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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.