Part One - Before we ever met
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She was a clean thing, but didn't ever scrub herself, or soap herself, like the other girls would.
Instead she’d sometimes slide away from the house and crawl down the side of the valley into the river.

The river that would swell suddenly in the night after some storm, forcing its way violently through the forests in the valley, lifting things and sometimes, someone said, even moving a tree.

And there she'd sit, cold and calm in the river. Naked and shivering in the dark water, neck deep so she looked like a funny little round thing bobbing on the water, blinking.

She wasn’t afraid, anymore, that her past was looking for her.
That great metaphor, swooping through the night  like a Hawk, but with a giant human nose, trying to smell her from some long distance away,
with claws and flight and that giant human nose,
But she knew if it ever did catch up with her, at least she would be clean.

In the coldest months the river really did drag entire trees away.
And facing downstream, always anticipating some fatal blow from behind, she felt just like another winter bruise the river had claimed.

Then in the summer months the water just hung about, slapping cheekily against the fertile banks where the budding flowers were tickled by streams.
Little trickles that raced against the blossoms for who could reach the river first.

Submerged in the water her skin was secretly a beast. And she loved to be in it.  

Part Two - After we had met
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One day she's suddenly looking at me through the kitchen window waving a saw.
“Have you still got that blue silk smoking jacket?”
…
“I want to skin a rabbit and thought we could dress up and do it together, skin it together out in the disused airfield behind the train station.”

I want her to be my girlfriend, she kinda already is, but without any actual *******, so I say “yeh, yeh, that's just the kind of thing I'm into.”

..and she makes me wear this old blue silk jacket I found in the attic, but inside out, with the shiny paisley interior showing on the outside.

..and she wears a skirt over her jeans and I tie colourful sweet wrappers in her hair. Whispers and Crunchies, and a couple of Mars Bars.

And she's got a dead rabbit roadkill she found already, and we go to the airfield and saw it up.

Another time, there is no girl
In her beautiful truck
And there’s no me
Hitchhiking lonely beside the road
But there is a Kaleidoscope
Hung from a tree like a dead camel
Draped seductively in red bed sheets
But the twist is
When you look into the Kalediscope
You see her again
But now she’s got a purple flower in her hair
And is playing Jazz on a Harp.
And she sees you.

Beneath the sleep
where you yourself slept
(nestled like a silent Simile)
Dug down deep in your dream's dry dirt
you uncovered a splendid city

And chiselled deap into the Egyptian door
(in letters cold and golden)
dictated from a cat eyed god
was a holy lonesome poem

“Forsake the riches of Osiris
and the stolen light of Ra
Atlantis can’t be found in dreams
For it's the dream that holds them all.”

And like the mountain slowly crawling
across the land before us
(and the sea so swiftly curling
into its own abyss)
You yourself woke again to the “sosiety offs ‘is’ ”
where Atlantis is a state of mind
and the mind a state of bliss.

Gravity you godless equation
I just don’t understand you.
but apparently I am always to obey you
all because i’m made of matter

and you describe something so fundamental
about reality
You demand that I’m forbidden to just float about
but get this, Gravity, you unrelenting law,
i’m an equation as well !

Choose Your Own Adventure
Ok, maybe I will.
and I burnt the book.
It wasn't spectacular in the least
a pathetic adventure
but as I poked my finger deep into the smoldering ash
I remembered getting lost in Hanoi
in my youth
in the middle of the night
intoxicated
in summer
insecure
in search of a bed
and sleeping in my clothes under a bridge
burning my passport to keep warm.

Negation , as a verb
as if there is something to be done
and something to do it
but we all know the nots are already there

You want metaphor?
I point at the shadow of my finger.
The baby opens its eyes and is statistically bathed
in the dim light of Andromeda.
The inkless pen scratches out it's words.

I see, you want the plausible?
The heuristics bores you?
I personally, am standing before this specific tree
on this specific day
and I am staring defiantly towards this specific twig
waiting to see it grow.

It 'aint that I'm teasing you
it just that I've never known a better way.

yellow ***** shadows drip
lights that light your street
run down rundown walls
splash across my feet
pool into the gutters
dreams that fell asleep
London, you are a bleakness burnt
you pale and placid deep.

I held my hands and they felt fantastic
I tasted my tongue
Cross-eyed, I examined my eyeball
( with my other one )
I tried to contemplate my own mind
but, to my horror, I found it contemplating me instead.

My hand loses it's grip, and the string falls onto the concrete pavement
I remember a colourful mosaic floor of a restaurant in Sardinia
and a carved carrot that looks like a flower in thailand
and being told to wipe with old newspaper to avoid smears when cleaning windows
and the moon is not the same way up in both hemispheres
suddenly my friend is here again, "I told you not to let go of it" he laughs.

Lets not construct anything then
and bypass analyses altogether

lets just seem to be
foam that fizzes above the Gaussian sea
momentarily
then splash back to be pure statistical chance

So I see this guy stop in front of me and smash his radio against the lamp post
earphones still dangling from his face
and I wonder if he bought it at the $1 store.
It is night time and the street is dry
perhaps it is summer.

Those mountains came closer
today whilst your pale face browns
and things spin around each other
and open up into themselves
and curl towards you timidly.

Another Decade folds into your face.

I wasted my day again hanging around the market place
leaning on the wall pretending to feel bored
hoping someone would take me for a fool
and offer me a job.

Midday, this brown haired man in his Japanese van
asks if I’d lift a sofa for 20 pounds
(poor fool doesn’t know that money is meaningless to me)
Fell asleep for a moment on the short drive up the hill
and ran away when he stopped for gas.