There are stories to tell...
Some good and some
not so
good
They remind me of wooden stars
hanging
on a dusty old ceiling
Ignored but never forgotten
They were dull like
dreams in the morning
and yet they
scream
much like a nightmare
These stories... they whisper
sometimes to haunt
and sometimes to
justify their
existence
But as with all stories
written or told
the end leads to
another...

An army of little girls
poke dandelions through the skin of
every man who could hurt them.

Blades in a briefcase, hide several
between their legs
until the wetness chafes her

right where the dark funnels
stop. The big people and his crosses –
armpits made of porcelain then dug

into little girl gardens,
a meadow of dandelions scrawled:
we do not give you ourselves

but we will give you our blood.
Their masculine fingers could not win,
too harsh for bald skinned little girls.

i.
He told her
That mathematics was too
Sombre.
Too, too
Linear
To be poetic.

She said that
He had only seen himself
In a mirror,
A reversed hologram
Of his external self
Burned into his retinas with
His subconscious filling in the gaps.

But she had seen him
The rays reflected straight off him
Into her eyes;
Not some half-assed reflection
Off some silvered surface.

ii.
She said that
His jawline was
The ***** of a curve
Pencilled on a graph sheet.
His candlewax skin
A wavelength
Quantifiable on paper.
His spine
A number line with
Dashes, to show real numbers
The set of which was infinite.

She said that
A Fibonacci sketch was
A minimalist rose,
A post-modern bouquet.

And that
The reflected pale morning sun
In a half finished cup of camomile tea
Was a cardioid
With fixed coordinate values on the axes
And an algorithmic tangent.

And he
Was a negative infinity
A paradox not sorted under
Quine's classification system.

iii.
She had
Recorded his heartbeat and blood pressure;
Measured the distance between his lips with her own;
Tried so hard, so very, very hard
To put him down in a numerical form
And write him off as an equation.

But all she could say was
That he was more
Than the sum total of his meagre parts
And that she
Was his reciprocal value.

I think I would rather have had gills than lungs.

To live and breathe under water would be such a ******* blessing.

A place where the icy touch of water smooths over the rough, aching edges of your skin.

A place where your screams dwindle to mere echoes at the distance of a hand-width.

Where sins wash like watercolours in the purple ache of night.

But we are creatures of the land.

Cursed with bipedalism and an unbridled view of the stars.
Naively destined to watch a movie with a happy ending,

When your own life is a car crash,

And hope.

I'm standing on weird edges
There's blood in the sky
There's a boy named Pi.

The night is black, so
old blood.  So cruelty,
I've had enough.

I was born with barbed-wire sickness.

Is your blood running high?
Blood is life,
don't spill it.

Watch the mind of day
become the mind of night.
Better is the house of mourning,

better the sky at night,
I can hear God better.
Blood runs from our eyes.

Are you facing the sky,
boy named
Pi?

I belong in these pages
Of the books on my shelf.
I try to find the answers in the words printed on the paper.
I try to prepare myself.

I belong behind the words that I write,
The stories and characters they transform into.
I search for the answers through art.

I belong at family dinners.
With my mom, my brother and dog.
Together as one.

They are my compass.
Guiding me on.

Now,
I travel across the waters alone.

I try to navigate through the fog.

My parents warnings and lessons sing as lullabies,
That play softly in the whistling wind.

They aren't my map,
They can't guide me anymore.

I have this boat around me.
But the choppy waves never stop.
They batter the hull.
As salty sea crashes over.
I take in gulps of ocean as I try

To navigate my way back to shore.