On the creaking wooden chair in the corner, hanging on the scaffold, in the circular mirror, distorted and twisted and folding. It stands in the shadows. It lurks in the school playground while parents wait for their children, it’s a runaway train, and it’s the ink streaming down the window pane, it’s the clock melting inwards.
its golden fluidity and baby blue subtleties.
It’s the reason why you wake in the middle of the night,
gasping into darkness and grappling with loose ends... it was just a dream.
The reason you turn a corner just to look back behind you, why you double-take in the mirror, question where did I go?
Looking at nothing, staring into the bleak dark, it lurks. Awaits.
It waits in the form of a child holding a red balloon, staring into our blind spots.
Like shadows, when the sun rotates away from behind the playground wall you know, just then, now, in that full circle...
it’s about to run out.
You bend over backwards to relate to the moonlight dancing on the floor of its own reflections. It shows itself on beer bottles from better nights, you cross one leg over the other, position yourself,
folded linen.
Rushing to endless deadlines for nowhere o’clock, last call for the runaway train, struggling with human concepts.
You’re simply a sum of parts: an addition of flesh, limbs, old and broken battered bones, blind spots.
All the places you can’t see, can’t feel, can’t reach.
Loose ends meet themselves in the corner of that same old dusty room,
the folded linen crumples to the floor,

the red balloon bursts.

"So. Why a robin?"
I picture us fighting, my neck hits the back of the leather arm chair. It hurts and you apologise. You are still pretending to get mad whenever I say I love you like you are not willing to hear it. You know I am going far away and whether its university or life we can't work without one of us making the other miserable. And I am still folding our hands to origami swans at 3am wishing for a second more with you. It goes futher than taking the scenic route home, dragging my feet and prolonging the front door, pretending we don't know how this ends.  We have the same conversations over and over, you apologising and joking as you think about what you'll turn into//me wondering if I'll even bother to make it that far. One day you might not remember my name, think my face isn't mine because didn't I used to blonde? We are not even perfect on paper. The government wouldn't grant us our bursary because they knew we are too self destructive. My poems for you were pretty when flipped to the ceiling but we think too much, wound ourselves up, and the folds in the pages won't come loose anymore. The words don't sit right. Somewhere on a fence in Carlton sits two robins. And life gets so hard when you realise you can't actually help another adult with their problems, you can only make them a cup of tea. Not coffee. Their brain spins in it's swivel office chair, controls broken. A dictatorship sinking fast. Their heart races - the more coffee you drink the more likely you are to experience anxiety//undiagnosed depression is hard to get rid of, it knows you want to acknowledge it and it waits for you to stumble upon it, it feigns surprises behind a pinewood door, but life doesn't get much better after you notice it. You still want to die and you still think every day about the one in three anorexia sufferers that don't make it. How really you don't know what "making it" is. I found a boy that I imagine smells like fire. He has these crazed pinpoint eyes that are not like yours and I don't know what to think anymore. He is an artistic genius and I want to run from my bad dreams into you and I don't know what to think anymore. I don't think anything is real anymore. I think we hit an iceberg. I think my fingers are caught in the ice, splayed hands grasping still like curved talon ends and I don't think I can get lose but it is cold. Think. Your warm hands on my ribcage holding me on an axis. Pedestal. You told me I don't love you last night and it felt like hot wax cooling in my throat. I can still taste it now. My hands are cold. I'm writing poetry about you again but I don't know if it's for you this time. Yes, there's a difference. I felt something gut wrenching today when I found that the great barrier reef had died. Is dying. It lived for 25 million years and the human race killed it. Like a toxic relationship composed of a bad survival climate and corporate waste, like us killing us. Big red buttons looming closer. I would compare us to the death of the great barrier reef- I don't think we were as beautiful, and we were killed by ourselves not climate change. So I am writing us an obituary before we self implode. I am writing the nights I have not spend crying on the kitchen floor an obituary before they are even over.  I don't think I can breathe underwater and the pressures are getting to your head. The colours are fading and the plants aren't breathing anymore. The backs of my eyelids are freezing over. You are the only one who knows about the two robins on a fence somewhere safe. You are the one I tell my nightmares to, the ones where I wake up and I can't breathe without you. The ones that I don't have anymore because now my fingers are inches away from the end of the rabbit hole. I can feel the breeze at my fingertips. We deserved more than a bunch of flowers cellotaped to a lamppost. More than a game of hangman. More than this is how I say happy anniversary. I wish we hadn't killed the great barrier reef. I wish that there had been better ways to say happy anniversary.

