The ice drew lace on the window panes
We couldn’t see out for a week,
The air had frozen and blocked the drains
And my tears were ice on my cheek.
‘Come back to bed and forget her now
She’s been gone since the crescent Moon,
Her passing has freed you from your vow
Yet your grief’s pervading the room.’

‘I need to know what was in her mind
On the day that she passed away,
She left no message of any kind
Why she swallowed the draught that day.
But you were there when she combed her hair,
You were there for the last words said,
She must have told of her deep despair
Or she wouldn’t have ended dead.’

‘You knew my sister had many moods,
You knew, before you were wed,
She’d lie, consulting the ancient runes
While hiding deep in her bed.
Her superstitions were known, it seems
Her hold on the world was loose,
She drifted half in and out of dreams
But death was what she would choose.’

I shook my head and I walked away,
And ploughed through the drifted snow,
Crunched a trail through the empty streets
To the cemetery gates at Stowe,
The clouds were grey in the sky above
And the snow built up in the trees,
While headstones peered from their icy tombs
Like sinners, down on their knees.

I scraped the ice from the headstone face
That said ‘Elizabeth Jane,’
‘An Angel fallen to earth,’ it said
‘While her heart was wracked with pain.’
A shadow fell on the marble face
As I turned, but no-one was there,
Then words appeared like an act of grace,
‘My sister killed me - Beware!’

The horror showed on my face, I rose
To follow the tracks I’d made,
But somebody else had left their prints
Leading away from the grave,
The tracks were made at a frantic pace
And they forged on way ahead,
Leading me through the cemetery gates
But Elizabeth Jane was dead!

A storm blew up on the way back home
And had turned the house to ice,
I forced my way up the frozen stairs
To confront Margot Desize.
But she lay frozen with eyes a-stare
And a glance said she was dead,
The horror fixed in her final glare
As a shadow stood by the bed!

David Lewis Paget

you, my love, are the light of my life, and you - are ruining my writing. lately, when i sit down and try to write, all i can seem to come up with are grossly overused analogies and tired metaphors that have been recycled a thousand different times. all that flows from the end of my pen are flowers and stars and the creases that form in your forehead when you smile and how much i'd like to lose myself in the galaxies of your irises - and it's disgusting. this twilight-esque prose, this juvenile symbolism and puppy-love poetry that pours from me - is not me. i'm no Poe, no Plath, no Kerouac, but i like to think that i'm okay. however, recently the caliber of my writing has been reduced to nothing more than rainy-day romance and child's play. and god, everything rhymes. i feel like i'm sixteen again in the best way. it's because you've stayed, that you are changing everything i thought i knew about love. i catch myself absentmindedly drifting to visions of a shoebox apartment in a city somewhere and furniture shopping and even the B word (babies). that's so unlike me, that is so - amazing because nobody has ever been so serious about me and i think that maybe, baby,  someday i'd like to be 80 with you - oh god. you - you are too many poems that all sound the same, but each time i read through them i somehow manage to find something i haven't read before. you are open doors and patient arms with a voice like a lullaby that resonates in the darkest corners of my mind. you are saving grace without condition and a love so deep i could go for a swim in it - and maybe that's why i'm drowning, because all i ever really learned how to do is doggy-paddle. but you are so patient. anyone else would have quit on me by now. the idea of forever has always terrified me, but the promises you make sound so real that i'm beginning to think maybe they are. baby, you, are eyes like soil and words made of rain drops, and every day we grow a little more. i adore you. i am so sorry that my meager words can't do you justice. my ineptitude is criminal, but i'm trying. and i think that i would rather be vomiting these clichés than return to the world of gray i lived in before i met you. i love you. i love you. i love you to the moon and back and every planet in between. you are the sweet to my tea and the leaves to my tree. and every song i've yet to hear but somehow i manage to follow along with. i wanna scream it from the top of a mountain or the middle of a grocery store, about this love that leaves me with butterflies in my belly and fireworks in my heart. baby, i've never been so happy to embrace mediocrity. my prose may be suffering, but my heart is soaring. writer's block has never been more welcome than when it bears your name. so wipe your feet at the door, take off your coat, and please, make yourself at home.

- m.f.

You aren’t the only one with secrets. Some secrets will be shared but I imagine most go unspoken, because the best kept secrets are the ones we keep from ourselves, those things we don’t know that we have hidden or forget we ever hid in one of those hiding places we don’t know we have.

