You stole my last cigarette and coughed red all over the ashtray. Fountain like it overflowed with our combined wants. Your limbs seemed annexed from your mind and flew all over the place, like across my shoulders, and I had to wriggle out. You drew sticky lines in ash and spit, into a ***** table.

Your mindlessness serves you well, in times like these.

All I could do was collect the half smoked butts and construct them into something not new but at least poisonous. I keep it far from you, though you’re paying as much attention to this as the last bi-election.

Your mindlessness serves you well, in any time.

My smoke creates a protective screen between us, unhappily easily broken by a waving hand or a breath exhaled forcefully. But it’s all we have, so we sit quiet and in our own worlds. You’ve got bats and old songs in your head while I have ****** in mine. Every second of silence is a plot to **** you, every puff, a breath, a gift, a warning. I’d give you anything you want because soon you will be gone and I will take it back.

Everything. The gifts, lies, memories. So your mindlessness won’t serve you so well.

The only thing you get to keep will be a coffin and a lonely name. Keep philosophising into your glass. You want a tin foil hat? Is that your last request? Let me laugh as I dig the hole, I won’t trust anyone else with your death. It belongs to me and I’ll take you and what’s due with utter carelessness.

I close my eyes as you open your mouth and I dream up a better world. It is better because you are not in it. It is better because you are in a grave I had commissioned and then forgotten about and your name is spelt wrong and I had done that and the headstone had been kicked over and maybe I did that or maybe it was some other random marauder with more beer in their veins than blood and an arbitrary rage to exhale.

I woke up into a smoky haze when you touched my arm, asked me for a light. You'd bought a new pack of smokes and two pints. Maybe I can deal with you now. You touched my arm and I started and punched you in the temple.

You don’t mind.

In fact, you laugh and snuggle up to me, take a sip of my beer and steal my cigarette and when I say I can’t wait to **** you, you laugh as if there is no consequence.

We forget about each other as we drink ourselves senseless.

This is not a new day, this is a day gone bad, rotting and stinking like putrid death, but repackaged, perfumed, and sold like cheap ***, for dimes or a sense of certainty or just company,

Surrounded and Alone-
The essence of city life

Out of windows, dusty, and brushing cotton flakes out of hair
In a cold room there is so much to do, like breathing,
Running hesitant tongue over stoic teeth,
Why use it? When communication is fraught with shipwrecking maelstroms of miss-understanding, miss- understood and miss-interpreted

                                   -heavy headphone armour on,
Check.

But what is sung is wrong, pursued by romantics old and new, this modern age is fractured and cannot be seen by a mirror unbroken, while comedy halls are bursting at the seams with self deprecation and I laugh at everything I don’t understand, and don’t understand why I laugh but-

But I’m fond of morbid irony: is it possible to commit suicide accidentally?

I ask the Eternal Cockroach as it salvages waste and it rolls its Eternal eyes at miss-placed Inconsequence. It rolls its eyes and sees the bottom of my shoe and ***** off to cockroach Hell or Heaven while the crushed and oozing carcass stains my sole.

And I don’t care if I asked a question or wanted an answer or, in the end, what I got at all.

Forget the bridge; I’m flying over this-

A poem, played out on stark eyebrows and two fine forehead lines, then quirked, ruining a long lamentation’s worth of time, to say nothing of the ruminating circle, the square that fits in it, those fine fired diplomatic lines, deluxe and then depraved and then forgetting what that means.

If anything at all

A New Year I don’t know what to do with, an old expectation I still harbour, though here ships can only be wrecked and left unrepaired save for chewing gum and spit.

