Heartstrings

When our girl learns to read, she will trace each letter, each word with her fingertips
Almost as if she is trying to capture worlds, orbiting each sentence with her tiny young hands
Like small planets around a star.
And when she goes places, she will run her fingers over surfaces,
Collecting
As if by some miracle she will one day wake up to find the whole world contained in her hands.
And baby, I'll tell her, because I know she will listen
Baby, don't go forgetting what you love
Because when you do, you'll find the world
Slipping through those fingers
Like I did once.


I had a dream last night that you were here
Only, it wasn't your presence, but your absence which made you present.
Because I feel even your absences, in the place your heart should fill
In the negative space of me that should hold you perfectly
In the silences your words should replace,
In the stillness of my battering heart.
And when I dream that I wake up next to a man that I could no more love
Than one loves the people walking behind the news reporters on T.V
I awake to find it more and more true each day.
And I'm not going to tell you that my heart broke
Because I have forgotten what it was like
To have a heart so intact that it could
Fall to pieces at your distant touch.


And I'm not God, but I'm looking for him underneath each table and chair and rug as I go past
And in the faces of the people that pass me in the street
And when I find him,
I'm going to walk right up to him


And
Probably break down crying.


Because, you see, a long time ago, I found the one that God had made for me
Our pieces fit together in ways I'd never seen before
And although he was still a boy, and I was still a girl
In a world where the adults seem to be the only ones to know about love
Our thoughts became like twine, tying my heart to his,
And his to mine
So that when pulled tight
I could feel him breathe, even on opposite sides of this universe far too big for us to fathom
But mostly just from opposite sides of the playground.


And there were thoughts that no one else could understand but us,
And even though there were words that we didn't yet know,
And our universe was nowhere near big enough to sit on the tip of God's smallest finger
The universe that consisted of unspoken thoughts and of twine and of dirty fingertips
And of the cradles we'd find between branches of trees
To tie ropes and swings to
And to grow a love that grown-ups could never understand
But was as real as the conversations of the stars above us
Talking to no one in particular of the time they once found a reason to change orbit,
Speaking of the one lonely planet that had once filled their night sky with the certainty
Of dinner waiting for us at home.


And so when I find God,
Because he's been hiding from me for so long
I will ask him
What sort of scissors do you need to cut through memory
Because those strings that I tied when I was apparently too young to know any better
Have not yet come undone
And when I awake in the middle of the night next to a man that is as far from me as
Those lonely stars from the planets that were once their all
I can feel that boys heart beat
And I know that if I whisper
Wherever in the world he happens to be
He will still hear me
For those cords that we clumsily tied with our young fingers
And wrapped so tightly about our hearts
Are still here
And although muscle and tissue has grown over them
Like the bark that has grown over the ropes that we left dangling from the trees
I fear
That if I ever did try to untie them
I would bleed to death before I ever got the chance.


And so I look for God on the backs of strangers necks and in the bottoms of glasses in musty old pubs
And in the smell of the trees that remind me of you
And I'll keep on looking, even though I know it's probably in vain
Because the smell of the trees won't bring that boy back to me,
And the necks that I search bring me no closer to finding the neck of the one I so long to kiss
And the bottoms of those glasses only bring me closer to the bottom of my own heart
Where I'll find myself stumbling and bruising that other bottom of mine
Trying drunkenly to find my way back to the home I've made in this universe.


To the home that was meant to be ours
That I now live in alone
With a man that knows nothing of fingertips and stars
And the way that people orbit each other
Tied together with tiny bits of string
In the universe that still holds it's traces of us
And although there's not much which I don't know,
And the things I don't yet know about,
I haven't yet found out what they are.
But without you, my universe has dropped
And is floating somewhere
Lost in the lower part of God's beard, the part which rests on his chest
And moves, rising and falling with the breath of an ever expanding universe
Next to the first morning and the colours that only he and people who know such a love can see.


And I search for God in the face of the little girl that was meant to be ours,
In the eyes that should be green
And a little bit too much like a cows.
And in the shape of her fingernails I look for traces of you
I search for the curl of your hair, your corners mimicked on her tiny form
To find only the parts that you left behind with me
When a wind, far too cold for me to handle
Swept you off to orbit another lonely star.


And so when I find God,
And approach him with one finger pointed and a fight to pick,
Just before I break down,
And only nanoseconds before collapsing into a black hole at the end of my life
And I realise that all this time I've been looking through the stained glass window at a life
Which I'm not sure really belonged to me in the first place
I'll ask him


Why?




This is my first attempt at spoken word poetry, but hopefully still works just reading it. I'll read it out for you if you just ask!