Through the house
smoke is drifting
You're a ****!
No you're a ****!
cheerful exclamations mingling with the smell of salsa and the clink of beers.

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.

I am too hung over for dairy
you said
our ice cream dripped and
dribbled onto the hot chrome
and the sun was blinding me
and i was listening
to the little boy telling
his Dad about rugby
and looking at your freckles
and thinking you have nice hands.

We walked back to my house
and sat on the jesus rug
under the stolen shade of
my neighbours tree
talking about nothing and
squinting at each other because
the sun was bright until
you fell asleep sprawled on my grass.

Then mum came home and
you woke up to say hello and
she asked you about work
and you told her about how
you are a little sick of the timber yard
but it's alright.

Mum went to make a
cup of tea so you
and i walked out the front
my feet were bare on
the hot concrete and
we said good bye and
i could see that twist
in your grin
and i hugged you
so i wouldn't see it anymore.

Sometimes when i dont sleep
i imagine the day
in the yard and your
hands and that grin
and where it would have lead
if i hadn't looked away.

Hello you say as
you saunter through my door  to
flop onto the couch and
fluster me with a lazy grin.
got any food?

I am elbow deep in a bag of nachos
why?I ask suspiciously
and you smile wider.
Because I'm hungry, you say
and
kind of fried.

Of course you are
and you
laugh and grab the bag
your fingers brush mine amongst the
crinkly chips and
the artificial cheese dusting.

Who, you ask later between
crunches, is hotter. Gerard Butler or
Johnny Depp?
I nibble a chip in
consideration distracted
by your arm sneaking
around my waist.

It is obviously
Gerard I say because of
reasons I forget when you
start to kiss me.

The nachos suddenly lose
importance because
you taste like
smoke, cheese
and a friday afternoon.

I'm building myself a fortress
a tangle of bricks and mortar,
deep in the forest where you can't find me.

There are spikes on every window ledge
and a deep dark moat full of monsters,
and I'm inside the darkest room,
visor down and armour shining.

But all this doesn't matter, you wont attack with force.
The armour is useless and the walls will crumble down around me
without the help of a siege.

Because you don't need to find me,
you've already kidnapped my mind,
I can put up no fight
and so
memories well up and spill over.

All I can feel are wounds made by no swords,
empty places that ache to the bone,
armed for a fight I've already lost.

You disarm me so completely,
all I can do is surrender.

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

So many lines and laments
scribed in ink and feeling,
for the girl who is the ocean

but she is a swell and surge
too dauntless and wild,
for a lover whose bones crave the shore.

She craves the squalls and gusts,
and cast iron skies,
a worldly drift to sate the salt in her skin,
the deep pull of currents in her blood.

She is chaotic but not reckless,
she is fickle, but not feckless.
Love her boldly or not at all
her bones belong to the sea
but she will always return to the shore.

You and I went for a drive today
squeezing ourselves into your car
jostling for space amongst five years worth of love and loss
lapping an aimless mosaic
through  the streets we grew up in.

I say I want to clear the air
looking at the  scars your hands collected since I last saw them
and you say it's funny we are both so stubborn
or we would've spoken sooner
watching the road
with the wry grin that has always stayed with me

Of all the things we talk about,
the hollowness you say you feel is what echos in your face
and the steely timbre in your voice
is so different from the happiness of when we first fell in love,
and I can see it  grip your steering wheel
hidden in your broken knuckles
every time that you accelerate.

I guess                     up
I could trip
the stairs  of
my mind
in time
to find
the line

I shouldn't have crossed.

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.

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.

The minute shift it brought about
helped along by three pints and sneaky tequilas,
was enough
to generate
a fanfare.

For too long I have stooped,
trapped in the exoskeleton of an older world,
unable to move and unable to breathe,
for fear I will shatter the outer plates that hold me together.

But a little while ago,
I felt a crack rend the outliers, and a burst of colour I'd never seen before,
rainbowed happily through the split

So here I am,
cracking plates with rainbows,
with the Old World and an Exoskeleton I outgrew,
gathering new dust on the floor beside me.

And atop a hill moulded from wishful thinking and despair,
stronger arms build armour from a grin,
gnashing teeth and belly laughs.

So try me now,
because I am ready.

Time no longer falls quietly into order
the minutes and days have unravelled
digging their boots in the dust.

The hours and weeks stacked like rocks on your shoulders
as you drag time wearily along to nowhere.