Baby faced innocence wrinkles faster than hands in tepid bathwater; here,
Skin crawls with the tactile hallucinations of a spider’s breath; evaporating

The words, which are always contested even by themselves, that remain seated on a reluctant tongue, everywhere, where echoes of watercolour paint and bolognaise sauce compete for existential poetic perfection, here,

There, on cracked amber shores, ancient icons and ancient dramatic dreams, tumbled shreds of history textbooks and photographs combine into nostalgia, ready to catch a hot wave and jump into another word-

The essence of speech, like bread and potatoes, is starchy blandness- the plaster base of meaning, waiting for the frieze,

Really, it’s a tasteless memory that supports the world in its frame, in its seams, and cracks before it compromises-

I do not compromise, not because I am the best but because I fall apart without myself, and any compromise will mean death and that arduous reinvention of the smile, the hand, to wield pens and stroke guitar strings and make gear changes and fidget with hair and with fingers express urgent ideas in the shape of air,

Here,

The hollow house has already been burnt out, but an X was marked, so let’s ruminate around it still, and still before we pounce

On anything that gleams, anything that shines; hunt with snout in trough for lost treasure, those things that gleam and shine-but it’s a hoax

As fox masked bourgeois wolves run behind backs and pinch backsides and pick pockets. Steal pocket lint and ticket stubs and laugh, waving miss-fortune in faces, equally lost in the search for the words of missed discontent, but with money and our pocket lint and ticket stubs to forget it-

Until it just stops: Reach out, and bash them on the head- or start a civil war, it’s not always a choice, but now it yours-

To swing lavish hips in the garbage of history, or not

Don’t want or need to know what made this: put up a sign for the archaeologists of the future: don’t dig here, nothing worthwhile here, take the trowels and brushes and theories of Diffusion or Constructed Hegemonic Discourse (though Gordon Childe may stay for Tea, tea, that most holy incarnation of caffeine)

And go.

There’s nothing that one could want here that isn’t already known; when weeping, when looking in a hotel bathroom mirror and pulling at hair and eye sockets in mad disorientated frustration-
So,

I’ll be East of Eden, looking for East of Ordinary (if anyone cares) dropping and rescuing causes like pebbles and shells on foreign shores,

Sure, I don’t know what to think, but I’ll feel it anyway,

Spitting in open mouths next to ancestral verse, no reverence for irreverent history or this,
these narrow doorways and double standards are doing heads in;

shrink it, trim this mental overgrowth, neo-liberalise this stress, just privatise it all, and it becomes

Decrepit disconnections, miss-spelled and miss-meant; missing a lucid neologism and marvelling at its absent meaning. See, all there was to believe in was a circle pit that spun forever and insistent chords and the increasing pressure that ended in a broken nose;
                                                who knows?

Revelation: maybe I quirked that eyebrow, and disbelief simulated stimulating dreams-

I’ve seen promises made out of diamonds, wood, gold, amber, spit, so don’t ask me to repeat myself or this, to diagnose or understand it-

I’m sick with everything I cannot count or count on, things accidentally found and purposefully misplaced. I could lie and it would probably mean the same thing anyway,

See, there’s nothing new to see, to this or me,

This is not a new day, but one wasted in a cold room.

Strange things have been known by man. Stranger things yet have been known by women and the strangest things of all have been known by both, and everyone in between. Because that’s the nature of dreams, that’s the reality of nature, that’s the dream like quality of being alive, here and now and so **** material and intangible that it deserves a post doctoral thesis or dozen.

So that’s what the pattern of moonlight looks like over your thighs.

Now, we’re too old to hypothesise but young enough to ponder, not naïve but not yet jaded. It’s the best way to be, like lucid hallucination. It’s a feeling too clothonic for the modern age but not something that would fit anywhere else. Something belonging to the earth and desperate to return to it, desperate to drag me with it, with you, up or down.

I’ll swim or drown any which way life will have me, and anyone who knows me at all knows this.

You have a way of getting under my finger nails. I pick and pry but can’t clean myself of you, just seem to spread you around and over me like your tongue or your eyes. I never planned for this, but,

Sometimes love must be ad lib.

Kind of like us, don’t you think? Mirrored bodies caged by a mosquito net, trapped, entrapped, embraced. Moonlight over your thighs, across my back, pattering over my spine along with the sweat. Moss stained ruins and craning palm trees and monsoon season in our minds and outside them.

