, tell me that you want to watch, that you want to fall, that you want to fly. Tell me that you want to lie above the world and stare down at a city full of artificial stars, while the real ones blink on from above. Tell me that you wish you could whisper sweet words into a lover's ear. Tell me that you wish she were me.

Tell me, and I'll endeavour to do anything to please you.

Friday, June 15, 2012

Debt

Quit your sulking. The world doesn't owe you anything. We're all just bees, buzzing out and about, in and around the things which will profit us, only so we can bring it all back and give it to the Queen that is Capitalism. You don't own a thing; everything owns you. Love is just a side project to feed your soul - unimportant in the big picture of sustainability. It breaks your heart, and maybe you can't handle it, so you throw yourself off a bridge, but it doesn't make a difference; some other bee will take your place, the hive will continue to thrive, and you'll be just another memory in a graveyard of sodden thoughts. So keep it together if you want to make a difference. Remember, the world doesn't owe you a fucking thing.

Thursday, June 14, 2012

Dying

Take one stumbling step, and then another. Shuffle forward, inch by trembling inch, facing down the things which want to break you. Isn't that what we're supposed to do?

But no, we sit along the sidelines, watching people play a game we long to get chosen for, but never understanding the rules. So we sit. We watch. We weep.

We're just living to die.

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Unsanctioned

I don't deserve those things of beauty; light filtering through the trees, a brush of fingertips across a bare stomach, murmurs of a sleepy afternoon. No, those things melt out of my grasp, fleeing like roaches from the light.

Alone, I've become unstuck, wading through a life without a hint of buoyancy. All I'll get is grit under my fingernails, and bruises across my face for all the work I've done. All I'll keep are harsh words and hate, cancer cells of black bitterness taking me over from the inside. Goodness. What is goodness? Good things don't happen to crazy people. No one is going to care about the dregs of life, those people who are so abandoned by society that they abandon themselves. We'll all careen through the streets like ghosts until the whole city is a ghost town.

Wonderland

Things. They all collide and writhe and merge into one teeming mess of life. Not one thing happens, but millions, together, simultaneously, shaking the earth with their forces, rocking, quaking, shattering, until there is nothing but billions of pieces of ourselves scattered across the ground, falling away into the mass, to collide and merge and be reborn again. A death, a life, one with a foot on either side, trying to decide which to be.

Blood, the nature of life, spilled in birth, stilled in death, brought to the surface, red, hot, steaming even though it rises from a hollow heart. A staggering hope, a wistful illusion, a fleeting whisper on the breeze of a possibility, which flits down the street and darts out of sight when you try to get too close; a shadow from a flickering candle. Untouchable. Unreachable. Unforgettable. An education.

And all the pieces of ourselves, the things which let us be, wriggle and writhe, struggle and slither, determined, damned, broken, dragging themselves across a burning carpet of razor sharp memories. And bruised, bleeding, weary, they launch themselves into one another, colliding with another earth shattering crunch; the heavens vibrate, hell shudders, the earth sighs. A birth, a death, a life lived staring both in the face, accepting that that is how it must be. A relief.

Monday, June 11, 2012

Synecdoche

We can't help but get lost in the things we feel, brought on by some external stimulus, getting into our bloodstream, raking its claws against our heart, leaving us to bleed out from the inside. We start to live for a moment, an action, a scripted line, to satisfy the interest, poisonous and fetid, which festered within our chests when we were looking the other way. When it comes, our heart breaks, the best kind of pain, tearing us to pieces, but only the pieces of us on the surface, floating to easily be reassembled only to be broken again; we're like the adolescents, addicted to dragging a blade across their skin, because it heals to be cut again, addicted to the feeling, the synecdoche of one pain standing in for another. We're all just minds and bodies, caught in a tide of mutual suffering, brought together by the release of it with our addiction; I, no less than you, and you, not less than them. We're all hiding. We're all running. We're all terrified to face an obvious truth.

Friday, June 8, 2012

Stockholm Syndrome

It's a very tiny flutter, starting somewhere in your navel, the softest brush of wings. Then higher, an insistent flapping on the left side of your chest, in that area you'd always thought was hollow. This, my friend, is what they call "Hope" and you too shall be caught in its web of invisible but unbreakable filaments, till death do you part. But in a severe case of Stockholm Syndrome, you'll fall in love with it, forgive it, pray for it to never leave you. And one day, maybe one day, it will take you by the hand and guide you to where you ought to be. Maybe. And that is what we call hoping.

Saturday, May 26, 2012

Reality Check

Small triumphs, that's all we really live for, isn't it?

