(007)

You are quieter here.

Away from the sounds and the lights and the way your tongue never stopped to think that maybe, this would be the last thing it knew.

You want to call the trees home and live in them until the snow falls and weighs too heavy on your head.

But the last thing you knew was my tongue, my fingers, light, over your neck and the heat of a day too cold for summer

It’s the best we could do.

The light bulb blew

And for a few seconds, like the sun, we knew nothing of the approaching disaster

Of the fire and cold, the ice that won’t form now that the chasm of torturous heat at the centre of our room, your chest, is gone.

The trees remain silent as men watch the stars for a sign that God is not real,

Hoping he’ll tell them himself, so they can turn their backs on the sun 

And live like mushrooms in the dark.

(006)

I think I may have inhaled you at some point in the past, but somewhere between the endless rumble of the cars pushing the street deeper and deeper into the earth and the sighing of the sky as it holds its breath and exhales, changing colours as his lungs change shape with the day, I must have breathed in another, or maybe more. Sometimes it feels as if I have breathed in the entire world, in one breath or many, I try to hold them all in my chest as if keeping them there could keep us from harm.

(005)

‘There is too much between us.”

There are seas and days and distances across time that only light knows, there are too many paths that our selves will never take. The distance is too far, too far to see or hear or drink or swim or dream. And when we have reached the edge of what we know, we look out into the distance and see only unknown.

“I wish I could say that I know you too well.”

But not enough.

Even as the warmth of our hands change each particle in the universe, the motions of our hearts send stars into motion. Even as the wind moves and the stars shine and all that we once though was certain will eventually fade; the ways that I knew all the pathways across your skin; the colour of your blood as it drips from a cut finger; every memory of you will fall like rain into nothingness, lost amongst all the nothing that every person has ever known.

But still, nothing is never enough.

(004)

There was once a time for me when the words of each book become no longer the testimony of the author, a prose agonized over and laboriously tended to- but the same words, written over and over, pages filled with different structure, intonation and verse declaring the same thing again and once more. The same words filling each page, each chapter whispered my secret as though each tree and sunrise was because I love you, each laugh was the explosion of myself to you. 'I love you', as if the world was as in love as I, as if each page, and the ink from which these words were made of were all declarations of my love. That's how it was. For three years I read many books: hundreds, even, but saw none of it. All the words were replaced with you. When I left it was as if a floodgate had opened, and all the pain that your love had blinded me from came crashing in. Your love struck me again and again, drowning me in my own ignorance as you continued your own inscience elsewhere.

(003)

Recently, I’ve been searching for meaning, a rhythm to which my weary heart is meant to beat to, but all I’ve found is empty rooms, syncopated with all the echoes of a life I’m not sure I’ve ever understood. Like looking into a stranger’s house, I try to find reason, a method and causation to explain why I, unlike my neighbours, bleed not with blood but words.

So I search and I search for the reason and rhyme but I’m coming up short. The kind of short that sends you to bed before the others, rubbing your eyes with the frustration of not keeping up; that sits you at the kids table and keeps you always looking up, up, up at all the faces who speak of things I’ll never fully understand. They say youth is a chalice waiting to be filled by emotion but I feel more like a plateau each day, each feeling and thought pouring off my edges like the waters of a world not yet round and I’m wondering if it will always be this way.

And every now and then, when the moon grows too dark and too far away, I stop. I stop and I wonder if what I’m doing will do anything, if my scribbling will bring more change than change the weight of the change I carry in my pocket and most days, I honestly don’t know.

There was once a time when I could have written the ten things I know to be true, and I would have believed them. Now I’m not so sure.

So I read. I read and I read and I wait for something to reach out and grab me by the throat, but all I feel is a tingling in my toes, and I’m sure that’s more to do with bad circulation and tight socks than the need to pack up and go.

And twelve months ago I could have given everything away to any boy with a pretty smile and a cheesy sense of humour, but the winter wasn’t kind this year and I’m left more hollow than before, dodging around the bad metaphors and allegories that will carve me out like a Halloween pumpkin if I let them. (And at times I’m sure they’ve gotten to me, when the weight of the world feels like the badly written words of an apathetic youth who knows little more than the cost of a three section bus ticket and a bag of chick-peas, who waxes poetical over all the lost love I’ve never actually had when in truth, I’ve only ever loved my cat).

And this isn’t a complaint. Except the only thing I know to be true is that I know nothing of what I once did, and nothing of what I could, and everything is made of the same nothing that I keep bumping my head against and it sends those blasted stars from long ago into my eyes to blind me with all the nothing that the light has travelled through, and I rub and I rub to try and get them out but nothing I do works like it used to because my fingers are made of more nothing than something and I’m passing through walls like the living pass through doorways and sooner or later the ones with the brains and the talent are going to pick me up and send me to bed.

I need to breathe.

I’m not Atlas, but sometimes, (night-times, times when I’ve had too much sugar, 5.30am morning-times), I think I can be. When something in the air catches in my lungs I almost feel that I could carry the world on my back, or in my hands, but I’m still not sure if I can be responsible to hold that much.  My hands are still too small, my life is still too short, my shoes are still too worn. And even when I feel as old as the world and all my past lives are creeping out through my skin, I still struggle to understand the ways in which gravity keeps me together.

I want to be bold enough to be weak, and I think I am almost weak enough to be bold. I have nothing left to prove to anyone but myself and I hope that that won’t change but these things always do. But I’ll keep searching, looking for the reasons why I breathe this staggered prose like dragons breathe smoke and dig until I’m just short of reaching the fire in my belly. Maybe then I will know. But until then I’ll keep hiding under tables and searching dust in these empty rooms to make rhythm out of this thing we call a heartbeat.