My hands fidget.
I will tell you when I see you that
my fingers could break when I speak,
loose from the chicken wire houses that pin them to nail holes
no one sees and my words could snap
with them, straight down their spines.
My hands fidget and my tongue trips.
One day I won’t be allowed to see your eyes, your eyes when the sun hits them and they turn green, your eyes when they're blue, when you're being real. Or both.
The sun is in your eyes and it's setting.
I think I could be the moon,
we could meet at every eclipse,
create our own lightshow in the sky or make them notice us just for five minutes,
the kids sat on steps behind the sports centre,
I will tell you when I see you that you are so ******* smart you could ruin the world with it, so why can’t I tell you this, so why can’t my hands stay still?
I want to feel the way my mouth tingles when we sit, you murmuring in my ear that you could spend all day here,
alone with the indents of each other's lips.
I guess if we ruined the world I wouldn't even feel Numb, the Nirvana song.
My hands fidget.
Recently I stuck a sticker over my fear of death to try and be as brave as you and now I am Nevermind,
I can't feel a thing.
My tongue sits still when I try to speak about thinking and when I think of losing you I see Topcat, Pink Panther and this time my mind trips over itself.
I chew my lips and the corners of my mouth close.
I can’t see in the dark like I can’t breathe when I see cartoons like I can’t see **** when you say we need to talk like I’m scared of the ******* dark so please walk me home.
You find my hair bobbles at your house and I'm sorry that that last one wasn’t a metaphor.
I imagine the space behind your closed eyelids looks like a dark place at 3am where you exhale smoke.
I imagine the space behind mine is inhaling, coughing and static in the form of a thousand headlights blinking
and
it burns.
My hands fidget.
You call me out and it sounds like my brain not being able to hold itself still, I can't,
I can't stop fidgeting under those blue-green eyes.
When you tell me you love me my fingers stay still.
When I think it's loud like nerve endings screaming at me god-**** react like
controlling hands, interconnecting veins jumping from wrists,
hazy.
The stuff of nightmares where you say I don’t trust you
but I know that your hands on my wrists would not,
do not,
burn
like that.
I will tell you when I see you
I will not wrap you in chicken wire.
I am writing to tell you that when you speak my hands stay still.
I am trying to say that nothing snaps and my head is
quiet.

Photographers step out of hazy stairwells, tired eyes adjusting to dim light, looking for
their next muse.
“Works of art take time” they tell themselves
they look for the next spark of intrigue, their next fix.
You’ll find them on public transport, in old cafes:
cameras slung around their necks like billiard boards captioned ‘the end is nigh’.
Buzzing with anticipation of their next good catch, biting the lips of their disgruntled
faces like ancient gladiators biting the dust.
Castaways, oil paintings once brilliant and beautiful thrown into apartment blocks and
grey buildings,
ruins of art cast adrift by time.
Haunted by still frames and possibilities, all burned onto retinas, they stumble across
traffic jams;
finding beautiful people, forcing themselves into their lives.
Fleeting whispers rotate into double takes and flickers on the film of a Polaroid camera;
the subjects become muses,
cities are reborn as golden
flood into spotlights:
vibrant, reckless, insomniac.

Last ditch attempts and descents without grace.
Darkness was diffusing into ambers. He’d been deteriorating for a while now, slowly, abruptly, and then with the fall of the summer months completely off the other end of the scale. He’d felt it in adrenaline coursing through his veins, known it when spilled liquids seeped into carpets that weren’t his own. But this was it. He faced the final breech of his own standards, or what was left, with bare feet, exposed eyes, all the while knowing he was corrupted.
He had brought himself inches away from a descent, drawn himself through the chaos, grasped his gnarled hand around what had held him back, and pulled, pulled his own cold body from the lifeless thud on the floor, pulled himself here, and now his toes curled over the edges of what had been his life.
Gathering the last vestiges of his age and time, Bram stepped forwards into unfilled air. Foot first, the ground drawing closer; he watched the atmosphere fly past in kaleidoscope. Like all inevitabilities, the moon extinguished the sunlight, both knowing their places elsewhere.