tonight the sun died
like every other night, it bled red for hours
leaving a trail of stained clouds
to a place we aren’t allowed to see
and this tragedy was watched without a word

tonight is calm and without thought
the silhouetted trees look at me,
a small shape in the yellow frame of my window,
and listen to me
more than anyone else has today

my breath floats gently up to the moon.
i stare as it reaches greater heights than i ever could
and as particles from inside of me are dispersed into the sky
no one at all notices


I pull the shutters closed
and immediately nothing outside exists
my reality consists of me
and my bed
and my tired head
and I crawl into the space between the covers
and it is only me there
and if I stretch out my limbs to the four corners, they do not touch anything
because I am the only island around
and the sound of my breath is like the tide
drawn in and out by the moon
but it is just me who hears it.

i get tired on the phone to you

after we’ve said all we have
to say about our day
and the line is filled with the white noise of our background lives
crackling in and out

hear me out, i say
there’s no point in delaying
what we already know to be true
and that is
i miss you

the rest of this call might as well be spent
with the exchanging of short, saturated words
but know that i am content to sit in your silence
and to imagine the borders of our lives blurred

until finally we are pulled out of half-sleep
and i realise we can’t keep
not talking
until the morning

today i went for a walk in the park
and saw all that my life was meant to be

the waiting sky i thought, was what I
might have painted
if I painted
and if I pictured things the way they could be,
not the way they might have been

the trees whispered to me words
which I might have written
if I wrote
and if I could translate the dread in my head
into a language others might understand

and all the people showed me who I wasn’t
and who I would never have been
a diversity seen between beech trees and picnics
does not mean I have to be any one of them
but myself

every passerby
a reminder, a promise
that not all those who wander are lost
and that paths don’t have to cross
and that humans are nomadic by nature
and soon
soon i’ll move on

my grandmother was a person who could fly
and don’t even try to tell me I imagined that
because I saw it with my own two eyes,
and I never asked why, or how

when she had the time, my grandmother used to climb
up all of the stairs with me, and when we reached the roof
****! she had disappeared, off into the great blue sea of the sky
and I used to wonder why she brought me with her

was it so I got used to seeing her disappear
because when it really happened, she did disappear,
only this time it was down, not up,
and mum got all choked up
and wouldn’t look me in the eye

was it so I knew that she could do it,
so that when it really happened I could understand
that the place where she came to land might be somewhere else,
somewhere above the clouds, not like everyone else’s grandmothers who just ended up underground

my grandmother could fly, and I used to stare up at her
as she swooped between the tangled wisps of cloud,
perhaps planning the route for later on, planning how
she might get up to the golden gates before it was too late,
and there was no light to see by,

and she had to find her way in the dark

she glanced at the ceiling
and it smiled back at her

how polite, she thought
but really it wasn’t like that,
it was merely smiling because it was comfortable,
and it was comfortable to be above her and keep her underneath,
and it was comfortable to gaze at her life
and to see the people who came and went
and the people who came and went and then didn’t come back

it was comfortable because it was light entertainment:
the constant motion of her daily tasks and always, always
the notion that it would always be like this
just her and the ceiling
just the ceiling and her
smiling back at her as she lay on the carpet and made angels with her arms and legs, who floated up

beyond the ceiling

and carried on

to somewhere else

a dark and stormy night,
no not a cliché, the real deal,
a real storm that you can feel,
eyes peeled, waiting for the next —

lighting spikes the sky, except
you keep missing it out of the corner of your eye.
you wonder why, if perhaps the sky rumbles the way your tummy does when it’s hungry.

it rains, for a while

perhaps the sky is hungry, cracking apart with flashes, like fissures through heaven
zig zag, a wait. a lag. and then the wave breaks
and then count the seconds

how close is it?

close enough to echo around the secret corners of your room
it reaches every one, harbinger of doom
a black crack, a churning, buckling, godless groan, you’ve never heard anything so big
it wants, it booms