Oh but to escape this ache.
Pain permeates the rocks and dust
soaking up through your soles
to lie like pebbles in a river
on your heart and mind.

But how do you run?
How to battle Time back into submission?
A solitary figure bruised and abandoned
alone in the wasteland .

Time weighs on you with the strength of ages
while the past snaps and slithers at your ankles.

Fight the claw and crushing restraints!
Emerge ****** and torn, yet victorious.
Tame the fickle measure of life
and send the past yowling back to its murky world.

Square your shoulders and lick your parched lips.
March on, you will conquer the wasteland yet.

Schizophrenic,
the way we love.
your love and my love bind my hands,
a straightjacket ,inside rage is trapped,
a pent up swirling vortex futile against tender restraints.

Yours is the voice in my ear,
at war with the angry noise in my head.
‘Love’ you whisper across the space and dark between us,
reassuring the buzz and hum of desperate uncertainty.

Your hand slips into mine, rescue in torrid waters
Anger surrenders, too tired to howl and rage.
‘Love’ I breathe back, and the noise becomes distant

Once when we were kids
Mum had fun throwing a dinner party.

I could tell because
there were stains on the tablecloth
but no one was crying,
and the food upgraded from sausage rolls to Sushi and Olives.

I want one-
-You can't, Mum  said they're for adults-
I want a Olives-
     said the back of my 4 year old sister as she went to try the
New Thing.

The Olive was carefully chosen and examined with 4 years of culinary expertise,
swirled around a gummy mouth and
promptly returned to its post.

It was yuck -
she informed me and her breathless twin from the safety of the veranda
after weaving her way through the adult legs strewn around the Good Lounge without even so much as a
'woe betide you child if you're in here again.'

So we sat and thought about parties and Good Lounges and woe betides
drinking juice,  
and watched our Uncle fill his plate with sushi and olives,
singing tonelessly to ABBA
before spilling his beer on the floor .

Throw your line down
and sit with me below,
beside the cray pots and the fish.

remember the gifts the sea gave up
the rocks and stories that made their way into my pockets
for your indifferent hands to overlook on the windowsill.

Throw your line down
beside the ***** and tangled weeds,
and remember a single line
is not enough to tame an undertow
that sings arias to the moon.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Please don't speak to me
about the universal movement of time,
I feel as much as the next human,

days marked by solar rotations
restless nights under changing lunar faces
and the chameleon nature of life as history etches a path in skin.

And while time will while away
pulled along by the ebb and flow of currents,
and history is lost on ancient tides,

pull away my new skin
and underneath as always
you remain the center of my gravity

an infinite pull I can't help but follow.

At dawn on my twenty fifth birthday
416 pilot whales beached themselves,
in the shallow tides at Farewell Spit.

I woke to rain on the wooden roof
of my new flat
and confused myself in unfamiliar blankets and
the words of your message,
written heartfelt and wobbly
in the early hours before morning,

caught in the marine ebb and flow,  
that stranded us too.

Hiya what can i get you?
fingers tap on the polished wood
of the bar they sit in front of
Their faces sag
like the coats they shrug off
lowering their old bones into chairs

two jamesons please
gentlemen hands fumble for wallets
for money
for the sweetheart
easing an old mans' troubles
with ice and a measure of whiskey
behind the bar

that's nine dollars twenty
thankyou my darling
a crisp new note in a weathered old hand
thats an old hand at weathering life
you're welcome

into the whiskey they sigh
away an old man's aches
I polish the glasses
while they polish
their glasses
and polish off
glasses
of whiskey.

Why do you still occupy
the nooks and crannies of my head?
Drifting up through the cracks in the plaster
bent nails and poor construction
hammered hastily into place

How do you fill
my vacant minutes with shadows of you?
Your outline walks beside me on the street, wound up in my headphones
the echo of your daydream touch
a humming static on my skin

How still do you fall asleep beside me
when I am wrapped in the disquiet of a restless night?
How do you ease yourself into my brain like its nothing
and hide among synapses that try so hard to lose you

And how still to lose you?
When the thought of you occupies the wasted time
that escapes order and control
and slips under the floorboards

And in that quiet and that dark
is where you and I occupy,
held together by the wandering nature of thoughts,
that find their way into the nooks and crannies of my head

The thought of you is indifferent to my hasty plaster work,
and
the thought of you is intoxicating.