i lost your direction
with my back against you i begged you
to unzip the sky

i was parched without shade
you looked like destiny
a mirage in a thirsty throat

i kissed the ground and broke my mouth
spit teeth that bled your name
but you came no closer

the pain was not divine
perception rose in red welts around my lips
mountains of flesh that held no beauty

i poured myself into this strange espousal of a world
cold cloudy glass
forever rounding walls
that held me in smeared thumbprints

on a hot day i am static
i dry slowly, paint
i am the ever madonna the lost woman
heroine heroine heroine
corrupt word that bursts like an aneurysm on the tongue
spreads like a warm solution

and we bred closer
fixing flesh on the bones of our connection
meet me when i come to you
don’t grow old with me
i can never change

the leash nerves held
keeping you that same size
until the sky seized with the threat
rain rain rain
and i was no prophet
just a woman you thought you could save
if your feet could make the steps

but i am not lost
i’m just waiting for you
you can find me under broken clouds
you can save me to soothe
your own self

somehow the world looks down on me.
standing central inside a garrison
of skyscraper's shadows
a concrete world s
liding down it's own walls-
until-
you are here- i am here
or so i'm told.

sometime ago i was here with you.
we bought a postcard and i dated it for posterity
amongst
buildings that climbed, clock faces that chimed
breathy airy floors split into windows outside-
doorways replete with someone to greet
own world in it's centre turned pinkish by heat
as the rest unfurled around us
and all we could do is look up.
i am here, i am here
looking up.

somehow this whole world looks down on me.
poor lonely soul wondering restless and old
i am here, i am here
so i'm told.

summer is just a bruise blossoming on my pearl skin
i'm eighteen and the world is sadistic
but you tell me i wear it well
you wear me
we're so elegant in this sin
you word me like a pariah
when it ends i'll be hell

you string words like a necklace
pull them around my throat
poet with a finest flute
filled with liquid gold
we lose
endless impressive nights
to the keen of jazz
trumpet notes collapse
a jaw bone against
a new language

dress me in silk
perfume my neck
engrave me with
your new decadence

daisy
you say
threading the word through
the tail end of august
daisy
like a chain of open mouthed flowers
daisy
the nights are wilting
shortening their hours
daisy
listen-
i could give her the world now
gold and love and the finest furs

when september comes
i turn nineteen
i wait in the atrium
bronzed like a summer's statue
your finery thread heavy against my neck
i am leaning into your mirror
the one that decorates the hall
it cuts me off at the neck
when it ends i'll be hell

she takes ashes and sculpts them
into new perspectives.  new lives.
beginnings are like sweets at her fingers
colourful, varied on the tongue.
she can taste different directions before she commits
that’s just who she is

she is beautiful
waves of hair and a pierced nose
a ***** neo michaelangelo
sitting there in youth
patience in her tiring muscles
until she freezes into womanhood
on planes of smoothed stone.

she has grown beyond my stature;
an adult born in a huff of breath
that pours over our lives
her new status matches the pull of her eyes-
wells of blue insistence, i’m here, i’m here
I’ve grazed myself on eighteen,
I wear my newness well.

when she covers her arms in bracelets
hard little planets
that orbit her statement-
i’m me hello world i’m just me

when she paints her eyelids
lips
lashes
dying herself new

do not wait for me-
there is not time
today has gone
yet i am here
without breath
keening with fear

i am a grain, caught
in an hourglass
yet i am a collector-
hoarding lost hours
in the lining
of my pocket

i take them out rarely
they are old keys
their locks are long gone

do not wait for me
there is not time
do not wait for me
i am already gone

i can slowly trace the changes-
the moment she picked up an almanac
and put structure around the future
she was a dead woman

now
assume she is you
her ideas threaded like dreamcatchers
embellished with feathers, beads
that sag their delicate threads

assume she is given bait
that she counts magpies
their cloud white throats a portent
that does not sit well around her neck

assume she will live her life
as these things expect

something fit.  something aligned under the breastbone
ribs pattered out and gave space for breath
that didn't taste of anything.  

something clicked.  tortured poet keeping a journal
walks the south route instead
and sees the spiritual spin on life through the stained glass windows
of a shack church in need of extensive renovation.
she is inspired and her need bottoms out for the day--

praise is good.
good.
great.    
don't bother me when i'm sharpening my pencils.
i'm preparing for divine intervention
and the clarity i know i'm owed

something hit. my words, hey, i'm black and blue
and they? they're cut through and through
with flecks of tracts lent from life and beyond.

your slim volume taunts me
i am all flabby with words that wind
a convoluted sentiment
a never-ending pitch and bubble
of adjectives that collect around the waist
sag themselves down
to collect at my feet

and your spine is pin thin
straight. i am petrified at the sight
of your delicate sonnets
resting like slender wrists
that taper down to the profession of words
every word a counted fibre, lean
while i bulk up and on and become
obscene

you’ve lost weight-*
i am not skin and bone but my clothes hang
an elliptical waist that slips to my thighs
a second skin that wrinkles and lies
and says i’m well
by the cut of my body, bone crests emerging
like white flags-
i’m the shape of a woman,
a well woman-
a woman cut down to size

when spring turns
cherry blossoms roll out their tongues
thirsty for this season of recovery
i join, flavouring my days
with their new perspective

watching sitcoms at three am
without you-
you left me seasons ago

sitting underneath her knee was a lent book of entymology
something about butterflies being caught and pinned
preserved in stasis for the sake of beautiful things
cold crisp leaf wings smoked behind the glass
of a cyanide bottomed killing jar
and in that half read book all she could glean
amongst the bones of writing so lean
was the feeling that you could lie flat and cold
and be a redolent beauty despite the lack of life-

days earlier
the talking therapy had been all right.
hey, there's a ton of treatment these days
medication and conversation and there's no need
to burrow yourself away.
so they talked about feelings
as if they were quietly observing the to and fro
independent little embryos growing opinions of their own-
the indignant insistence that these things,
these emotions have names, signs, triggers
and they begin and they end and curve again-
rising up from the flat of a typeset page.

