Pray, my love, for what you hold

Take this song of praise off my tongue, for without your lips, it burns and blisters within the scissoring of my teeth, grinding and wearing at the build up of love at the back of my throat.

We love with all of our bodies, each organ and limb is made to hold the passion and crime of desire in its existence. The electricity of lust circulates within our veins, throbbing in its bodily enclosure until the time when we find an escape; observe the lovers grip, the splayed fingers in the act of earthing one another to release the pain of love.

Our teeth hold passion, our ears remember, our skeletons groan under the weight of the purpose of love. Each part of us is made for love, crying, falling, weeping for the parts of another's body to complete the hollows that desire carves into us. Love falls like a guillotine upon lovers necks, it is the fatal executioner, the rebellious uprising, the city burning.

And helpless, we sing along, swaying irresistibly to the dance macabre that love chants through its teeth at our sleeping bodies. We feed the flames that rise under burning skin; the sweat and musk of another we call intimacy, craving it when it's potency appears to be faded.

An addiction to love. It will not stop, for it is lifeblood. A dependency that not one being can deny, a necessity of life; we feed like infants at it's existence.

So fan the burning of my heart with your hands, let me live beneath your skin. Hold this hushed dedication between soft lips and pray, do not let the pain of love break your limbs.

Tonight, I am alone.

Tonight, I raise my hands to nature as your hands reach for the moon in my stomach
I loosen my spine, I untie my ribs.
The cords of my lungs breathe out in dissonant sighs
And I feel the impurity of my birth lingering on my skin
You moisten your lips, but I am alone
Our hearts grope in the space between us, missing each other by the depth of our skin, stretched too tightly over all the secrets we hold, 
held in the oceans of doubt that swell in our chests.

I whisper your name in colours, your breath tastes of violet, of the sweat and the rumpled skin of stale intimacy
And you whisper mine, through the hollow of your mouth in timber and stained velvet notes
But I am alone.
Even Saturn and his sixty moon-wives could never understand
Why the heat of another's body could turn a soul cold.
All the oceans in our guts are drawn by the pull of another
But even then gravity breaks them apart.

So tonight, I raise my eyes to hold the universe
As you lift your arms to hold my heart
And though we hide our cratered souls behind the light of the stars
We recklessly continue our attempt at loving with so much abandon
That we leave patterns in another's skin, the same way the moons carve through saturns rings.
The reason why we continue to orbit another
Though our icy knees and elbows and fingertips may be shattered
To make wedding rings of ice to wrap about our bodies.

Tonight, with push and pull you break me apart
The moon in my stomach calls out for peace
But the oceans of torment that storm under your skin do not relent
And in the midst of our own universal chaos of colliding hearts 
Of musty bodies, of the sweat and the discordant breath of intimacy
That intimacy has never really touched.
Still, I am alone.

Particles, mass and entropy

I was born into silence.

My mother bore me to her grave.

I would tell you that she was a wonderful woman, that her eyes sparkled as she told me stories of world smaller than my smallest fingertip, and places bigger than I could ever imagine. I would tell you that her laugh was musical, that she smelled of jasmine in spring, lavender in winter, the ocean in summer, and my father in autumn. I would tell you these things, but I never knew her.
 

My father would bring books home to me. He hoped that I would learn more from the souls of dead trees than his dead soul could ever teach me. He was known as a physicist to everyone but me. He knew more about the universe than I could ever understand, but couldn’t understand how I could sit and weep my soul into the pages of the worlds I longed to join.

He would sometimes sit at my mother’s old piano. He never learned to play, although he knew all the theory. He could tell me how each string was tightened, what the string was made of, down to its anatomical structure and how aging and use changed this through entropy. He could tell me how the quality of timber would change the reverberations and therefore change the subtle resonances in pitch. He could give me the history of the old ivory keys, the inhumane processes in elephantine slaughter in districts in India and Africa. He knew of all the classical composers, mostly from Baroque, but also from the German Enlightenment, British Romantics, and the Pre-Revolution French movements. I'll bet he could even read music. But he never played. He would just sit, tracing his fingers over the keys that my mother once caressed so passionately.

A silent attempt at claiming back what entropy had stolen from him.

 
He never blamed me for her death.

He would look into my eyes and tell me he loved me with all the forces of the universe, and I could believe him.

Love is a strange thing. My father told me that 'you can never choose who you fall in love with'.
I wondered if he had studied this, whether there was a mathematical equation, a formula hidden in the deep recesses of his office, or else his mind, that spoke of this truth.

