I woke up this morning
to see how your hangover wraps your face
in the creases of a sleeping headache,
last night's cigarettes still traces on your fingertips
curled around my waist.

You fell asleep last night
pressing a smile against my skin
that left me feeling tipsy,
like the beers you drank
before you called me,
to ask to bring you home.

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.

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.

The first time I kissed you (again),
we were sitting in your car,
under shadows and street-light orange,
and the impression I was going inside.

But then I found your NERF gun,
which you said was for robbers and slow drivers,
but proved more entertaining for girls
who like to sit in your passenger seat.

So we broke into a scuffle
in pools of orange light
abandoning  seat-belts and any pretence that I was leaving
to wage an epic war
inside a parked car
over ownership of the polystyrene darts.

The end came when a missile was lost to your backseat,
and we both reached for the NERF gun,
and that kiss I'd been waiting for since I'd first put on my seat-belt
materialised between the space above your handbrake
and a little plastic gun.

I could sit here
at right angles
with a computer
a clear head and course work

or

I could lounge here
at whatever
with a computer
a smoky head
and a chocolate bar

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.

Please say something, you implore
wearing a halo of uranium based fallout
lift the silence wrapped around your ghosts
hurt me
hate me
hit me with it.

Silence never volunteered itself as a barricade
it slipped its way into gaps left
by broken plates
broken bones
broken homes.

You are not the first to implore me
nor the first to disappoint me
but mutually assured destruction is a two way street
and I can't reverse the nuclear winter in my bones
just to appease the guilt you feel
for bombing everything we had.

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.

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.

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.

You stood awkwardly in my doorway to say Hello,
hiding in shadows
and my mouth formed shapes made from the stunted conversation
of strangers,
while my fingers fumbled with the light switch.

I've loved you since we were children
and now a rift the size of oceans separates us,
filled with small talk and broken ships,
and it makes me seasick.

Sunday is church day
said childhood, Mum and Mr. Jesus

I agree
said university days, a late night and a hangover
Sunday is a day of rest,
and there are many ways to keep the faith,  

like staying in bed.

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.

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.

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.

How can I blame you for your broken parts?
for a flaw that was hammered into your bones by another
until you thought it shaped the way you sit inside your skin

How did you get to be this way, you ask
how do you hide your pain to help me lessen mine?
how do you love me, both craven and curious ?

Because, I find no joy in the pain I could inflict
which for only a second would ease the dull ache in my belly.
Because I have welded myself  together from the scrapmetal anger creates, countless times
Tasting only iron and rage
and my bones are stiff from the reconstruction of yet another life.

I forgive you because you are as human as I am,
just as tired of the forgery which has weakened the frame that builds you.
Because you now control the hammer
let it build you,
or let it break you

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.

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.

You were taken from me before we were born
and so I floated and grew alone in a room for two dreaming of moons and sunlight

What are you if you are a twin,
but never had the chance to be one?

I'm half of a whole made up of two people
but now I am  all of what is left,
with a ghost
hidden in my peripherals  

Sometimes I feel I am the moon,
the moon and lunar tides
which means you must've been the sun and shores
to tie me to the earth

Because when I am alone, you are the phantom beside me reminding me of warmth,
and you are the unexplained loss I feel
standing in the sun

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.

I wanted to write
something to unravel what is going on in my head.
Lyrical sentences to explain madness.

But then I  realised,
FINALLY realised
that you are an *******
of the cruelest kind

and you don't deserve
the time I'll waste
forming my disgust at your immaturity
into beauty.

It's 3 am when you wake me
with cold hands in the shape of chords,
breathing stories and whiskey
spilled on the p.a by a guy
asking for songs.

In between saturday and sunday
you tell me about the  bikes
in town for the rally,
lining the streets in rows of inert thunder
while their people drank
and moved to the music you made.

It's 4 am
before morning finds the bluff
to light up the world's earliest hours
good morning you say
before we fall asleep,
laughing at your own joke.

just to sit in scalding water is not enough
to wash
  human days  off your skin

scrub through the dirt, the worry, the love
scrub until blood reminds you
we are more than organised paper and ink blots.

On soft paws she
comes dancing like a
slip of
silken air
to pad about the room
feigning innocence.

Then,
quick as the wisp she blew in on,
drops her guileless  disguise
in haste
to do battle with the socks
and commandeer
the newspaper fleet scattered
on the floor.

