A bit of a thing.
I opened my eyes fully and drank in all of these places and I took breaths deep enough to allow me to feel the concave fold of my ribs, and I let go. I was moulting. A snake shedding skin, turning the old layers inside out, stepping away.
The night you left I asked you if you wanted to take anything. A photograph, a piece of clothing, a souvenir. You looked at me with those eyes, violet, like Elizabeth Taylor, or Lapis Lazuli, and said ‘but I don’t have anything to give you.’ And that’s how it always was.
-
I can’t stop thinking about my heart. How much it has transformed in five weeks, the stages it has gone through. At first, I felt like it grew a protective casing, spun in the way that a moth spins a silk cocoon. They attach vegetation to the outside, to disguise it from predators. I did the same, but with words of comfort from friends. I felt like a gecko, plucking those sentiments from conversations like flies on that long, sticky tongue. I swallowed them whole and let them mould together in the centre of my chest, every ‘it will be okay’ becoming part of an army to fight off any threat. To fight off her. Some insects secrete fluids that eventually soften the cocoon, and then they escape. That was what it was like for me, with every day I felt the drum beat of my heart falling back in to a steady rhythm until one day, this day, I woke up and felt the cocoon fall apart like a tangerine. I’m exposed, again.
- part of my current assignment, still working on it, may post the full thing when it’s done if I like it. :)
I want to write but I can’t. Nothing is coming. I’m the best Creative Writing student. Hmhmhm.
‘Break’
There are words I never wanted to hear you speak.
But you know,
they sounded much louder,
and felt more like a movement,
when they appeared on the computer screen
instead of falling from your mouth.
2012.
Moving
‘To build a home’
is our song, and I did -
build you a home.
Your home is in my chest:
my heart is your bedroom.
I hope you never move out,
but if you do,
i’ll cut a house shape out of your clothes,
fabric that smells like the colour gold
and I’ll stitch it on to my front pocket,
to cover the skin of my fluttering breast.
I’ll decorate it with sparkles and velvet that feels like your cheeks
to satisfy the onlookers,
so that they won’t peer in through the windows
and scream in horror.
Because as soon as you open that door to leave,
there is a string attached to a wrecking ball
ready to fall from the sky of my brain
and demolish every floor of the home
that took so long to build.
The cement has only just dried.
Now watch it float like dust.
(first draft, written in 10 minutes - will be revisited)
2012
untitled
The first time you slept beside me, I felt stiff as a board. I saw your arm slithering towards me and coiling itself around my torso, a snake saying you’re mine. The silence hissed it. I own you.
Minutes earlier I’d been as close to you as possible,
whispering in your ear and then trailing my pink, poking tongue around your lobes, soft soft and ticklish. Trying to tease it back out and let it fall back in to my mouth where it came from, like throwing candy in the air.
I found the dot to dot scatter of freckles below your hipbone, drawn out like a bouquet of birds taking flight. I traced my fingers to everywhere they might be going and found where they might have come from.
You said, on the cusp of an ‘oh’ - ‘I’ll definitely be back in here’.
I burrowed in to your collarbone with a smile and hoped that the little cove that caved in between your bone on your shoulder would catch my sweat. A pool of me.
With your white skin against the white sheets and a mouth that I could not stop sticking myself to, I could not say no to you spending the night even when my heart beat so fast that I thought it would throw out a key and open the gates of my rib cage to come bursting clean through the skin of my bare chest and break all over you.
Bed space is mine. Night time is for me, for my dreams do cartwheels out of my brain, escaping through my ears and turning and turning through my nostrils til they’re flipping around the room and kicking me in the face, jolting me up and throwing me to the window to look up at the sky, trying to find the face of God to tell him to stop.
When the lights go out control is converted from a force to a measly nine point Scrabble word. It is made from a material so slippy that even if every finger tip held a thousand miniscule fishing nets, it could never be caught.
That night I stared at the ceiling going through the alphabet and silently naming an animal for every letter until my head became a safari park and I had to grab the sheets to stop my voice box from letting out a roar. I wanted to wake you up to help me with X, but then I’d have to explain why at 5 in the morning I was gripping on to everything solid around me like my knuckles had only just learned their power to go white.
In the morning when I felt the small of your back stir against my tensed belly I squeezed my eyes shut so that I saw fireworks in my eyelids and pretended to wake after you. I watched you leave and then rubbed my fingertips against every inch of sheet that you had sprawled and stretched and arched on, and your perfume hung everywhere like glue. I liked it better there than on your own skin. I closed my eyes as was only kicked in the teeth once.
Ten months later and I feel stiff as a board. Now, I’d give anything for that snake arm, I’d let it shed it’s skin over and over so that I had a blanket to always keep me warm. Since then I learned that an animal beginning with an X is a Xantus, but no thoughts of that bird, even with its feathers that look like someone has shaken the yolk from the sun, can make sleeping without you any easier.
I’m yours.
Now. 2012.
double entendres
‘Come to my flat, we’ll talk there’
and we did,
but more with our bodies than our mouths:
a yin and a yang,
curling around and circling,
meeting at the other end,
coming together.
2011
Reflection
Reflection
Spring has come and he
is alone -
around him are others
yet he is alone, existing between them.
His eyes snap from the river
to the cotton mill,
far away, yet tall, imposing.
In the sea of his mind, memories float, resurfacing:
thick cotton dust, thicker coughs,
spinning, both cotton and himself from the heat
and the noisy hum – a bee in his eardrum.
He will not return,
not to the ten and three hours each day
nor to the nostril clinging smell
causing sneeze upon sneeze.
A splash sounds
to his left
and he returns
to the river.
A romance begins
between his sockless feet and the grass:
long strands like ribbons of silk
twist around and tickle his toes,
toes squeezing tight
keeping them there, their green playmate
for one second, two
before flattening them again.
A boy of eight or nine
is humming softly
as if copying the river’s rhythm.
It was he that caused the sobering
splash.
With busy hands as small as they are strong,
he washes his black beauty,
more than a foal, not quite yet a mare.
Small waterfalls run from her and
she is glittering,
her raven coat a blanket of miniscule diamonds
catching the rays of the sun.
The silver river has become
a rainbow -
reflections of azure sky,
grass more emerald than green
and running from the muddy horse
warm red and brown,
like the underbelly of a thousand salmon. *
In the wise and slowly blinking eye
of the sparkling horse
he catches a glimpse of himself,
solemn and calm
like the clouds floating above,
flirting with the sun and birds.
It is then, under the leafy shade
It comes to him, the realisation
That he is not a factory boy,
or a child
like the one before him,
but a man,
hopeful and unyielding.
*This is a recycled image, it appears that I’ve used it more than once in different pieces, oops. Must take heed.
- 2010
