Urbia
The city leaves little starshine.
Shampoo gurus and strands and strings
Play the song they sing.
In the place we try to replace,
Withering away, building new buildings on top.
But the crystal city seems to unravel
Like a child’s shoelace.
The streets drown the eyes,
Like the hair of a lover
Who pulls in close to the face.
Don’t think of it. Don’t think of it.

Among the dogs and dying things
There's a long droning monotonous hum.
All syllables of thought and parables of the past
Poured over with Summer Sundays
And the future grew through a crystal glass.
Yet retracted across its own bones by Wednesday
With all time on a woman's fingertips that tap at a screen.
The thoughts unsaid and yet seen
(For who dares to say)
Sizzle softer with another yesterday.
Afterall, the calendar unfolded
And the story it told said
The time will come.



So I summoned a thousand nights
And sent them yonder into yesterday.
Crusading and fading for an empty grail.
That last prize lost
Was beautiful the way fantasies tend to be.
Agile

Her face drips the drops to drench
And covers the mind
As though drawn across *******'s blinds
As the excretion of my gender bears a stench.
She leaks over my mind.
Let this image fade.
Let the ledge invite.
Let her mascara masquerade cascade in the tears on our faces.
Yet her flavour is the delicious stench
That covers my mind, filthies and fills it
With desires and a face.
Perhaps her face sullied with no sea of tears.
Perhaps the rain and lilac ridden sky
Left her not to cry, cloudless and clear.

Look back to the city, you fool.
There in those great cubicles
A thousand stand on ledges
Ready to fall.
But no one would know,
For they hide behind windows,
Working away in those offices.

Forget these harsh things, look to the world that is
Among the dogs and dying things.
There's a long droning monotonous hum
That escalates the scattered, sordid and rancid
To a pattern previously faded,
Dwindling and outshone beneath a thousand starlights
Or simply her sweet semblance in the night.

The night drew itself across the scene
Like velvet over thin thighs and there was Ursula.
Her face drawn and painted like some artists scheme
Her round eyes the piercing blades of a peninsula.

The awkward moments couldn’t live long for some reason.
"You once told me you feared the ocean."
"That's because there's a place that steals and bends the light and offers no more, but a slithering flowing crystal. That dries and lies ‘I will quench the thirst and drench to drown away the filth’. But only chills flesh into a collection of bumps against the skeleton."
"It's strange to agree on such a particular decision."  
"And yet we agree?"
“We do.”

We began as a muttering that giggled
Through restaurants and you wriggled
Into my arms when you were scared by the darkened
And I laughed that you were so easily frightened.
You told me oaths were a thing of fear
And vows were a virtue.

We drank and lapped from bottles.
We whined and divined
And found in vino veritas,
Walking the streets that sound
With a muttering command to pass.

Then as the tears rolled
She peeled me layer from layer.
She made a vow, vulnerabilities will be safe.
She told me she made incisions and bled.
I told her where my skin was thinnest.

Then for three weeks I collapsed
Into thoughts and dreams.
Into fair nightmares
That procrastinated throughout the day
With only soft mentions of her from friends
And then by night brought me away
And pulled me towards joint ends.

I waited three weeks before a word.
Then breaking I told her of my feelings,
And she told me she was taken.
So, in glades of shade,  
Where the luminous touch dares not draw near,
She decayed me from sleep then
Shattered my ribs to sharpen them.

I wish we had just hated each other. Instead
She leapt into my arms with a smile on her face
When we were together at a drinking affair,
And after a while, she slept on my shoulder.
I rested my head on her raven hair.
We and a friend left the others
Away into that house of hers.

Our friend and you
And that boy who loved you
All curled into one bed.
A branch rapt on the window pane.
Hence we left it open,
So the night could cuddle up with us.
I wish we had hated each other instead.
But I dreamed we'd be again,
If friendship was continuous.
Not that we ever were really.
I like to dream, in our defense,
We were under the influence.

Your leg lay on my covers,
Braun begged to creep over
And unbend my elbow.
You asked why men love movies of romance.
I didn't dare the disturbance,
Saying 'I don't know.'

You received a call, you left laughing.
The boy knew who you were talking to
And hearing you laugh to the man you loved
Tore his insides to shreds.
I slept at five, your friend woke me at six.
I wish we had just hated each other instead.
I caught the train to school.
I remembered,
'Most of the time I dream of the dark hue
But last night I dreamt of you.'

I spoke Spanish to flirt with a bottle of iced coffee.
I wasn’t going to waste years of my life on lessons and not be ****.
The clocked rotated to two.

