"whats your favorite song?" my voice is quiet, i dont know if he can hear me a neighborhood away. maybe ill make him a casette tape like in the tv show with the lost kids, send it via stumbled conversations and the crowded hallways we float along like its the river of styx (i have 2 coins.)  

i like to pretend you wear that blue coat because you know it makes me smile, maybe your messages got misplaced somewhere. ill wait for you, across the mud where those who have wronged you are stuck, ill send little messages through my fingers alone (in the air, spelling letters, or on here. youll find them soon enough.)

i will take you to the piano hall, with the pink walls in the bad part of the neighborhood
we will sip rosé and slow dance in the sweaty gym
you will speak soft, and ill fix my hearing so i can appreciate you

you'd always come home via the garden path, reveling in the crunching of the twigs, the slooshing of the leaves, the endless clackering of misfound footfalls. till the day, after a particularly satisfying stomp snapping, you looked underfoot and saw the remains of the fallen sparrow's nest


it took you five days to soak out the blood


tonight's supposed to be the biggest moon in 68 years. Biggest moon! Wow.


a girl at the party says it's stupid to care what others think. i agreed with her. She agreed with my agreeance, and then burst into tears. i ignored her and walked away. i'm a frigid *****, but theys' gotsta learn, they


God, the flies, it's such a cliché, but it's true, as you trek down into the sludge you can't see them but you can hear it, the buzzing, you can always, from everywhere, the buzzing


when our flatmate left, he deconstructed his bed. he didn't take it with him, he just, took the mattress, threw it in the water closet, left the headboard on the stairway landing, and the sides and springs'n-**** in the garage
                      i really respect the gesture


in the gully between the graveyard and the mine, they built a highschool. a ******* highschool. lord knows why. it looks like a ******* campers lodge, all the kids climb up the banks and the uni students sell them acid in lolly mix nickel bags. everyone i've ever known came from that school, one way or another. heavens know why. hey, look at the big chimney, guess the furnace is on. it's still in use, huh? probably shouldn't be loitering. anyway-


the big diggerman's dig up the concrete, put it in a bucket.
the big diggermans with the big digger truck, with all the cones and stop signs.
Bawm! Bwam! the big muscle arm, full of strewn piping and pistons, bab's the ground bab bab. Take that, ground! Bab Bab!! the spinning chair vibrates, the man gyrates, and the big arm up's and downs, down down, swivel, dump.


remember when we were thirteen, and the idiot boys made a game of standing in a circle, trying to **** into their own mouths? you wanted to punch them in the face, but didn't want to get your hands *****. if only you'd known, back then, that your limbs were really just overgrown turnips, would you of been so insistent at keeping your distance? keeping the world at arms length? that's always the irony, isn't it. the world was inside you all along

–

At the end of the cemetery, past the hedges, a car park, overlooking the hill, where there's a huge oak tree, and all the concrete is just fractured under its weight, and the asphalt is in tar stricken colours a blackbird in mid-dive splatter. Anyway. Sorry,-

god, you're making porridge? Porridge? *******, are you even hungry, or did you just ******* want to see the ******* oat-*****-muchus coat everything you

-just, there, in this graveside car-park overlooking the city but also in the middle of nowhere, there's two cars. One, a ******* Mitsubishi GT, all slick and weltering plastic, pure pristine millionaire CEO's toy phallus, and beside it, a banged up old Datsun, and it all seems like an allegory for something, but it isn't, it's just, someone dumped these two ******* cars here, but they're not even dumped per see, the registry in the windows are up to date and everything, but they're just there


      all the damp men take the STOP out the truck, stand on the road, hold the cones, watch the digger man seat shuffling; gotta shuffle move up the pavement before you big hand down


You were too clever, weren't you? to bash her head, right there, in the corner, there, above the left cheek bone, so i couldn't tell, right? to make her look like just one more corpse, among the rot? obscure that one side, turned away? left to decompose, mid-perch, on a desert highway? well, maybe it wasn't, maybe it was just someone else, but the fact that you knew, you knew i'd check above the left temple, and that you ****** chose that as the point of rupture, it shows, it just ******* shows, the


the flies never gather, at the point of death, they just breed in the damp, the gulleys surrounding it, why is that


and just look at you now, sitting there, naked as a newborn, crying to yourself, wiping your weepy eyes with your simpering turnip paws, and it's just pathetic, isn't it? And i love you, i do, it's the one moment i can say it, i can feel it with burning, simple purity, with self effacing truth and clarity, because, here, i don't matter. you don't need me, you need a body to hold, an arm to hug you. in loving you i can be absolved of all qualities, and so, for once, i do, i do