reading my old poetry is like sampling
blood's flavour on the tongue
the uncomfortable metallic taste
of something in the wrong place
at the wrong time

i'm eighty pounds down and my skin is loose.  shales of empty casing hanging from my pelvis, upper arms.  

what will i do with it now?  

it is still excess, still too much, still my same old problem.  

hangs, folorn, from my frame, not sure how to be.



that summer i shop in stores that have never been mine to walk in to.  

it is entering a portal to a world i've only ever circumnavigated,

skimming round flesh-toned mannequins posed for the beach, the city.

wondering if pretty prints and flattering cuts can exist beyond a size 8.


bikinis on the rail threaten the illusion that i am slim and toned.  

their gaping homages to the idea that showing a little,
just a little
flesh, is the sexiest way a woman can exist, bring about a conundrum.

they will see.

they will see that i am still not it.

a lawn of dust grew up around our graduation photo
as we started spending saturday mornings with a fresh head
buying the weeks produce from the farmers market
laid out on the pavillion where we used to blend evening with night
and a bottle of something.
now we drive with destination
and circle early mornings with a coffee in hand
every second of the day strategically planned.
we are visitors back home, driving away not for escape
we are travellers passing through

there is a gold lighter on the kitchen counter.
it doesn't mean anything
but it still burns with the heat of the last time it
was alive.
i pocket it.  i will try it later, when i am alone,
and watch it's smoke curl in to the crevices of the endless sky.


outside there is a dais and my family are spread across it like a luxurious french tapestry.  
it is fraying, though.
or maybe it always was.



i am colder than i was here, last year.
every spring we gather to remind each oher
that we should see each oher more, shouldn't we?
i am planted in this polite, vacuous soil of words.
a bulb submerged, fat and waiting in the earth.
i am waiting to grow.  to turn my face up, and away.
last year there were more of us, i'm sure;
but i can't recall the names
faces
of those that aren't here.

we are measuring our decline like an hourglass-
with each new year we are one less, one less.

my darling, let's go back now,
to when we weren't a fixed point in time.
and nothing would change and we'll still be apart
but i'd like to live us again.
i'd like to remember our love in reverse
because i know exactly how it will end.



i'd like to start with the pain and the sorrow
distance shrinking and stoic conversation thawing
we're getting younger and there's less history to share
i know you less today than i did the one before.
we're old before we're new and we're heading for our pinnacle
we're runming back and to catch the apex of our best.

i want the sourness to fall away

i want to unlearn all of you that stopped loving me.

i don't want to know you found a prettier girl

i don't want you to stop contacting me so suddenly.

and as we move back through the years

and the coarse ropes of comfort fall away

we'll regain the grace that made us good at the start,

we'll find our way back to that place.



soon i'll reach the day we first met
and you'll be that bright excitement i first caught.
then the memory will surpass our temporal stretch

and you'll be a stranger with no space in my heart.

salt in the wounds.
slab laid out on stainless steel

deathbed-

it is a bed after all,
a bed is for sleep and comfort dreams

but more often than not
i thrash in to it

trying to break the ribs of my
nightmares.

split in taste-

downstairs there is colour.
passion
tribal motifs and sun-washed orange.

upstairs? a more muted affair-
stocky floral borders carve peach walls
old furniture on the verge of mould sits-
a temporal mistake.

split in mood-

cheer and optimism tends to rise
bubble balloons up and up.
but there it is
me
a restless cloud covering the landing
with the threat of teary rain.
i overhang the balcony
an exhausted sunset flagging down
the night
heavy dark.  sink in on itself

absence, absence.

what is downstairs doesn't venture up
into such an airless atmosphere.

anne sexton wrote love letters to my soul
long before i was conceived.
i think she knew the ways, all the ways, in which i'd suffer, before i did.
because it's a tale as old as time; you profit off my soft heart
and i consider death, always, as the solution.

my mother suffered in the same way,

                    as did hers, as did hers,

and hers, and the anger has nowhere to go but in to our marrow
to exist long aftet we don't.

we birth it in new girls, beautiful new girls who are worth more than the currency
of how they can serve others.

i wanted to be different, i really did, anne.
the nuance of your long nights and painful days was not lost on me.
painted a temple in the language of supressed women
for me to see-
split at the ventricle to become the mother, the daughter, the *** goddess, the poor browbeaten housewife.

and all i do is crane my neck and admire it all, eave to eave.

i gave my confession down at the beach.  tide out and salted heart.
i sold it to a man in neon boardshorts
with a surfboard clamped under his armpit.
chalk pillars and a congregation of seagulls
fighting.  conversational scraps.
an isthmus that leads in to the water
before it backs down.
we go.

i spilled it all, my guts, my broken guts.
vomited them up on the pebble cast.

there is something about the gait of the sun as
is it turning away from our sky-
soft and low-
that brings it out of me.