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.