My lungs are shallow. My stomach is hollow. My mouth is stitched up in see-through string.
I flick at the switch to invite the vampiric darkness across the threshold, seeping invisibly in and sucking the skin and light and colour from this room; this eulogy to bridges burnt, all stickers and posters and cuddly toys; this childhood in a box. I push my eyes across nothing to my bed, and the space where you are. I paint you out in shape memory and memory alone, draping subtle gradient over every bump and curve of your body, familiar even in blindness from hours spent studying you like a textbook, with warmth at the tips of my fingers and heartbeats in my toes. You were my inexplicably informative fascination, like a list of perfect facts; like some contradiction of important trivia. Now, you are black lumps in a blackness, tangled up in anticipatory breaths and restless dancing heart. I can’t tell whether I fall into your arms or you fly to mine, but the landings are soft, and we’re cushioned in caresses. You take my shaking to the wall of my neck, and shoot it dead against my skin with the bubbled warmth from your lungs. You swallow me between your legs, coarse with goosebumps and boiling with electric blood. We tumble into each other’s republics wordlessly with clumsiness of unspoken grace, and sink together with the ship.
You were always there, swimming at the corners of my eyes; a peripheral ghost, or affliction. In a world of your own; your own cosmic web of atoms and dust, and the more I got my focus on that slippery side of my window to the world, the greater my shadow hung enormous over your house and your people and your town. By the time that we met, splattered like stains on the wall of that urban industrial husk - aching monument to abandonment in grey - I was long twisted in what felt like headaches, draining myself trying to fix my bead upon your shape and saunter. You get one moment in your life where the world seems to burn down around you, all crossbeams and struts, like a gas explosion in an opera house. The set creaks and smoulders and drops around you, and you don’t even notice, and honey, believe that the rafters were falling all around our heads that day. We burned to each others’ deaths there and then, forcing a lack of conversation up against that wall in mechanical throes. Unified by the wiry, telegraph sky; the pincers of iron twisting, clawing upward; the tumbling grey factory walls and walkways. Birth and death at first sight. A symbiotic miscarriage of teenage depletion.
My teeth are bones
And in this moment
I belong to the sky
The blood runs down
The windows either
Side of my nose
Feels like drowning
In warm disregard
In a bath I didn’t run
The world spins at
The correct speed
I’m correct in this fog
This entire city wears an oppressive palette of grey and spaciousness, crowded though it does bleed with disrepair. The trees compete at withering, turning to lonely suicides, out of fears at once sentient and inexplicable. You can see the silence dripping from gutters and rooftops, and the air you breathe needles the cold pit of your stomach through the walls of your lungs and into your shaken bloodstream. The life that’s left to be lived makes a victim out of everybody.
The clouds ground themselves against the sky of sand, and sharpened themselves into dark thunderous razors, aflame with venom and incalculable malcontent.
The buildings flexed themselves into debris and glass confetti, their windows diced and dispersed storey by tortured storey; their struts and freckled foundations snapped and sheared.
The sea grew to a turbulent boil and tumultuous sickness, dragging itself beneath an iron curtain of its dead fish before pillaging its beaches and promenades with a practiced and disenchantingly consistent epicaricacy.
The dirt and asphalt blossomed into rose-shaped pits, clawing the surrounding land and life into its terrific infested gut in the stomach of the planet, smelting our civilisations into gigantic iron teardrops.
The volcanoes coughed up blackened lungfuls of insatiable fire as the mountains cascaded down like dominoes, pounding city and forest into sickly world-pulp.
The rivers sped beyond the sound barrier, crumbling dams and flooding the people under a veil of radio silence; satellite delay afforded through apocalyptic improbability.
The men in suits with black credit cards got drunk in their private aircraft and hung in the sky like stars; to the doomed below, warts against the swollen red moon, auditioning for God in the Great Big Play.
I bruised my teeth with indecision on the barrel of my gun, eyes fixed on a fanged and flaming horizon, ears under siege of screams, working on working a hole through the roof of my mouth and out into the shouting sun.