But,
in a flash
the crusade
she won
is forgotten.
because she's found a hoard
of spoils and treasure.

Among the
warm golden spills the battle claimed
on the windowsill,
she lounges,
and rumbles her tiny
lion voice,
surveying her conquered Kingdom.

Taking a seat near the door,
Curiosity sits politely through a church service
not to scoff or sneer, but to observe
Faith.

With a nod, a smile and a reassuring touch,
Faith walks quietly through the congregation,
but never quite reaches
those sitting politely,
in the last pew.

"Hey Critter,"
is how Jake greets me.
About that  dude-
he said-
he's a child.
You deserve a world better.

I was telling my
Mate Jake
that you're coming over
and he said
"good."


You don't even know him yet
I said.
Yes but from what I've heard
he said,
he's "good."

So today I was drinking whiskey and juice
and playing pool.
Then we went to a friends house and
watched the boxing.

I don't think
watching people hit each other
is exciting so I
smoked a lot
of cigarettes.

Hey Critter
Jake said,
and I know he's got my back.

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.

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.

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.

scrub it off
cut it out
**** it up
make it count
let it go

scrub you off
cut you out
******* up
make you count
let you go

scrub me off
cut me out
**** me up
make me count.
Let me go.

There will always be
flour on the bench and
today I've got banana everywhere along
with the chocolate chips
which tumbled from the sides of the measuring spoon
and bounced along the floor.

But once I've sat down covered in
butter and floury hair
and the smell of the cake
is tangible,
its worth the mess
i make to see
friends jostling for
a piece.

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.

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.

My friends and I got drunk tonight
it feels like there are fire alarms going off in my head
but it doesn't matter because tomorrow there are bacon sandwiches
******* bacon.

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.

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?

I remember what it was like
to use you as a wind break
standing on the pier at Brighton.

But I don't need you anymore
because I bought myself
a really good raincoat.

You set me alight from the inside
the fire warmed my bones.
and you eased yourself under my skin
you and happiness,
to hold me closer.

Oh the fragility of happiness.
Tall we stood arm in arm
I was impervious,unbreakable
fire burning under my paper thin skin.
you choked the flames, lost sight in black smoke.

happiness and I crumpled together like paper,
little dolls in the wind.

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.

First sound before first sight
is the spit and howl of windy sleet.

first sight the pearly water
dribbles down the hopeless window
and Cold sneaks in to hug your bones.

up into the shivering morning
two bodies leap
one earthy flesh one gossamer wisp

the faintest touch of silk
up a backbone  a thousand small soldiers
stand to attention
of the coldest kiss

next and suddenly
brisk warmth over rubbed skin
static woollen heat

the whisper of a touch
up a backbone a thousand small soldiers
slump from duty
and Cold slips and idles away

Andesitic magma
was leaching from a tectonic collision deep below
and burned itself out
on the side of a newly formed rend in the landscape
A languid lava flow both ruthless and viscous  

pyroclastic madness settled in a cooling atmosphere
forming ash and raining tephra which fell
quietly to earth  
to suffocate the burning
and everything else.

under ash clouds
under grey powder and stillness
no movement can be made.
Each breathe is sulphuric but the burning goes on

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.

To an astronaut, it's full of planets
To a keyboard warrior, it's a weapon
To a stoner, it's a state of mind packed in a cone
In a race, it's a split second of opportunity

But to me, it's just where you're missing.

Unzip,
new skin quick
neutralised Freudian slips
A spy game
so slick
well placed mortars sinking battleships

new suit
cover skin ill-suited to do business with life

find a life that suits your business
before you cover your life with a business suit.

Don't worry yourself
think of the exploring you'll do alone
no one to drag you down

alone
alone
the word rings around my head
the most depressing decibel I ever heard.

No one to drag you down because
you have SUCH an imagination
how could this POSSIBLY be a bad thing
look in the dictionary under independant; you're the definition.

definition however
finds no hold in a mind made only of galaxies
the expanse is endless
thought can stretch so thin
I lose the beginning of an idea into space
and end up floating in the quiet vacuum of my head

I needed you
to be
the corners of my mind
a framework
to attach my grandiose ideas and give them meaning
to know
that I am more than just synapses
firing at random  into the dark
that I am a physical being.

I needed you to hinge me to reality,
because otherwise
I am just stardust and matter
trapped in a skull.