Capture the Flag

Oh, you clever girl. In the game of subtlety, you're winning.

Roads That Lead

I'm  sorry if you ever felt that I left you on the side of the road, howling at the tail lights of my car as they made white streaks into the distance. But the truth is that it would have been you leaving me sooner or later. And then what would I have done? It is the manner of my existence that I cannot bear the thought of being left alone by you.

In a list of things that would kill me, that would grace the top spot. So excuse me if I seem distant when we talk, because I'm really dreaming about a world where you and I coexist as entities free of the fates of one another. But I'm also dreaming of a world where I wake up next to you and not have to wonder if we'll share the same bed again.

In the grand scheme of things, I'm just a deer caught in your headlights. And you're hurtling right at me.

The Only Things We Remember

The months went by and I didn't spare a thought for you. I've no doubt you did the same. But walking through a familiar place, seeing a familiar face, is as unexpected as awaking in Wonderland. The brain didn't register that you would still be around, that people didn't cease existing once they'd left a room.

So you caught my eye for half a second, while I pretended to be engaged in conversation with someone else. And now I wonder if I should have said hello. Now I wonder whether you really wanted me to. Your face was saying something, but I'm terrible at reading the map of someone's soul. And then the moment passed.

There are questions running through my mind, tripping over one another; like, 'can we transgress who we are?', and 'what was that look in your eye?'. But the biggest question I ask is 'am I seeing light where there is only shadow, because I don't want to admit that I'm afraid of the dark?'.

Poetics

Everything I wanted to say is tricking away, diffusing, like fragile light. The tongue cannot push out the correct words into the loaded air, for it won't take anymore sounds, too full have we made it in the afterglow.

Instead I'll take a camera and have it focus on the sheets tangled around your legs, and then the way the light pierces through the curtains to trail over your hips, highlighting the ridges of your ribs. I'll take a photo of your ear, for all the things it has heard, and your eyes, for all of me that you have seen, and your lips, for all the places they found that I did not know existed.

Or maybe I'll leave the clicking shutters and whirring of film canisters for another time and simply lie by your side, my fingers entangled in your hair.

Ghostly

It's been months and months and months and I've spent all this time with words dripping through my mind, but drying up at the tip of my pen. I crept through the corridors of my thoughts, trying to find from whence they came, as though I could trap them at the source and have them gleam back up at me from the paper's surface.

I found naught but dead ends.

And then I came to the realisation that they are an embodiment of all this time that I have spent chasing you through my dreams. I cannot hold them, because like you, they are insubstantial.

Time It Goes A-Changin'

Oh, I used to think myself so clever. Nowadays I don't think half so highly of myself. But perhaps that makes me a little more wiser.

Half Real

The words in my fingers and on my tongue disappeared, caught off guard by the sight of you. Now everything's on fire and burning, my ambitions of words and worlds and half real people crumbling to grey ash. Now there's only you, the only half real person. Everything I dreamed. Everything I despise. Everything I want.