I believe more people
Than would care to admit it
Have a crying bench.
Because crying in bed is a luxury
Afforded only to those for whom
Bed is a haven
And to bury your head
In the place nightmares find you
Is against every instinct we have.

Time does me no favours.

We meet sometimes
Our eyes make no such connection.
Time away from me freshens your face in every instance,
Draw out the premature creases.
The secrets we hold are nothing, now;
Ill-remembered exaggerations that make life now seem that way.
Almost easy.

Our eyes meet sometimes.
Haunted, mud-brown.
If I closed my eyes and challenged you
You would say they were green.
I grasp at the closeness you offer me
Laughing it off as my working through the problems
Using it to demonstrate the changes that haven't occurred.

I met you, once.
I was shorter, smaller, almost bony.
You were chinless, smelled of sweat and anger.
Blue tee, green jacket, mud-eyes, mud-hair, mud-nails.
You said hello.

Call the young and call the grown
Spectres from an early home
Let each memory unfurl;
Each one that was once my own

Fays that only knew my name
Nestled as before they came
Sprites that tap and talk and twirl
Somehow different and the same

Through the shutters, through the skies
Isolated streams and tries
Capped and callow, summer girl,
Always hated long goodbyes.

A little life with
Works and schemes
And white hairs strangled in the snow
Feathers more than choked I hope,
Well oh **** help me...
Let me go?

Snow Callie.
One Callie
Cally-in-the-Spring.
That's maybe what they'd call you
Based on what your life could bring.

So many names invented
Based on hedgerows where you hide
Tell me you're not lurking there
- or tell me you're alive -
Don't. I see you Em, and Em and maybe all besides
I see you smile sadly and the lonely long low tides
The waves crash on; I think I know - I see the way she smuggles much
I know she smuggles something and yet never quite enough

Break rocks and snap her feathers
but maybe do not curl her
locks
For I know she's taking notes and her world will be made of rocks.

I should have been a creature with one claw
Snatched up newborn from the ocean floor
My song the scream of water through my shell
**** to buy and little more to sell
I would have paused to blink my one good eye
I would have heard the universe’s sigh
My song the scream of water through my shell
And no more than a minute spent in hell

Mila knows there's nothing further
Nothing outside this great blue -
Make a song for me, my darling.
I will make a song for you.

I will be very honest darling
But Mila likes yours too
No-one comes for us now, sweet thing,
Not for me, her, not for you

But if you cry then maybe I will
And then she'll be crying too.
And you should trust me on this point
because I swear I told it true.

So you should tell her not to cry, dear,
No-one listens anyway.
More important just to be here
Let her breathe another day.

Letting someone step round me,
and coiling further in my bed,
and editing my privacy,
and choosing to eat first, instead,
are gestures small for them to see
that I'm not going where I'm led
but this is something hard to be,
for one who believes what is said
and one whom, when they cannot flee,
is hoping that they can't be read
and one whom, as they can't be free,
once chose to live inside their head

If time could tell someone but me
I'd tell them to be swift, for all to see;
I'd listen close; the toll, the bell
And sink down to my private hell.
For what is hell if not my mind
With very little left to find;
No-one would search within my shell-
Now none remains in which to dwell
And much is lost, but something's found
In finding my feet on the ground.
And though I choke at every swell
I mostly loathe the tolling bell.

There's something that some folks will always tell us
When they're doing things we never got to do
They'll look at us and their sadness will burn us
And then they'll say "You know, I once loved you"
A million days will come and pass and dry up
A million memories drying with the dew
But when they look they'll turn away, and sigh, love
And they'll say "You know, I always did love you"
The world will change by leaps and bounds and glances
The world won't change at all without its due
The world won't change but there'll be those that suffer
And what they did for me, I'll do for you