She imagines the sound of a spine cracking when she crumples plastic bottles to recycle.
He hates his father and not because he’s an alcoholic with a vicious temper
           but because he gets more attention from the woman he’s married to,
           his mother, than she gives to him.
She doesn’t like his laugh.
He doesn’t like his laugh.
She won’t answer the telephone because she’s afraid of being mistaken for a child.
He won’t answer because he feels sick thinking about all the prints other people
         have left on the receiver.
She has recurring nightmares about her childhood teddy bear and
         she is reaching forty-five years old.
She resents her baby because she has to give up drinking for her pregnancy.
He resents her for being pregnant.
He has never had a dream he can remember so he makes them up.
She makes up anecdotes that bear little importance to make her life seem interesting.
He is planning on killing himself before he is at the age his hair begins to fall out.
He intentionally hold his jaw clenched to make it appear more chiselled.
        He read this in a magazine.
She refuses to take her socks off in bed. She said she read in a magazine
         that *** is better if the socks remain on. She actually hates her feet,  
         and his feet and all feet.
She makes herself ***** more than seven times every day. She has done this  
         for five consecutive years. She is clinically overweight.
His hair is not naturally the colour people think it is.
She has fantasies about her boyfriend’s sister.
He is afraid to go outside or near sharp objects or get in a car because
         of his conviction that he will **** somebody for a reason he can't explain.
He has no idea what he’s talking about.
She has no idea what he’s talking about.
He says he doesn’t believe in love. He believes it, and that he deserves it,
          but has never been shown it or felt it. He hasn’t given up
          but says that he has with a shrug.
She loves the way he shrugs her off. She loves to feel unimportant.
She says she doesn't believe in love and people assume she’s damaged
           after her divorce. She never loved him in the first place.
She spends her time alone splitting open tangerines and picking apart
           the slices one by one and then eats the rind.
He spends his time alone splitting open saturated teabags.
He has been stealing from his mother for five years.
She knows her son steals from her but doesn't want to confront him
          because she knows he has a drug problem and she hates him for it.
He thinks his daughter is weak.
She’s sad her daughter is ugly.
She’s comfortable being ugly because it means she’ll never be touched by a man again.
They tell people they were too busy to make that appointment.
They are alone all the time.

i. How the weathermen can predict happiness. Especially my mother's. Especially Swiss weathermen.
ii. I am glad that winter' is here, for finding warmth in the itch of wool, hat around ears, socks over knees.
iii. I am trapped in between walls and other people's walls and my bookcases and their bookends that may not ever end but can look like ends and ends and no no ends to the layers built in brick, all boxed in beyond this building. And my words are trapped in my mouth. They escaped from my mind to my mouth and now I don't trust them on my tongue.
iv. The strangeness of Roman numerals and the study of such numerals.
v. Is there a word for the study of numerals, specifically those of the Romans? There must be, as there is one for the act of eating whilst lying down, a fear of having fears, and the delusion that one is a cat.
vi. My wrists. No watch.
vii. Watch out for what you must keep a hold on, but know there are some things you need to just L.E.T.G.O.
viii. Morse code, S.O.Ss', plurals on top of plurals, mnemonics, anagrams, one blink for yes, lasts longer for no.
ix. Photoraph of my cousin on the day I found out she was going to die and we are kissing at the camera.
x. X for the kiss I need from the right one, or for the answer, and something telling me I got it wrong.
xi. Thinking is counter-intuitive when I'm thinking too much of absences. Silences. My thoughts don't know where to go and neither do my eyes and I can't look up because the photograph will look back down.
xii. Look at yourself. Steps: reflection; dissection; cut. it. out.
xiii. I cried harder than I have ever cried since I can remember a while ago and it's wasn't even a Wednesday or a Tuesday then, and those are my crying days.
xiv. When I get touched, I go back in time, sometimes.
xv. Transformations.
xvi. Condensation. Where do clouds come from? There are things we see everyday and we say we know exist with not a clue about how they work. How does a ball find its bearings? Where did the train begin to lay down its tracks?
xvii. Questions. Questions. Quote: Indecisions and revisions. Unquote: the more you cut it up, the more divisions.
xviii. How many parts am I divided into now? How many incisions? I can't keep count.
xix. The sun sets early in winter and the comfort of darkness is something you can count on. It stays longer, and you can count on that too.
**. Kiss kiss, one for me and one for you.
xxi. This doesn't count.

what are you doing to me?
these marble figures
crashing at my feet
like chips of flint
begging to catch
fire, to catch a
breath of air
but my god,
my lungs
heaving,
I ask
you

what are you doing to me?
permeating stone and
teaching me what it
is to bend, when I
once stood my
ground and
said, you
cannot
move
me

and what are you doing to me?
your feet are padding around
in the dark tunnels of my
temporal lobe, hanging
lanterns where lights
went out in storms
of crazed chaos,
and don’t you
know that I
am often
a ghost,
( don’t
you? )

what are you doing to me?
I feel the sun’s light as
it shines into my rib
cage, and I find I
am drunk from
this warmth,
and I ask,

what are you
doing to
me?

my mind is a planetarium
where each memory is a meteorite
and every apology burns like a dying star.

enclosed in the vast celestial stretch of my skull,
planets tend to vanish without the courtesy of a goodbye,
but i'm just happy to have housed them for a little while.

my projector is faulty and sometimes,
the images i try to convey become obscured
("asteroids may be larger than they appear").

i can't help but speak in broken constellations,
and hope that you somehow understand
that i have nothing but the best intentions.

not to mention, i've seen a lot of visitors, though
none have ever stayed for long, after they've surveyed
that i'm nothing more than a bunch of chaotic galaxies.

i rubbed the collection of stardust and debris from my eyes
and to my surprise, found that you hadn't gone anywhere.
instead, you were there, floating through my solar systems.

you've got me orbiting around your finger
like the rings around the sixth planet from the sun.
i come undone a little more with every word you breathe.

my bones are made of moon rock, aching like cold craters,
waiting patiently for the radiant warmth of the sun,
or your breath, or your touch, whichever is closest.  

the most stellar display of stars i have ever seen
are not in the belt of orion, nor anywhere within the milky way -
instead they are lightyears beyond, resting comfortably behind your lips.

- m.f.