I did it again,
I did it again with the same woman.
She didn’t say it this time,
But I always get the plan she could be mine.
After I knew I loved and hated her,
But knew more than that, that that
Made no difference with a woman so fair and far beyond me
I collapsed against the floor, again.
I ran out of the house,
To spare me my paralysis.
Because this time I knew what to do.
I couldn’t woo, I wouldn’t ask the impossible questions anymore
And more, I could not breathe.
The clock rotated to four.

I told a friend I was scared,
It’s not what I always try,
Or perhaps this continuous
Superfluous display, is but a lie
That has broken my mind.

I did it again,
I did it again with another woman.
She didn’t say it this time.

Friends and I met and made regrets.
Jack, James and Daniel
Hid beneath my draws for hide and seek played with parents.
The glass danced well
By the sight of light.
We went out for a night.
I sang drunken sailor.
I entered the stage,
White weft through my hair.
I sang at your window,
From the ground where I fell.
You peered past the afterglow.
Your lover cursed with 'Hell.'
Eventually I stood and left,
Once my legs relearnt their pace.

Your man made a lie.
That I returned and am of the kind
That perches upon your shadow
And not to be seen, leaves.
From you the lesson learnt was that
Love lives between the eyes hollow knowing
And the darkness it weaves.
Whilst loathing and fear flows by the ear
And festers through the whispers of rumour and word.

So she draped herself in shawls of shade
And the swirling words slither by her neck
And by the break of day
She still persisted in her own pooling conversation
That was kissed to life by the lips and tongue
That run to persuade her dress and tresses of shadow
To an overwhelming deception.

I heard her echo through a friend
With words 'pathetic' and 'vulnerable'
And beyond that
We never spoke again.
I watched you on blurring lines
Pass as a muttering
Across the street, from time to time.  
I watched you veil your face
And drape the shawl across your visage
And take the shape of splashes diving into water.
I heard it said I lost nothing but a weakness,
But I could hardly see your pixelated picture
And be painless.  

A season or two and a few novels later.
The grass wept with the midnight dew
And electric lights went through
And shimmered greyly to my eyes.
So insignificant in each individual piece
That one grey blur stretched the entire lawn.
I sat in that park and thought of a girl
The only who peeled me and pulled me.
Who taught and touched me
And felt winter upon the precipice of my eyes.
As though trenches through the Rhine
I felt the wrinkles and dementia
Rolling down my face,
And the inertia of your grace
Was too strong to hold away.
Were it said simply, if anything can be.
I missed the woman and the face of she.

The day came.
It began with messages and images
Pouring from the screen in bubbles,
Your name sprinkled their talk.
Then I saw a link,
And the light shone from my screen.

I have seen these places before.
I have seen the faces and the decor
And I have now seen the door
That women take into it.
I have one last hope,
That she has not done this with regret.
At least it pays well
And she may do it well
With her lover.

Each disappear like dates in improper filing.
Every slither. Every scrap.
Every silver lining.
I will do it again.
I will do it again with another woman
And she won’t say it this time.
I seem to have fallen for a dream
And simply keep changing her face and the voice
That breaks me.

Across black, my dogs run like stallions,
Stretching and contracting limps and tendons.
Then as I return from work, I find they brighten
Draining, darkening ends of evenings.
But the weak sinews of monkey's flesh
Compel us. To them it is the tempest
Of a thousand lifts and falls in a mess,
Indistinguishable barks in a mesh.
As we shout, dogs must think us mean creatures.
Someday, what will my wordless child observe?

The street seems calm enough to me,
With sentry lights and lunar memorials up high.
I weave with whatever air I find
My voice can shape
And my brain
Not quite empty
For I have a headache.

With each dusk, red recedes into darkness.
Empty desires echo like antique rhymes
Of Shakespeare, speaking of love fictitious.
Like apes to grapevines, up my desire climbs,
Incoherent growls of primal intent
For fruits. Perhaps a date among the thorns.
Gold light diminishing, as the moon's moment
Looms aloft, with a pale and nervous form.
The passage of time and carnage of thoughts
Project an old, desperate fantasy
On my bedroom ceiling. My feelings caught
In my true knowing none shall come to be.
The veins of time having washed off notions
That these desires could lead to devotions.

Is it set in stone? Or does that matter?
There's what I've known, the vices and virtues,
The truths I believe and the vast scattered
Universe that hardens the path into
Certainty and leaves few beliefs behind.
For all those who seek all certainties,
Unwilling for flawed faults to fully fill,
Let limited knowledge in vacancies.
Recall that none know all and fools fully fill
The world from rim to rim. From each corner
Of the Earth they spill over vale and hill,
And giving freely to the coroner.
Accept that you may be an idiot
And always learn from every regret.