Maybe we found love
Maybe we got lost
In translation
Maybe we just
Aren't the same.

Perhaps
It is our imperfections.
Perhaps
Time will halt
And seas will freeze
And the fires will cease.
And we will be perpetual.
But perhaps nothing
Is really ever created.
Perhaps you’re right.

I’m here somewhere;
Among the believers,
Between the cheats,
Within the walls,
Your favourite coffee mug,
My old raincoat,
Our patchwork blanket.

Forgetting is so
Destructive,
So damning.
But perhaps the best thing
Isn't forgetting.
Perhaps it is remembering.

I am Heavy-lidded tonight,
Heavy-lidded
and inscrutable in my childhood.

My childhood that was spent hysterical in airing cupboards,
Where I wept unashamedly to the fixed God
And the stained glass, rose-hewn Angels of churches
That reeked of oak and holy water.
Where I sat in the trees, high on life and vanila-blue ice cream
And with knees skinned by the ****** pathways of woods
Or the safe gravels of playgrounds.

Where sunbursted mangoes dripped with musky-sanded chlorine
And the sun-hot metal gates clanged shut in the holiday winds.
Where rocks were thrown by fated children
And paper-cheap candy wrappers filled up plastic trash cans.
Where strange, money-minded housewives gaggled and giggled
With their ******-white teeth
And reflected my mother' s bipolar poverty
In the lenses of their plastic sunglasses.
Where my self-hemmed summer dresses were stained
With green and brown and red finger paint
As the days outside grew warmer
And the inside self grew older,
Colder.

Where I was punished for expression of the self
And confined to the sanatorium
Or the offices of Moloch's servants
On a sun-stippled day in May
Where my scrap-bruised hands
Were bandaged by the words of the Real World
And threatenings of expulsion.
Where I hid behind felted display boards
On a landing somewhere near Neverland,
And lay and listened to the friend-fuelled ramblings of lost boys
Who sat and smoked in dormitories
And hallucinated Peter Pan.
Where I wrote self-indulgent fuckery in toilets
And drew crude artistries on mirrors with lipstick
And contemplated
Amo
Amas
Amat
As I sat and stared at my own disassociated hands.

Where paper aeroplanes flew and were thrown
By hungover kids in threadbare jumpers
With chewed cuffs and prefect badges,
Where holy Evian was poured over my head
After a long last day under a white marquee,
Where I disassembled pencil sharpeners with iron-smelling razor blades
and violated erasers at an exam hall desk in a stormy June.

Where I contemplated death;
Sang hymns in the darkness of my bedroom,
Took a blade to my flesh
Like the soulless piece of meat
That I believed myself to be.
Where I fell in love;
Hurt myself
More than anyone else ever did.
Where I read,
Where I wrote tear stained elegies
To my idols under the earth
And prayed that I
Would last
Just one more day.

Looking heavenward, I see only the earth.
The stars align and the planets turn,
But what of the holy?

Archangels sit and smoke and weep on tenement rooftops,
And the collared cherubim bleed into the rainswept gutters
Like cut dogs in cardboard boxes by the highways of New York,
Or the roadsides of back-alley Brooklyn or Paterson,
Where the demonic masses lie naked in the streets,
Their souls bared raw to heaven
And their hair as messy as sidestreet dumpsters.

The misted rain fogs on the busted double glazing,
The bare limbed trees outside fallen victim to a long winter
And a late spring.
The air that blows through the streets of these mundane cul-de-sacs
Has passed through the lungs of cancerous dodgers
In those hell-indulgent cities,
Where children find their kicks by freerunning
Across buildings of bricks made from c-grades,
Or by standing atop high-rises in the grey wind,
And biting their tongues only to feel their own consciousness
Burrowing into them
Like parasites from the condemning schoolhouses or university halls.

You’re alone when your skies turn grey,
And the rain falls with all the purposeful intent of a neon god.
You’re alone when your smashed milk bottles and broken plates
Are like music on those drug-dampened dawns,
You’re alone when your cold, ash-stippled roof gardens
Are your only way to heaven,
You’re alone when your fingers are cut on your own writing
And you are dizzy from spinning yourself sick
Alone in your splintered art lofts.