Sometimes though, when I looked at him compared with photographs of my beauty of a mother, the most unlikely coupling, I wasn’t so sure.

 
The first man I loved was just that. A man. Forty one. Much too old for a seventeen year old girl, with illusions of everlasting romance.

He was the one who taught me that space and time were relative, that time went slower as you moved faster. He gave me many things, gifts, I suppose you could call them. Pieces of life, to be tucked away into the yellowed pages of the books my father had given me. I gave him pieces of myself in return. The inside of my legs, the nape of my neck, my incisor teeth. Though I kept them on my person, the insides were hollowed out, and all of me that once filled them was replaced with him. With the pull of his rough hands, the knowledge that seemed so far from my own reach, with the way his eyes lingered on me when it appeared I wasn’t aware. He taught me how to love, in most senses of the word.

He also taught me that love, like space and time, was relative. That it wasn’t eternal.

I didn’t cry when he left. The small parts of me that belonged to him would ache every now and then, but I could convince myself they were made of stone, that the pain I felt was only a memory, it wasn’t real.
 

My father saw a lot of things that I did not. Like the particles that hide in the centre of atoms, he chose to keep them hidden.

‘In their own time, they’ll make themselves known.’

I think he practised this theory with me. Though sometimes, I wished he didn’t.
 

It was then that I fell in love with silence.

I loved the way that even the smallest things could seem so powerful, if only given the right stage.

My father brought home a book on gravity, and I fell in love with the author. He was from my hometown, so I sought him out. 

My father saw my intentions, with the clarity that had revealed particles of light, and introduced me to his son. He watched us shake hands with a glint in his eye and turned away.
 

This boy was soft. Not so much small as breakable. Tender. I taught him how to stand tall. He taught me how to see the stars. 

He gave me his eyes, and the world took on colours I had only read about. I gave him my lips, the hollow of my neck, the inside of my elbow, my lungs.

He was so small that I didn’t know if he could carry all that I gave him.

But the smallest things are the strongest, I think. The lightest things, not weighed down by anything, are the ones that can resist gravity. They resist the pull of a whole planet, spinning as to draw each particle closer to its core.

And it’s the tiny things, the weightless things that can do it.

He made me weightless.
 

But after a while, mass accumulates.  Gravity pulls, and life fails. I broke his nose as he left.

He broke my heart.
 

I wish I had fallen in love with a songbird instead.

For one summer and one winter I would have given my heart away.

When death came I would know that may heart would fade to silence.
 

But, as my father says, ‘things rarely turn out the way you expect them to.’

He engraved it on his heart, next to the melody of my mother, next to the formula that he was convinced would one day bring her back to him.

Written in Colour

Once I went all black and white for a week, 
like some passive aggressive form of grieving. 
Like I needed to feel nothing, 
to hear silence and not see anything. 

But even silence has it's colours, 
even grieving has a spectrum of it's own. 
And even in my black and white world
Where the black and white sky sings it's grey symphonies
I still could hear the colours I tried to block out
And so where does it end?

Is it in the faded grey photographs of dancing people
Is it in the black of the night
After the moon stops trying to impress
All the hearts it fell in love with
And fades into the dark.
Is that where it ends?

But for each month the moon hides her face
We still find reason to begin again
And colour rises
Like provincial bread
Like the dawn
Blues and greys turn to oranges 
And it all begins once more.

Silence, Memory

. . .

It could be said that the greatest human attribute is the art of forgetting.

So read your silences for me. 

Read them, and then forget.

. . .

Syntax

He stepped outside of the grey apartment building, sidestepping the swing of the heavy green glass door and pulling his arms closer to his chest against the icy wind. Shivering slightly, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a battered, almost empty packet of cigarettes. Noticing a crumpled note caught in the thin cardboard, he tore it free and jammed it back inside his pocket, he knew the words scrawled roughly on the well perused paper well enough already, he could even recite them if need be, spitting them tastelessly from the tip of his tongue. They burned like acid in his throat and behind his eyes and in his gut. He would scream them from every part of his body if it would mean something to someone. But this wasn’t necessary. He was the only one the words were for. The only one who really cared. Lighting a cigarette, he looked up at the distant grey sky.