Yeah no! In sixty-eight years! What even is the moon



it's amazing, i've eaten nothing in the last thirty-six hours, except a single dried apricot. yet
                                   i need to *****

  you know that feeling? What a feeling. You need to retch, but there's nothing to retch, and there you are, just standing there, at 5am gagging to yourself in a damp field. A stomach, trying to turn away, fold upon and shaft itself a vicissitude. A stomach, no, no, yes, you see?  You need to empty yourself of this bile. What bile? Exactly. There's nothing. Nothing up-emptied onto nothing. And that's all there is, right, that's all that life is, is given right there; the gag, the convulsion, the upturning unto itself, the attempt, attempt, you understand? Of the cathexis, of the innerworld, taken to contain only the unspeakable within itself, miserly bile, a concomitant of all the worlds ills and would be ills and then upon it taken as an ill unto itself, a single nebulous fluid husk of malignant umbra, held in *******, bound in fleshy lining. But then the expulsion, the retch, is attempted, to take all the seething disease of the inner and to project, upturn it onto the outer world. Where? It doesn't matter. In the bin, into the shrubbery, Anywhere but in here. Once it's gone, it gone, that's all that matters, gone, go, go, get. The body tries to push the malaise of(as) the internal unto the external, the outer, but in doing so, finds itself(boundary) empty, where it thought it incubated only vile, there was instead, only nothing, but still, somehow, the convulsing, the retching, the act itself, remains. And that's it, you see? That's all it is, all the emotional turmoil, all the half-hearted hallucentric episodes, the all of everything, is just that, just an, an emptiness trying to upend itself but finding there's nothing to upend, but it still asserts itself as process, as an unending nausea, unresolvable nausea, both grounding and thrown, the throwing and that-which-is-cast, bent under itself,  nausea



the swamp reclaimed the garden last summer. flood season, after all. some days the stagnant waves came right up to the brickwork, can still see the lines, see? your old swing set's a gonna though. all the rabbits either abandoned their dens, or were drowned out. lord knows how many micro-organisms died as well. lot's of new ones were probably borne though, right? hear those flies, bzzt, bzzt. life loves damp heat. you can never tell, never tell really.

=/ww'/do you ever feel as if, behind the waking world, there is just pulsating79?
like when you draw in breath and hold, everything stops, just for a second?



   it's rude to ***** on your neighbours tree.
                            don't be rude



all the sound, all but sounds

step one.
you close your eyes.
you close them tight.
then you press your palms
against your
closed eyelids,
until
you start seeing red spots that remind you
of a song you wrote
for someone so long ago.
that someone doesn't matter anymore,
not really, so eventually,
neither will he.

step two.
you wear a nightgown.
the one with the lacy v neck, the one
that exposes your thighs,
the one with the vintage roses.
you wear it to bed to remind yourself
that you don't have to wear his attention
like a perfume
to feel ****.

step three.
you listen to those songs.
you know which ones.
you listen to them and sing or rap along
until your throat is sore, until
your chest hurts. do it
until you don't know why you're crying,
then write a song about why
you are crying,
so that when you look back,
you can see that it doesn't matter.
heartache fades.

step four.**
dive into a body of water in only
your under garments.
force yourself
to swim,
no matter how much
you want
to drown.

are you lonely?
a blur through the skylight
black prism
noise
i dream of particles
empty waterways
myself
where has everyone gone?
shoes line the shore
a galloping howl splits the earth
and we rise like mist towards dead suns
are you here?
there is a surface you slip beneath every night
sometimes you catch glimpses of it when you stare into the emptiness beneath your lids
it is where you go to watch yourself die
who are you?*
sisyphus turned inwards
the first body of god
crushed beneath the weight of the ocean

The shade plays figures across my skin. A slow ripple of old casts, thrown off last winter festival. It’s an old game. Children gather at the riverside and watch their broken bones depart. It was like this the year before, and the year before then. It will always be like this.

Sometimes summer arrives early and I cry for days. My tears run into the wooden floor of the house. It follows the cracks and seams, soaks into red dirt, coal dust, mud. I was once here. Salt trails along aged timber, the dead corpse of forest gods.

I left early in the morning, before the dew had left the roofs. I followed an old bike trail. I listened to the silent clamour of pre-dawn. It was like a stream, the black edges of an open wound. Blood had yet to reach out, touch existence and harden.

The casts sink to the bottom of the river. The children scream and laugh, leaping through the air waving cattails. The shade shifts and I find myself awake, thirsty and without direction. I have forgotten my own name, a place without season, the sight of blossoms.

I am alone, waiting for someone. I am walking beneath thick wires humming with power. I am holding a hand, sitting atop a bus shelter, watching harbour lights diffuse the water’s surface golden.

There are two black figures now. They reach towards one another but cannot touch. To touch is to lose form. I lie staring into the absence of myself, watching petals fall on my skin. Clouds break.

It was sudden. A bright clap of electricity, before a downpour. We ran down the street, jumped through your open window and rolled onto our backs. The air was humid from the day, and without thinking I kicked the shutter down. We laughed and laughed, until our voices found themselves still, close and warm. Your cheeks flushed, breath caught on the ceiling. I kissed your neck as you unbuttoned your shirt, following the openings your fingers left.

There were days I wandered, a black whirr, a sprawl without end. My fingers would reach out until they lost feeling, and then, definition. I wish I’d been there when your body failed you. I wish I’d gathered your broken bones and dashed them against the river, but I know now, they were the only thing keeping you whole.

Some children run after their casts. They descend the mountain into a wild darkness and trawl the river bottom for their memories. They are the poorer ones. They are the ones worth knowing.

It is dark. The figures have blurred into one.