Inside me

I am constantly eating my words.
Words which I wish I could say to another
Words that show how I truly feel.
I eat them for how can my words show you
What colours I hear in beautiful songs,
The feeling that dwells in my chest, that pulls my heart like a dead weight
Or else sends it floating into the atmosphere
To dance with the moon.

I eat them for I am afraid.
Afraid that what I say will fall short,
Will fail.
So I keep them, stored inside me.
Where the sweetness of their intonation ferments
Bubbling, seeping into the cavity within my chest, creeping into my veins
Filling me
Until I can stand it no longer
And out they will spill
Sweeping my heart along with its wave
Intoxicating my senses
Filling my head and heart with light and lightheadedness.

And I'll find myself singing to street corners
My fingertips stained the same colour as the sky
Tattooing the words of my heart on the skin of the trees I find God in.
Painting my prose onto the sunrise
My scripture onto the bones of those long gone
With my bare hands, I attempt to fill the mountains with all the words my lungs demand.
Until all the world that I know surrounds me with the words I tried to swallow
And inside me is empty once more.

Cross a land you won't get over

The sign says ‘Cross a land you won’t get over’

And I remember

And I can’t forget

The memory of mountains, higher than you’ve ever seen before

Reaching heights that even my heaven doesn’t know

Going all the way up,

Up,

Up,

Almost touching eternity

Before crashing back into the sea.

And I’m not sure if I should tell you

But I’ll probably miss the sight of the stars without you

Not because I loved you when I saw them

But because you knew what it was like

To be touched by beauty

Like I did.

To Live.

I tried to tell you once, what it would feel like to die. You threw your hands up to your ears and shouted that you weren't listening, that you didn't want to know. That night, as we were falling asleep in our too-small bed, I asked you why.
'Why what?'
'Why did you do that?'
'What did I do to that cat?'
'No. Why did you react that way?'
'I don't know. I guess, I... I just want it to be a surprise or something', you mumbled.
'Oh.'

And even then, I think you already knew. You knew in the cigarettes you smoked before breakfast, and then every hour, thirteen minutes past. You could feel death settling, making it's home in your lungs as those hands of yours continued to force it past the air your lungs needed. But I suppose they were in on it as well, there was something they needed to forget just as badly. You felt it in the force that pushed you backwards into your seat as you sped around corners without slowing down. You said it was like searching for the universe. You had to try and get as close to it without letting it claim you, and then, only then, would you know what it really looked like.

You told me one drunken summer night how you tried to find the universe in the veins of your wrists. I held onto your hands like you were slipping away from me and you winced from the bite of my nails as you explained that you were fifteen, young, and only halfway to double the completion that had taken half your life twice over to reach.

I stated at you in confusion.

'It's a Jewish reference', you shrugged.

And you told me that you found out that we do not bleed stars, lestways not in the way that the universe bleeds stars. I wondered that in all the effort we make to get closer to dying, constantly encircling it in it's deadly dance, when is it that we truly live?

Is it in the moments we spend before breakfast, in the clink of cutlery as the table is laid? In the colours we hear, resonating in the songs of our heartbeat? In the eyes of the strangers that no longer remain that way, in the embraces from friends of old? I tried to see life, to run my fingers over it's surface and pull it towards my lips with two impassioned hands. I tried to taste the path the sun carved into the night sky, chasing desperately after the moon. Tried to have the scent of your neck fill my head, tried to have it be too much. I needed it to be too much. I needed to see something of everyone I had ever known in your face, needed to know that there was something other than our ticking hearts tying us to this place.

I tried dyeing fabric that week. My hands became stained the colour of the sunset, and my heart found the poetry of the sky as it seeped through my skin into my blood. I had a dream that you were an artist, painting the stories of your life onto my bones. You painted birthdays on the small bones of my toes, each time you ever laughed on my fibula. All the universes you had her found with impassioned strokes you painted onto my left collarbone, the wonder you saw around you on my right. On my hands you painted every way you had ever loved me, on the back of my skull; your lips. Your breath on my pelvis, your favorite set of cutlery; behind my shoulder. Your heart on my ribcage, your embraces on my jaw. Each moment you had ever loved, ever breathed, carved into my spine. 

I awoke with your stories in my lungs, your universe in my veins. You woke with the taste of galaxies on your lips and as we sat beneath the covers, you took me by the hand and began to show me them all, piece by piece. I think all this time we already knew what it was like to die. But with you, I found what it was like to live.

The Culmination

Maybe she had just had enough. Enough of the cups of tea at three in the morning, enough of the steam that rises from your mouth as you walk beside her on cold days, enough of the hellos, goodbyes, pleases and thankyous. Maybe she knew, all this time what it is like to die, and even in something so unknown, she found there was too much of what she already knew. 
The late nights alone, the silent mornings, the dandelion that she'll make a wish on, without really believing it will come to pass. The feeling that she was most afraid of; the nausea, the fear that everything she did was false, that she was a fraud, and didn't deserve any of this.

Maybe it was the nausea that became too much, maybe she had just forgotten to breathe.
There was always new reasons for forgetting to breathe. The look in men's eyes when they found what they were looking for, the thought that everything was too much, yet was still not enough. The backs of strangers that looked strangely familiar, the sight of someone crying at a book. The key of silence. Sometimes A flat, sometimes D minor. At good times, the times of peace; the silence around her sat at a solid G, but most days it drifted more towards E minor. 
Maybe it was all the minor chords in the world, the endless melancholic hum of sad people drifting through life. Maybe it was the lack of laughter, the intensity of the tiny things. 
Maybe it was just time, claiming her back for his own purposes. 
They told her things would get better with time. But Time is selfish and claims all, so he continued to pursue her, leaving all else fixed and unchanged, leaving nothing better and none the worse.

Time. Like the ticking of our own hearts, each beat bringing us closer to something else. Eachother, maybe. But the closer you got to her, the further you found you grew apart. Apart from your skin, your soul, your heart. Apart from everything you gave to her, that she now carried with her as she drifted away, lost in the current of everything that was lost and never found. The single socks, rings and house keys, the minds of the foolish, the sanity of the wise. Away to the place where all things lost are found.
The place she yearned for.