Twilight. The worst time of the day, he thought. He hated how the sky seemed to pause, how the street lights, always too bright when he would try to fall asleep, now seemed to shed no light at all, palely faltering against the bleak atmosphere. He hated that, the reminder of the powerlessness of man. He hated thinking this, hated how restlessness would overcome him and his thoughts would always seem to stray down these forbidden alleys he had long since blocked off, the alleys of feeling, of emotion. He hated the colour, the grey, like the world was washed clean and instead of coming out pink and raw and shiny it seemed that all colour was removed, leaving only the saddest and bleakest tones. The colour of my life, he thought resentfully.

Inhaling the rough smoke, he stepped edgily from side to side, exhaling with a slight shiver. Squinting in the grey haze, he saw the unmistakeable signs of rain. He groaned. Rain had the power to make his night worse than usual, filling the empty spaces of his home with the haunting cacophony of howling wet cats and dogs, honking cars, the splash of water on the streets and in gutters, with the squealing of people running from shelter to shelter. It was nights like this, nights when the water would leak through the walls, when the smell of upstairs Mrs. Hanniway’s derelict apartment would leak through the ceiling and make him gag that he hated everything with such an intensity that it made him feel sick to the stomach. Combined with the strong odours from the Chinese restaurant next-door and the seedy Irish bar below the entrance to his apartment block, it was enough to make anyone despise their own existence.

‘Great, a deluge is exactly what I need’, he muttered to himself, as the first icy drops landed on his raw skin. His voice was rough, yet eloquent and melodic, like he was once quite articulate, but now seemed to be well out of the practice of carrying any conversation but the short, sharp demands made at the corner store. His clothes still held remnants of success, the sheen of confident self-assurance remained, though days old and unshowered; it lingered faintly, barely distinguishable from the dry, metallic smell of old liquor, the sleepy, musty traces of nights alone, and to the educated nose, the distant and faraway smell of a rough and sweaty rendezvous.

His thick black coat, muted with the light struggling through the thickening, grey clouds was pulled close to his torso. Underneath was a thin cotton button-up shirt, the sort causal executives donned during the summer. Tucked loosely into worn black denim jeans, he still exuded a casual sort of elegance, extenuated by the quantities of thick, dark hair falling loosely about his defined features. A too-thick shadow suggested at least a week and a half had gone without a razor touching his jaw, the shadows underneath his hazel green eyes seemed to declare that the same time had passed since they had seen sleep. Stubbing out his cigarette with the toe of his shoe, he glanced upwards at the exterior of his building, squinting against the now spitting sky. Deciding he’d rather not face the long climb up the heavily carpeted stairs, nor face the unusually pretty girl on fourth, who always seemed to run into him whenever he passed, smiling coyly at his shoes and mumbling a polite greeting to the stairs, he set off away from the building.

Ascending the steps heavily, he turned right and set off down the grey pavement, hands in pockets, head down against the freezing gale blowing fit to blow away even his skeleton. The sickly smell of the restaurants and bars faded as he moved further away, and turning a corner, he found respite from the vicious arctic gusts. The cessation of the wind, however, left space in his mind for other things, the words he was perpetually trying to forget crept slowly back, coiling icily around his neck, constricting the passageways that once strove so desperately to keep him alive. Now, he barely noticed. Being breathless seemed almost normal these days, the aching in his chest so regular that he was sure that if it ever did cease, he would almost be concerned for his wellbeing. His lungs tightened slightly as he involuntarily remembered phrases, parts of intimate conversation, now deathly echoes, resounding in his own mind. It was a mistake to leave his musty one-room apartment. At least there he could deaden the cries of his lungs, gasping for the sweet air of her exhale, numb the fingers that froze without the warm skin of her beyond his reach. Out here in the open it became too much, the laughter of others bouncing off the tall buildings stung his skin, the music floating from the underground clubs tore at his clothing, reminding him of the hands that had once did the same thing, passionately pulling him towards their owner.

He shrugged off these memories. Too much, the thought of her was too much. When he needed to, he convinced himself he should satiate what needs he, like all men, assumed he had, but as sure as the dawn, as soon as he tried, she would find her way close to his heart, her hands pulled at his chest, at his lungs, opening wide his eyes so she could pierce each part of him, and he found he couldn’t follow through, storming out of darkened softly furnished rooms, frustrated and full of despair at her absence.