Your stars are misaligned and your planets need engine grease to turn,
And you sit and smoke and weep on tenement rooftops,
But you still look heavenward.
You see your madness in the same silver moon
That compels the tide and transfixes wolves,
You recognise yourself in newspaper clippings proclaiming ******,
You acknowledge your expression in broken syringes
And powder remnants
On the glass-topped coffee tables of water-dripping apartments,
You feel your heartbeat in the gasolined engines
Of stuttering Cadillacs
And taste your own warm lifeblood in the burgers of roadside diners.

You see cosmological galaxies bursting like Van Goghs,
Horrible, bitter-cold starstorms underneath white skies,
Raindrop-dripping garden leaves in shrubberies and verges
And earthy rockeries,
You dream of enlightened, ***-smoking boys in beat-up trailers
And the cluttered box rooms of sky-high apartments,
Of screeching atop stone-cragged mountains of green in highlands,
Of bell-rung harbours in the white seaside towns of England,
Of the salt-chapped lips of fisherwives
And the bone-skinny children of sailors,
Of visionary angels in stained glass cathedrals,
Of the cobbled thoroughfares of lamplit cafes in a Parisian purgatory.

And yet you lie naked on floors,
You lie high on floors and let visions spill from your hands
Like the whiskey you drink.
You are under us now,
Under the earth like meat sacks.
But your vision lives on
In every piece of self-indulgent fuckery written for you,
In every copy of your collected works
Or your novels.

Seek,
Live,
****,
Die.
For you are immortal, in the end.

Mad girls.
Moonlight-ripened fruit,
Fingertip-censored *****,
Fragile,
Toughened,
Violated.
Throats are burned by whisky,
Eyes blackened and tears shed.
Stars grew between your breast bones once.
Try for me now to care.

Stardust drenched in
Rain and red wine.
Poverty sitting atop rooftops in
Whitewashed cities.
Run;
Around in circles
Until you are too dizzy
To taste his breath.

It is funny;
Funny how one day you can see the universe reflected in your own eyes
And blue-rich galaxies bursting from the hidden darknesses
And the gone-places of your mind.
Your pen is as ceaseless on your paper as your feet are on your bedroom floor.

Other days are like tepid water, or half-sour milk
That is undecided on the matter of its own freshness.
Those dark, gone-places of your mind are not even dimly lit.
And yet you wish for that eye-universe,
And those blue-rich galaxies,
And for your pen to skate across the page
As if possessed by the likes of Ginsberg or Kerouac.

So you wander down to the quiet places;
To the caged city forests where the trees cohabitate with basketball hoops,
And the birds sing their squeezed-in yellow melodies.
To the crumbling, sandy banks,
Where on a good day you can find a smashed white seashell
Or a pocket watch, rusty and decayed with time
And confident in its fragility.

But all you do is stare at the sky.
No miraculous inspiration comes to you;
No stardusted metaphysics,
No juice-rich red and purple existentialism.
No darling lovers dripping with candy-yellow sweetness
As the birds sing like Blake or Wordsworth.

So You return to the loud and cluttered places;
To your places,
To your off-white apartments where the water runs cold
And the refrigerator stinks worse than hell.
To your concrete-welded rivers,
Where the only birds are grey pigeons,
And the most beautiful thing you will find
Is a ***** green bottle
Or a razor blade
With more memories than you.

And you will try tomorrow.
Maybe the ticking of your generic clock
Or the casual griminess of your old green bathtub
Will be enough.
But for now, you will sit,
And you will consider constellations
And contemplate the reason why your lover's eyes
Remind you of the Milky Way.
For now, the eye-universe is still, and the blue-rich galaxies
Are deep in sleep,
Just like you wish you were.

For this is a tepid water day, a half-sour milk day.
And that is not a bad thing, in the end.

I saw dynamic innocence violated by the cold mundane,
Thoughts and plans and dreams dampened down by normality.
They say that naivety, just like defiance,
Is a bloom which should be touched and killed
With all the haste of an eagle in the russet dawn.

I myself am pure and blissful in my confinement.
I do not know the wonders of the sinful world.
But your own bloom was erased long ago,
In a time that you cannot now recall.
Retain your wonder at all costs.
Lest you leave this world as one of their
Success stories.