But maybe it isn’t like this at all.

Maybe it started because it was cold, so deathly cold, like a terse comment or the gaze sought for and purposefully kept away. Like the last ice cube from a ****** mojito in a faux Hawaiian bar crunched between your stellar teeth. Maybe it happens in a cabin in Siberia battered by fast and fat snowflakes and a howl of a wind. Not because of us, no, we are only pushed together by the elements. Feelings don’t come into it at all. Apart from the ones we ignore, and push away as virulently as we banish the frost on each other’s skin in our caressing and rubbing and trying to forget it all later.

Because even if there is no such thing as ghosts we still keep them inside us. In love, hate, in longing.

To never forget is to make your own ghosts. Spirit equals life knowing it will end and seizing it regardless, laughing all the while.

So we give birth to each other’s ghosts, and lie with them, the respectable beds we made are now burnt to cinders and scattered on trade winds.

Even the things we dream and invent in our imaginations are true in their own way, because they are all based on and born out of things that are material, things that are tangible, even in the waking world.

I can see your worries written in your collarbone. Let me lick them out.

Like I did in dry desert heat, when we were parched and our tongues scratched like sandpaper against the corners of each other’s mouths. The sand was everywhere, in your eyes and my shoes and it shifted inside us as we moved. Maybe that’s how it started. It’s a struggle to remember.

I remember you crying for no reason, your back to me, face mirrored in a cracked window.

The point, the fact that can save, is that love can be made out of misery. That everything can change even by nothing changing. This is true even if it isn’t right, I’m certain of it.

But certainty is rare as rocking horse **** around here, so we take what we can get.

And we got it, didn’t we? In the curve of a Renaissance painting we saw each other, but you are no painting that I could stop myself from touching. You don’t belong on a wall, you don’t belong to paying visitors and school groups and snooty experts who would pick you apart. If they did, if anyone did, I would tear them to shreds and spend the rest of my life recovering your pieces; from museum floors, from photographs, from other people’s memories.

But it’s funny how people always look best when walking away from you. That or people you’ve never met. Those are the most beautiful and perfect people, the ones that don’t exist except in your imagination.

But aren’t we all to an extent imaginary? Or at least imagined, by ourselves, by others. We become new from day to night to daydream, influenced by our past but not the same. Like Play-Doh, a square can become a circle and then a square again, but it will not be the same square as before.

So I remember you like I’m waiting, not regretting but always reminiscing, always missing.

I don’t know if it’s less painful this way, but at least it’s a feeling of something.

We first fell into each other when we were still small time, still ate stale toast for dinner and had to share rent with four or five other seedy folks. We didn’t know each other past our names and skins back then, but so we could pay our respective rents the next day we split a bottle of whiskey and drank all night. Why? A mate of ours had got shot and we were young enough to still care that we might very well be next. The gum tree leaves still smelled hot. Summer is a melting season here.

These days we don’t worry, because we realised that the worry would **** us worse than a bullet or an electric chair or an overdose.

But back then we reminisced on good old days that weren’t so old, and lessons learnt that we would not fully understand until years later. We spoke of experience, though we had none, and it seemed so simple when you kissed me and it was alright because it was only skin, only experience.

Years later when we were reminiscing on that, laughing at our younger selves, I admitted that that had been my first time, sleeping with a boy like that. You’d been shocked, and apologised because you’d done it and not done it gently, and you hadn’t loved me...

and you say you’re not a romantic ******* but I know you only act out of love, necessity, and revenge. These are the engines that drive you forward into the world. You may not have loved me then, but you needed me, and I had wanted you.

But we weren’t a thing – you didn’t love me, after all – but we worked together more often. We grew calluses on our hands together, ran in the night together, laughed and choked out adrenaline together.

I think we got too carried away – were we intoxicated by sunburnt skin and dried sea salt and long hair?

I think I was, because one night you had to stitch a knife wound in my thigh with murmuring concentration and I joked you could be a beautiful nurse and you threatened to knife me somewhere more sensitive while still threading the needle with precise care, while dried blood flecked your knuckles.

