I laid a galaxy to rest today,
A journey of discovery,

Through stars and feeling and ultimately to tragedy,
It burned out from building planets into nothingness,
comet fire dying quietly in the atmosphere above.

And I buried it in the ground to feed the roots of a new universe,
Leaving flowers on headstone for the Galileo in my heart.

world-weary,
we sipped coffee,
one black,
one milk and sugar
brewed tentatively by hearts not quite unbroken
in an effort to mend the damage.

As usual you are fluent and fluid in words my tongue could not replicate,
You are a waterfall when I am a drought.

One day, maybe you'll speak to me, you say.

One day maybe I could tell you,
I held earthquakes and landslides in my bones
and clawed my way above the mud and debris to breathe again.
I emerged the sun of my own universe
and I am afraid to ever let that go.

Can't you just love me again?

A whisper-wisp through the dark,
spoken in the night to familiar walls
you're helping your brother
paint a different colour,
masking forever words those walls have heard
and the time
I took acid
at your birthday
and watched the 70's wallpaper you've covered up melt like heated crayons
to join me on the floor,
rolling rainbows and laughter through the air in a technicolour soup,
in an effort to forget your face in the next room.


But can't you just love me again?

You want more than friends who are occasionally lovers,
to find meaning in the familiarity we sometimes share,
to amalgamate two bodies confidential in their knowledge of one another,
to illuminate my heart with another chance.

But you forget I say
into the silence and the drying Irish linen,
I've repainted the walls within
to erase a love which rendered us strangers,
built my heart its own house with no room for a former life,
so your words can do nothing but knock,
at a front door
now forever politely closed.

Sometimes I find myself
wedged inside a conversation,

comparing wallpaper and mortgages,
company vehicles and baby names,
struck up by friends,

over the same beers we drank discussing
politics and *** noodles,
life after university and ******* on acid

marvelling at the galactic deviations that occur
in the crevasse between your early twenties and
twenty six.

You confuse me he said,
you with your gypsy heart I couldn't ease
and the reckless galaxies inside your mind
bursting like comet fire through a black sky.

I confuse myself I think,
inside a whirlwind of love and debris
I am growing like a **** towards the sun,
and yet each new flower still holds the embers of an old flame.

Always I look to you as the sea looks to the shoreline,
trace your stoic edges and retreat, leaving seafoam and whispers,
or crash with rage and waves against your certainty
that I do not understand.

Today I am a galaxy, maybe tomorrow I am the moon,
but always I am saddened by the tides that pull me back from you.

Under the mountains
it smelled of snow,
and I brushed summer's leafy retreat off the hood of my car
in swathes of yellow and red.

I drove for two hours the other day
hungover and heartsore
because of beer and veins still filled with concrete  
to soothe the weight I feel with the sounds of the sea.

An hour from my town
is the furthest point I could be from the ocean.
Under the mountains,
their shaky doubles ripple in the lake,
in of itself a shaky reflection of the sea.
There's a push and pull woven in my bones
tied to the tides and the waves I crave.