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Goodbye

And I felt like I lost something today. If I close my eyes and listen closely, I hear the whisper of an echo, of something that used to be so close, but will never be so close again. My body draws in breath like the ocean pulling itself in before a tidal wave; but before it comes crashing down on the shore, my breath comes out as a sigh, and I know I'm slightly further away than I was before.

I'm begged to bid goodbye, but I cannot force myself to wave. I weep. I laugh. I weep more. My soul feels like it shrivels in defense, but the truth is that it's enlivened, enhanced by all that it gleaned from a long spell of glee, punctuated by disappointment, though entirely stitched together by love. I mustn't worry, I know; this pain is only temporary. But I cannot help but find that it's a more permanent parting this time.

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Between Sleep and Awake

Have you ever thought about sleep? Not the act of sleeping itself, when you're so far gone that not even the apocalypse can wake you, but the moment of falling asleep. Does it scare you that you can't remember it? It terrifies me.

Every night it's the same old thing, a cold bed waiting to be warmed by you, two blankets and a sheet, a fluffed up pillow, and the darkness which settles over you as securely as if it were molded to fit your body. Perhaps for a little while you lay there in the dark, conjuring images of a life you're sure to never live, but slowly, without the slightest acknowledgment in your mind of it, you start to fall asleep. Where, between consciously making up fantasies in your head and dreaming, does your mind stop letting you be aware of the world? One moment you're in a city far away, the next you're as unconscious as the dead.

To willingly be unaware of our surroundings, that is what sleep is. To really not know the beginning sleep and the end of waking, that is the most terrifying feeling of all. That place between sleep and awake, it's the place that will haunt you when you're lying in your bed, thinking about the way you'll soon be in oblivion, without quite knowing how you got there.

Monday, May 21, 2012

Museless

It's a dangerous thing when your muse lets you go. Thoughts slowly grind to a stop, inspiration flutters out the window, without so much as bidding you farewell. Suddenly you're banging your head against the wall because there's a vital part of yourself gone, lost to some place you could not even hope to touch. Emptiness fills your chest to the point of nothing being able to fill it again, nothing but that which is lost. You can't make it come back. All you can do is sit and hope it decides to show up again, bags in hand, with a big smile across its face.

Thursday, May 17, 2012

Ice

Memories are built on ice. They slip and slide and puddle, the longer you neglect to revisit them, and soon the details have gone, chaffed away by time; all that's left is a vague idea, an insistence upon filling an otherwise blank space in the timeline of your life. And once it's gone, it's gone, you cannot build it back up again. Memories have no right to leech into the present, no way of building a semblance to something that's happened unless you let them.

But versions of events differ; colours are not always the same, and textures come back as different feelings under fingertips. It's all in the details, and you cannot re-carve them into the present with the precision they had in a past now gone. We are not magnificent, we are not our memories, we are not to reconstruct what already existed, but to forge ahead new paths. What other way is there to measure the depth of ourselves?

Monday, May 14, 2012

The Wrong Kind of Unafraid

I do not fear the things I should. The things that scare me are quiet, a heaviness in the back of my throat with tendrils that curl around my tongue and stop me speaking, and creep down into my chest and squeeze my heart until it's hard to breathe. They could kill me; not a physical death, but an emotional one, wiping away hope.

I cannot be a wild thing, for I cannot love without abandon. I could stand on train tracks and watch the train speed towards me, but what use is that if I cannot give my love as easily as I could give my life? You see, this is why I need you. I need someone to teach me how to be unafraid.

Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Soul Tar

Once, I sat in the darkness, contemplating the corners of my soul, reaching tentative fingers and dipping them into the black tar found there, cementing the walls of me together. I find now that the tar had been cleaned off my fingers, and the feel of it has fled from my mind, to hide in some other distance place. But the tar, neglected in its loneliness, twisted itself into tendrils, and climbing up the walls of my body, attached itself to the bottom of my skin, pushing ever upwards to grasp the taste of air. Now my fingers itch, and they grapple with the pen, struggling across the surface of a sheet of paper, turning a blankness into a representation of the tar's whisperings. And when it is done, it whispers further, and the words get written down across the bottom of the illustration, a tribute to the cynical; an expression of the tar.

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

This. Always This

My heart hurts. The time, it's ticking by, forging a path, despite my hands which grasp to hold it. My heart hurts. It's all going. The light of the future isn't as bright as the burning of the past. Nostalgia for the present I'm not living beats at my chest. By the time the day closes on us, and the world returns to their respective nests, I'm still going to be here, alone.

Pick holes in me and my love will all fall out. But that's ok because nobody wants it anyway. They all glance, look away, keep walking. I'll sit here until someone wants to sit by my side. If I fall off the seat and I can't get back up, I hope someone will pick me up and carry me home.

I need to know my faith in humanity isn't unfounded. Someone be the person I want them to be.