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.

One night when I was eighteen
I was drunk on beers and East end accents
in a Basildon garden lighting fireworks.

I seared my thumb
on the base of a sparked *******
which careened into the fence and dried grass,
igniting in deep welted pain
and a smallish fence fire.

Inside my skin sits once again the same ache
ignited by a spark you nurtured,
which burned us both down,
as beautiful and unruly as the rogue firework and the flames.

Cold feet hold up the weariest of skeletons.
I am sick of this limbo.

Flinging myself between two hearts in the hope one will sear an imprint
on non-existent flesh.

Nobody can love cold bones
and cold bones can love nobody
when they have no body to love.

Sphynx-like they move,
lions in the dark,
where they watch her
through hungy coals set in gaunt faces,
licking their chops for her bones.

But she is a lion tamer,
with no more bones to spare the unfed worries yowling in her peripheral,
and a tinder spark now lives where the dark once crept
to keep their hunger at bay.

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.

tumultuously drunk,
in no particular order
on love
on wine
on loneliness,


but I remember too late,
it makes me sick
when I mix my drinks.

Darling,
I have grand adventures planned.
worlds away, lives away
from what we had in mind.
you and I, now there is a thought.

Darling,
So do I, you say.
and your first grand adventure breaks my heart
through the computer screen
more casually than I could’ve thought.

What good and what tragedy will come of it?
To reach back through murky time
to air out our togetherness like winter sheets,
in hope the mustiness and dust will disappear.

To wrap you back around my skin,
a blanket of familiarity
so patched, so frayed.
Will the cold shiver through old comfort?

D day sounded like
me putting on  shoes
and turning my back on your disgrace
and the way I had organised our furniture.

I just wish I hadn't lost my headphones
because I have nothing to stonewall
the abandonment
screaming at me from every corner of this life.

You disappeared like the last winter frost,
  and I despaired like Spring.

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.

Do you remember when your voice held my name
not at ransom but aloft,
and it lulled me to sleep to hear those syllables
cocooned in comfort.

You blew back into your hometown this week
trying to hang the language of your new life in the doorways
I've repainted
on the furniture I've shifted
and in the corners of my mind
now reserved for little plants bravely growing in watery sunlight,

they're replacing your absence,
and the taste of your name on my tongue.

What is it like
to wear feelings like garments,
so boldly projecting the colours
in your mind
with no fear of respite

to wear your heart on your sleeves
like cotton,
instead of a millstone round your neck.

My new lover is an old ghost,
who picked apart armour
left bereft by rust and rain,
to sit inside my ribcage
once more throwing pebbles at my heart

I did not welcome them
to my table
or to my bed
but this ghost holds me close inside my bones,
and each morning,
I entertain a phantom
that clamours to be fed.

Take your time they said,
to learn but
don't take your time to work.

I'll take back my time I think,
and take time to explore the earth.

She drifts in and out of lives
a stray comet offering brief illumination
before setting off on another lap about the world.

how are you so heartless,
asks the earth of her lofty voyage,
here to spark heat and small hopes,
the nonchalant aftermath of your visit,
only to leave as a flash in the night.

oh to stay a comet-
if you move fast enough,  
it's easy to forget you are dust in orbit,
if you move fast enough
you are not heartless but frozen,
in constant motion to forget
your heart only exists on earth,
in those fleeting moments where you allow the ice to melt.

here, look-
you're tripping over
your feet and lost love
to show me,

so hastily taped and mended,
by your eagerness and earnest words,
the fragile parts of me
it took so long to build for you.

it was all for you,
the tiny castles
I spun from glass and love,
monuments to small braveries,
a tribute to your residence in my bones

tripping over my feet
to show you
I was strong
and that I loved you

two weeks of little loves
began,
with the smell of wet beech forest and moss
in the back of your van,
your hands were moonlit spiders
around my waist
laughter bubbling up around us in the dark,
and you tasted like smoke and smiles I couldn't see.

little loves took root
on my birthday,
running barefoot through the park stealing kisses and road cones
after sun drenched beers wrapped around my brain,
leaving me hazy in the heat and hops
and dormant hopes
I had forgotten,
taking form in the scratchy sounds of a vinyl
you gifted the night through my open porch door,
to combat the sound of cicadas.

Little loves grew roots so slowly
I didn't notice until you were gone,
We'd grown a garden instead of apart.

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.

Do you feel the pull away?
The crashing tides receding,
to run as tender rivulets along the beach
as if to say an inter-tidal goodbye to the shores

Back to the ocean
the water will run  my love,
a reminder of the times
the sea intermixed with sureness and the stones
only your shorelines could offer
a pelagic mind adrift.

Last night we tiptoed in laughing circles
around the truth we both know
a sound
a syllable
a feeling lighter than air,

a helium delirium inflating the balloons in my heart with joy.

It's hung suspended between goodbyes and goodnights,
a weightless pause spun heavy in meaning,
words made shy and sweet by the newness of it all.

And last night you rambled through your hiccups
about the importance of getting it right,
of furnishing words in fireworks and gestures  
lamenting your romanticism,
which I hang in garlands around my room
and through my mind,
throwing open the windows of both
to shout,
a sound
a syllable
releasing a feeling lighter than air,

a helium delirium of joy.

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.

too lovely
you were to stay for long,
instead
you left a tidemark on my walls,
a gentle swell and retreat I welcomed with delight and open arms
through the doors and windows,
awakened by the smell of salt and quiet happiness
and by your laughter in the waves.

And the little treasures hidden beneath,
the rocks and flowers bumping and rolling in the current
you left for me to find on the floor,
tiny keepsakes of a happy time,
reminding me
how sublime it is to float.

I was listening to Kings of Leon  
trapped on the bus for 2 hours
between a lady who had fallen asleep
and endless beech forest skimming past the window
green green grey green green grey,

until we broke through into farmland
past the national park sign
(ka kite ano ko Te Waiponamu),

and a shock of yellow broom flowers
waved us onwards past the lambs
and streams idling through the paddock.

40 minutes from home
it's stuffy and I'm carsick and hungry,
but it's Spring,
the sun's out and I'm just happy to be here.

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.