I feel every bit the man that I am
I crush love into dirt under my heels
Tread it into the soft mud, pockmarked with tiny dead flies
A scarred soldier in a coat of grease armour
A stern voice
A pair of iron hands
Kneel on the floor
Take off your skirt
I don’t care
I call you what I want, you do what I say
I call you when I want and when I don’t I am cold
Or am a fountain of displaced lust
A calendar of ejaculations
A locomotive derailment upon your misbehaviours
There is something wrong with me
My biggest problem is your biggest problem
You don’t listen
You wanna cry, bitch? Tell me what you are
Not my problem
I don’t care
I’m a drinking abuser of drugs, abuser of you
I train my arms on fullness
I train my soldier of a tool on your misfortune
And you’ll swallow every shitty load
Because I am a man
Saturday nights of isolation and whiskey and scorn
A furious core of beer and malliteracy
Hanging from a branch to teach a slut a lesson
When I’m not too busy faking
Faking both more and less a man to the men around me
A gentler tougher soul
Razors in bubblewrap
And next time I come by your shitty cloudy town
Peel me back and cut yourself
Bleed and come yourself a sticky pool
You have permission but hurry up
Sweat into subspace like an explosion
Drop like a God damn mortar shell
Rust your metal joints in the mess you made
You are a wet masterpiece in which I submerge myself
A still body of open water
I hear your walls talk
Memories in deep-red satiated ‘haling
The in and the ex
Waves ebbing and flowing across your rocks
My hair gritted with your sands
Dipping my foot, you ripple
You sing back at me with your semblance of soul
Your deconstructed and re-romanticised child of a subconscious
The school choir after the school shooting
We clumsily construct short and slippery windows of ecstasy
Presents at the feet of each other’s trees
Echocardiographic anomalies
Happy accidents, back and forth
In your flaking paint
In your smudged mascara
Stuck under fire in the trenches at the corners of your eyes
Anxious breasts and gigantic white wings
And everything that implies
I’m the shot you’re given
For the rusty cuts of the passage of time
And I’m the shot you take
To burn clean the factory floor at the back of your throat
To take the edge off your night
So blunt my sides with your dirty yes and your free-falling hair
Skydiving grace
Dark-spotted sheets and suicidal springs
Notch-worn posts and detective under-covers
Your softest smiles on my darkest
My softest on you
Hanging at the mercy of the varied trusts in our orbit
One complete universe
Satisfied and shelved
The grand and invisible exhibition
Swelling inside our skins
Pound my dreams in with a fire
For a comfortable coma’s clutch
Sleep turns you into a liar
Pouring screenplays out of places
You can’t bear to look
Don’t care to look
Looking glass dismantled
Situation handled
Little lumps under the rug
I had a nightmare
Where I grew up
Bank accounts and
Dependant strangers
Sick republic
Of household chores
Parking tickets
And census laws
In a day spent awake I’m a patient
I’m a patient
I’m a casualty of horrible war
Staying patient
I’m beside myself with nothing at all
I’m adjacent
I’m adjacent to no one but a wall
Separation
I had a nightmare
Where I was a person
A functional robot
Statistically white
Statistically legal
Empirically short
On love or a want
I wanted to call you
Before I could realise
I don’t even know you
Whatever a you or who could be
A lone and idle mind
Dreams a city of people
But I’ve got nothing to say to you
Trapped beneath my sunken sheets
Look to the sky
Heaven’s a lie
Open my eyes
Crutch up my legs
Deliver a shock to me
Wake me from a tragedy
Code blue
He needs a fucking nurse
Defibrillate
Or book the hearse
Dig me a hole
Ten foot by three
Or drag me up
From this dreadful dream
And every day I’m waking up
Until I’m waking into this
And then when waking up
I won’t be able to wake up
Again
We stake out wishes
Across the stars
On birthday candles
On credit cards
27
Scraping heaven
Room with a view
A view of the floor
Here is my home
Lock up the door
27
Scraping heaven
Not 18 now
27
The more the soot
Falls out of the sky
And paints me grey
The more I’ll die
Time really flies
In an episode
Where the fuzzy lines
Subtly explode
I lost my head
Several me-s ago
Several screaming scissors
Cutting out my throat
Every cut I carved
Was a ladder step
Knocking on the roof
Can I come in yet?
27
Give me heaven
Not 18 now
27
The crow kicked out the murder
For his broken wings
27
27
Cogs for teeth in God’s metal mouth
Missing the days of
Sailing through sunshine
Heart shaped name on my tongue
Dream shaped smile on my eyes
In the old van
On the old roads
Every song on the CD
An uncanny dissection of
The curvature of my
Giddily unrequited wants
Scalpels along the seams
Of my swollen anticipation
“She feels it too”
And she didn’t
I couldn’t nor need have
Seen the woods
For the red confetti
A lovely fog on me alone
My father’s driving
Undisturbed
Take me to the place she is
And we’d be
Too many at any time
For my earth to move
But every little thing
Felt like something
Like pushing the car
Too sun scarred to start
Up the interstate towards
Not quite heaven
Maybe somewhere less sad
Maybe your place
