Riverbed Girl.

Disconnected and walking to a place I’ve been before I wonder if you’ve been here too I think you do know what I mean when I say it say it twice I’m sick of pretending it's alright when I can feel that tremor of something shaking and don’t brush it off again brushin your shoulders clean like flickin dandruff - there aren’t words enough to describe all the white lights bursting behind my eyes when I close them against the tide and the pressing up of my forehead on your shoulder isn’t warm enough to thaw out that frozen part of me that speaks in cryptic code like a child trying to hide a secret or a grown man trying to be discreet about it. Body like a cello with that spinal chord ringing loud and silent in that evening way, I saw that eye gaze to the floor when the water sprayed our hairlines cold and everything you thought you knew about the way my eyes can blink away the me and you was rewritten by the fingers on the triggers of all those little deaths and all those missing strings still make a sound to me. All those little secrets still bubble over like boiling oil in a pan too small to hold all the junk we tell each other under the pretence of bonding or communicating or simply tryna find a glimmer of truth within the space between our noses when we lie facing one another and yet we’re both any number of miles away, both simultaneously twigs pulling down the river and the current unearthing everything amongst it. The sun was an emaciated child wearing cream pleat socks and the sunshine skin was but a penny useless to me and full of unnecessary inevitability disguised as hope. He said he didn’t wear sunscreen. She said she didn’t trust the mobile phones. She said her doctors got it wrong and got it wrong again but I guess we all just have to pretend for a while and for the rest of our lives that these things all just turned out fine and put your faith in the man with the prescription pad and the glasses too bright to look at reflecting that hospital light like the shiny back of a cockroach. I never thought I’d be the one to really truly trust the way your hair behind your ear means something in my dreams but we’re all changing all the time after all, and I’m holding on to a dead butterfly found floorward and still coloured in the way life branded it. We’re not all the same. You’re the colour purple, tightly tucked into a playdoh bucket and smelling like the earth when it was new and yet to be trampled. I’m the clumps of sugar found at the bottom of the barrel and never removed because who has time to deal with shit like that. I smell like the ground when it’s been pissed on by dogs and drunks and men with an engrained sense of entitlement, given to them by their fathers and their father’s fathers and their father’s father’s fathers. There’s something to be said about that silence settling like a layer of dust, aren’t we all just forgotten ornaments in this old lady’s attic, important in that unimportant way, branded with an arbitrary meaning that only lives in her memory, too important-unimportant to throw away. Strip me of my varnish and lay me in the garbage bin, with the kind of care you’d dish out at the soup kitchen, ticking off the hours tryna be a better person. Isn’t everything we do in this world an attempt to be loved a little more.

Dream of life.

I want to write about 

the sharp sigh of your asthma puffer                    evening light lending you an 

illuminated texture

like the down feathers of a quilted sleeping bag.           I want to write about 

the open window that kept me warm by

contrast between our muted street

and our respective doonas.                        I want to write about the self 

sufficient world that is your bed

                                    and lockable bedside drawer complete with coke cans 

candles and antiperspirant deodorant.

I smile when I see the old tequila shot glass full of cigarette butts, thinking of 

the time you said              'everything becomes an ashtray'                caught 

red handed ashing into a

quickly cooling bowl of porridge we had both

shied away from after burnt tongues and dry mouths.

I want to write about how you

still don't know how to use the dishwasher and

I will never tell you because

we are far too sensible and

creative to have a conversation

about household chores.                                           I want to write about our 

house and how we complain about it and

yet we seem to spend more time there than we care to admit, case in 

point myself as I write this en route to the tarn

when I should be in class

unable to avoid the gravitational pull

like the elastic snap-back of an umbilical cord, felt somewhere

behind my belly button and connected

to that mildew infested green couch on the veranda.

I want to come home and put on your jumper

and find a place to rest my feet

on the cup-strewn coffee table

tea in one hand cig in the other and hear about your day        How was work? 

How are your lungs? What did you eat, what did you like on Instagram?

                       I want to write about the lemongrass

and ginger tea

                      you made me

when I was sick and you said it hurt you when I coughed

cause we don't have grown ups taking care of us right now

so we gotta take care of each other you know.              I want to write about 

the way you know what I'm thinking sometimes, I want to write about the 

way we relate the feeling 

of waking up

                        in the evening 

                                               to Edvard Munch's

                                                                        Scream

all open doors and dark

the naked window exposing the ugly sky.                     I want to write about 

                     all the skies we've seen

weight safely on the beams

of the corrugated iron roof, teacups tucked       

between knees and clouds

of smoke drifting like ghosts across the trees,                 I want to write about 

the clarity of dawn breaking.

And the beautiful music 

                                      of the garbage truck. 

Penance.

i.

This is the truth.

You were a wild thing, reckless and

almost chaotic, a runaway train

hurtling toward me, I

wanted that adventure (to disappear) and to forget

those very real things, back then.

I was a cowering ostrich, its head in the sand.

You were the tornado

that saved me.

ii.

A photo. You on our bed, hair

wet and a smile that’s a stranger to me now.

After that photo was taken we drank tequila and

I punched you in the eye (I guess I was reckless too)

we were old souls, roaming

hand in hand like trouble coming.

All those things, the pieces of me missing, love

and all that falls between the sheets

has a habit of leaving one starved.

iii.

This is how we worked.

I come home drunk, bones aching your name

like it’s written on my pelvis

you, half sleeping with a neck for my lips

and us, slipping into dreams before untangling our limbs

waking to a comfortable silence

that stretches on for years.

Safe. And tortuous.

Cruelty has many disguises.

iv.

This is the truth.

I turned you out like day old bread showing

premature signs of rot.

Then I begged you back, carpet burn knees and

sticky tears. Your heart 

was the Sistine chapel, dizzyingly

out of my reach. We left each other

scarred, burned out like matches.

Penance is this poem. (And all the others)

~~glass house~~

i dreamt you real last night

(lying next to me all moonlight blue and bones)

you don’t know

you don’t know

anymore.

you had a girl and a home

and i came in with that sense of entitlement

you always hated and fucked your shit up (again)

you took it with a smile

staring at a pile of letters

burned at the edges

lying in bed you kissed me wet

/what’s the deal with your hands these days?/

i realised you’re glass now

a glass house

paper skin and fading

i’m sorry for all that

i’m sorry for all that

the fishbowl smashed on the floor

and the curtains were singeing embers clinging

to the hairs on our legs and you said

go.

and i did.

(i’m sorry for all that)