Quickening his pace, he turned a few more corners absentmindedly, sheltering his face from the onslaught of stinging rain. Grumbling to himself, cold and wet, he began to wind his way home through familiar alleys and short-cuts. This was a bad idea, like all ideas he came up with these days. He knew it, and was all the more annoyed that he didn’t realise sooner. Climbing slowly up the worn carpet, he was so lost in his own thoughts he didn’t notice the steady drip-drip of his sodden garments on the already stained stairs. He heard a noise behind him once he had reached the first levelling of stairs, but took no notice. He was already making dismal plans of his actions once he reached the dismal womb of his sixth-floor apartment, mostly to do with liquor and not much else.

‘Terrible weather outside’, a delicate voice offered from behind him.
He looked up, surprised at his surroundings. The pretty girl from fourth was slowly taking the steps behind him, evidently unable to pass due to his skulking figure. Her coat was already folded over her arm, the white skin on her thin wrists shone and he stared at their nervous act of intertwining. She had a raw pink scar on the fleshy part of her left hand, like a serious cut that had only just begun to heal properly. She had a habit of picking at the underside of her nails, he noticed.
Still mildly surprised, he grunted his assent. She quickly stepped up the steps, levelling herself with him.
‘Vera’ she offered, taking each step after him, glancing repeatedly at his downward cast face.
‘What?’ he said, surprised at this level of attention from someone with no monetary interest in him.
‘Vera. I’m Vera.’ She repeated nervously. ‘I’ve seen you a few times, but we’ve never actually met. So I’m Vera.’
‘Oh. Vera. Okay.’
‘And who do you go by?’
‘What?’ he mumbled.
‘Well, It’s nice to meet you, “What” ’ she joked lightly.
‘Oh,’ he forced a laugh, ‘My name isn’t “What”.’
‘I know. It’s Stephen, isn’t it?’
‘How did you know?’ he gasped, trying to disguise his lack of fitness as he struggled up the stairs.
‘It’s on the buzzer by the door. Stephen Marling. Sixth floor, old Mr. Wallace’s place. You moved in two months ago.’ She stated, matter-of-factly.
He continued up the stairs, Vera followed. At the fourth floor she stopped.
‘It’s not good to be alone all the time.’ She looked up at Stephen as he continued up the next flight. He paused, and she fumbled in her bag, looking down to extricate her keys from the jumble of flotsam stuffed in the close, dark of her bag. ‘Come around for tea, tomorrow afternoon. Four o’clock.’

He began to mumble the half-formed beginnings of a well used excuse.
‘You don’t have anything on, do you?’ she said, looking at him, her bright grey eyes piercing through his mumbles. It wasn’t a question, it was a statement.
‘No, I guess not.’ Stephen admitted.
‘Well, I’ll see you then. Bring sugar, neighbour.’ She said brightly, before turning and clicking the lock in the white door in front of her and disappearing through the narrow space.

He was stunned. As he climbed the next two flights he found his thoughts weren’t so much dark as they were jumbled. He tried to remember the last time he had had a regular conversation with another person. Two and a half months ago, just before ‘everything’. He hadn’t spoken, choosing to remain silent at the funeral, one hand fingering the note that hadn’t left his pocket since. They had all given him distance, out of respect. Out of an inability to find anything to say, other than consolation, they stopped speaking to him. He couldn’t deal with it. That’s why he moved. Across cities, countries, across the wide, empty expanses of his heart. All he wanted was to get away from the closely filled rooms she had filled with her presence, with her memory. A silent life, drowned out by the raucous howl of the downtown city streets.

Two months of nothing but himself. A part of him, the rational side, which had often tried to convince him that he needed to move on, needed to let go, told him that it would be good to make at least one acquaintance. At least if you die, it told him, someone will find you before you rot away to nothing. Someone will miss you. As much as he didn’t want to, he agreed. However, when he awoke the next day at noon, he was filled with what seemed like unexplainable trepidation. As he stared at the mouldy ceiling, the events of yesterday sunk in. Now that it was closer, he wasn’t so sure that close proximity with another person was such a good idea.

Stumbling uneasily to his feet, he pulled himself towards the bare kitchen, groping for a mug and the closest bottle of whatever was on special four days ago. He took out the note. Staring at it, without reading what apologetics were inscribed into its surface, he downed the first mouthful, wincing as the liquors foul aftertaste bit at his throat.

‘I’m sorry’, he would have to say to Vera.

‘Sorry for doing this to you.’ He barely knew her.

‘I just don’t think I can do this...’ He couldn’t do this. It was too hard these days.

‘Goodbye.’ He didn’t need an acquaintance.

‘I love you.’

