Eventually they fade
they really do.
Until what you miss is the corflute outline
of where a body used to stand.

You reminded me  lately,
of how my name sounds
on another person's tongue,
spoken softly and with lust

and you reminded me of intimacy,
without the need to be in love.

A broken heart one year on looks like
a life I'm quietly putting back together.
Stitching contentment and peace into
the lining of curtains that open onto new landscapes,
growing bold in solitude.

Loneliness is still a ghost in the corner
but these days he is more polite with his interruptions,
and I breathe in more oxygen than lonesomeness.

You still find me in the quiet hours and sometimes I give in,
sinking backwards in the surf and noise of lost love.
but these days I float more readily,
back to the surface.

How could it mean nothing to you?
you ask me,
of the way our bodies moved together
surrounded in blue midnight and the sounds of revelry

How could I feel nothing
for your weight against me and your mouth on mine,
wrapped in the twilight bubble we made from gin and hours of dancing.

I feel nothing because
I still stand across the ocean I created
to distance myself from the hurt you flooded me with,
and I refuse to meet you in the middle of it all
to drown ourselves in the love we lost.

That night I felt drunk and expansive
and I missed the way you touched me
but the ocean still remains between us
and we now stand on different shores.

Sometimes you reach out
through phone cables and the distance of towns and topography,
to tell me you are sorry
for your carelessness
and the barren landscape it created
where nothing could flower

and I add your words to the compost and topsoil I've nurtured
alone
over time and distance
from the heart you broke, sadness and rust and the words you spoke,

to grow my own garden
of flowers and fruit.

chloroplasts are absent in a human body
the green ability to turn sunlight into energy
known only by the plants
deep-rooted in the earth
growing quietly on slower time

but photosynthesis
is the conversion of light into energy
and I like to think
I am more rooted in this quiet greenery
than the bustle of a human landscape,

and the feeling of sunlight
on my face and my arms and my bare feet in the dirt,
makes me feel like growing.

Come home,
my mother's voice suggests along 2,581 kilometres of phone cabling.

Come home to the hazy heat
that beats off melting pavement and wilting plants,
to the smell of exhaust
squeezing between buildings
and suburbs and rush hour and neon lights,

Come home to the aggravated traffic
wending its way through concrete landscapes
eight lane snakes placating
the clack and hum of underground trains
packed with people and briefcases and beers and graffiti
spilling out onto the streets like cough syrup glugging out of the bottle.

You sound like you need to come home.

Nah, I'm good Ma,
because I don't know how to tell you
the city makes me feel trapped

a little creature with an anxious heart
boxed in by the tarseal and the fumes and the noise.

I like knowing the borders of a town
that doesn't stretch to the horizon
driving quietly on sleeping streets in the night time
and tracing the coastline with my feet in the water

I need the sky to touch the ground, not the ragged edges of a skyline
to walk until there's nothing
but me and the bush and the birds,
and the smell of mud and dirt and rain.

I like it here, I suggest along 2,581 kilometres of phone cabling,
but I do miss you.

There's a museum
where love once welled freely,
a collection of relics and odds and ends,
carefully preserved behind glass panes and neat labels
gathering dust and history.

Sometimes I walk the quiet aeortic halls
treading familiar corridors to the echo of footsteps,
to read the plaques and leave fingerprints on the windows
exhibiting the old lives and old loves,
which have traded technicolour for antiquity

the night watchman of my own heart.