That’s when I got out of the game for a while, got a ‘real job’ – parents couldn’t be proud because that’s what they’d thought all along.

You didn’t seem pleased and I told myself it was because you missed me. Because no one worked the midnight silent districts like we did, no one ruled the bone grey estates like we did. No one mimicked a redback spider like we did.

And so you left, perhaps to find a different kingdom to conquer, one with more history and memories. Maybe you wanted to paint a new memory onto something, to show you were there. You said you were taking a ghost home, something you’d met in a forest on a Sabbath and who lived far away and you showed me a ring and said the ghost couldn’t go farther than the sound of the gold.

You’re always making up ******* like that, trying to put magic into the world,

When all you really need to do is be there.

So I worked an office job I hated from the beginning. The shirt collar too stiff, the paper cuts didn’t hurt enough, I cycled through memos and files and emails and reports on accounts, profits, billable hours. I slept with women, with men, but none of them make me feel like I’m bleeding out, not like you did, like I was on the knife edge of heaven with you gripping my hips hard enough to bruise so I wouldn’t fall off.

I would pay your rent if you only came home and made me laugh.

And maybe you hear me, from wherever you are, because you come back, in the night like a prophecy.

You show off photographs, a music box, a fresh bullet wound and a broken toe. I kiss you better and you don’t say that you missed me, you don’t say you love me, but I can feel it in your hands. They tremble.

You say you’ve found a job for us, a good one, and I say yes and don’t go in to work the next day.

After that we can afford a penthouse, so we do. But it makes us want to jump out of the windows. We buy a cat but it runs away. You ask me if I want to run away and I say yes. I always say yes to you.

So we pack up our guns, our skins, our names and go.

This is the sunset we drive into, this is the sun that we burn in.

You are waiting on a death wish,
You are impatient
But don't worry;
it will come in its own sweet time,
No matter how fast you drum your fingers
On my coffee table.

You once said that living was the hardest part –
So bored in the waiting, until you couldn’t help but
Do things, see things, whether magnificent or hated
You still sighed the same

You once said living was the hardest part
But after you arrived back home,
From what was now your
Seventh city of searching
You admitted you were wrong:
It’s the other way around.

I shrugged, because it’s all the same to me

I won’t admit that I bribed your demise to stay away
I met it in the car you would crash next month
Burning, your spine and ribs shattered
Your words faint and blood filled gurgles
On your split liquid red lips

I paid death to not, just not yet
It was a hefty price:
2000 bucks and five years of my own life

Because I’d miss you

When you’re at my doorstep,
Dripping rain onto the welcome mat

When you feed ducks and pigeons
The crusts of your lunch

The way you laugh at the tragic parts of films and don’t notice the rest of the cinema glaring at you

The way you make lists of the countries you would visit, the books you would read, but never what we need from the shops, and you always forget something.

The fact that you leave, but always come back

These are things that I admit to you, on this latest return.
After you’ve taken off your coat, hung it next to mine
After you’ve deposited your suitcase in the bedroom

So waste your time with me, while it’s here

I would be bored and waiting with you.

You’re overflowing –
Like an ashtray
                      But no
You’re not a nicotine yellow stain
You’re not ash grey
You don’t smell like a stale insomniac’s late night in an empty room

You’re a burst fire hydrant
Children shriek and frolic in your shower
And somewhere out there plants, grass and weeds will turn green and tall
Because you have nourished them
But you’re still ******* off that firefighter.

But maybe you’re the fire?
                    Too hot to touch
But we all look on
                    We all glow with you
You eat the world but
In leaving it fallow give a chance to something new.

But you’re not new
You carry eons on your shoulders and
Wisdoms between your teeth
You are like the grains of sand between my toes:
You were once completely different

But I like you in all your ways
I’ll inhale your smoke
I’ll dance in your rain
I’ll let you burn me up
I’ll let you turn me into something new
I would grow old with you.