He paused. Stephen, you have to be a sick bastard to use that on her, it’s disgusting. You barely know her, and what, you’re throwing your past in her face, like some sick RSVP. He moved into the thin light creeping through the gap between window and the bed sheet pinned against it. He couldn’t do this. Pouring himself a full mug, he moved back to the dim, grey light of his single, shabby room. After another half an hour, the room began to swirl, colours began to dance before his eyes. This was good, this was better. By four he was elsewhere, cheek pressed into the rough carpet that would leave inevitable red marks and ribbons in his skin. A faint line of saliva traced its way out of his open mouth. He wouldn’t hear the faint knock on his door, wouldn’t see the look on Vera’s face, white and dismayed as she turned back down the stars. All he could see was black, and it was all he ever could want, now.

An ode to the poetry of hands, that do what minds cannot, and forget.

When I was fifteen,

On the fifteenth day

Of the fifth month

I tried to find the universe in the veins of my wrists

To find the poetry of my blood in impassioned strokes

And I was only halfway

To double the completion

That has taken half my life

Twice over

To achieve

But I found out

That I do not bleed stars

In the way that the universe bleeds stars.

And three months after I turned nineteen

I tried to take up smoking

And the hands that had once tried to carve death into my skin

Tried once more to force it weightlessly into my lungs

Filling the cavity within my chest with the sighs

Of a thousand moonless nights

A thousand sleepless eyes

Staring down at the earth

Their haughty glances turn from reaching palms

Those same palms that now grasp into the air at night,

That search for your face,

That lean to touch your chest,

To hold your wrist,

To feel your ankle

Against mine.

That long to touch the life you left behind everywhere I go.

Recently I’ve been discovering what it means to have hands like Christ

To feel with my fingertips the silence that fell through generations

Falling like the snow that lands at my feet

Like the ashes of a thousand hearts on fire

Like the burning shame that coats young skin

Because their love does not reach the clouds

But falls down in the dust

That I’ll lie down in and whilst looking up at the heavens

Wave my arms with celestial grandeur and begin to make angels of my own.

And I’m beginning to know the feeling of my heart slipping through the holes in my palms as I offer it to the strangers passing me in the street

And I wonder whether I could hold anything close to Jesus these days without it falling through

Because I’m trying so hard not to lose him.

I’m searching for God wherever I go

I look in the mountains and in the rivers, where only whispers of his words still remain

Where they hide behind trees

And under rocks

And above my head

And I try to write down as many as I can,

Tearing parts of my life to inscribe on them the words he left behind.

Breaking apart my life to hold true to this syntax

So this is my prose, this is my ghost.

A ghastly replica of the worlds I could never grasp with these holey, holy hands of mine.

Every day I die a little more, dying, searching for a misplaced messiah

And maybe that’s why I carve my heart each day into the sunrise

And feel the colours bleed onto my fingertips

So that when I’m gone

The sun will keep carving my path after the moon,

Like the clouds and the skies in their mad love affair.

Like the cockroaches that love with such abandon

That they wear their skeletons on the outside.

But for now, my hands are stained with the ink, made from the colour of the sky.

So with these hands, I want to colour the memory of you,

I beg you to paint it onto my bones

So that a part of you will always envelop a part of me.

I want to write a symphony full of all the silences our conversations ever held

I want to tell you that the colour of your eyes seeps fire into my lungs

But there are so many things we will never speak.

So with these hands I will write

I will write you in the air around me

And in the whispers that creep into listening ears

So the sound of your existence won’t fade away.

I’ll write these verses onto the space inside atoms

Filling the universe with my memoir of you

So that each part of my being is inscribed with your history.

I want to be the heart inside a preacher’s song

And I want to tell the world that everyone was wrong.

But they were right.

They were right.

I wonder what it would feel like to draw fists with gipsy songs

To swing violence with my hips to the sound of symphonies

But I can’t live that way.

So I’ll tattoo peace on the inside of my veins

So my blood will learn to sing a different song than that of pain

So that those born into graves can feel again

And I search for God, because I think he knows

Knows what it feels like to lose love

Underneath the couch

And flying out the window

To wrap around the moon

And stare down at me while I try to catch you

Wrapping the earth in my embrace

As I reach out my arms for you.

Scrawling my poems

In staggered breath across staggered rocks

And trying

Not to cut my fingers.

So that this is the scripture that I write with my bare hands

These are the verses that my lungs command

I cut out parts of my life and cover it with the pages your words fill

I’ll turn each memory into a book

Wrapping your person in my prose

Filling my world with the promise both my hands know.

And I’ll let you forget.