Dreams str e  t   c  h  in  g      a  h  e   ad     o   f    t  i   me  
Ebbing and f  l  o  w  i  n  g like darker tides,
set adrift, off the shores of Nightmare,
where clouds grow fierce and

C      O      V      E     R      T     H      E       W    H     O     L     E        S    K     Y

I don’t know the way home,
I’m not sure it even existed,
just a p  a    s     s      i       n     g            m    e    m    o      r       y
that moves like the water,
w     a         s            h         i           n      g           a     w   a      y  
the sand;
dry land;
lost to time     i   m    m     e     m         o           r               i            a                l

By the light of glowing stars
I will traverse this path I’ve taken.
Though wicked brambles may snag my sleeves
and felled trunks may block my course,
even as twigs and sticks trip my ankles,
I will traverse this path I’ve taken.

As the path rises, it shall surely fall,
you can only travel uphill so far
before the landscape takes pity
and guides you down into a valley.
Even as the sun ends another day,
I will traverse this path I’ve taken.

The beautiful night hides nothing from me,
I will traverse this path I’ve taken.
Midnight dark, the sky full of stars,
they offer me luminance and courage
when others see dots in the darkness.
By the light of glowing stars
I will traverse this path I’ve taken.

My heart is filled with sadness again tonight,
I saw her face and again I fell in love once more.
How long must I wait to feel love’s light?

It caught me by surprise in how it felt so right,
in how I spoke to her each night whilst sitting on my floor.
My heart is filled with sadness again tonight.

It cannot come to this, but with all my might
I can’t fly over and knock gently upon her door.
How long must I wait to feel love’s light?

I see her face still, what a beautiful sight,
I always feel the heat of love burning in my core.
My heart is filled with sadness again tonight.

I feel the need to hear her voice again despite
the finality in her decision to let go. Mon amour,
how long must I wait to feel love’s light?

I felt so tall with her, now I’m searching for height
in all our stories, our mythologies and lore.
My heart is filled with sadness again tonight;
how long must I wait to feel love’s light?

This is it, the end of the line
and I didn’t realise it when we got here.
Ups and downs, good times and bad,
but you are not a friend to me
and I am not a friend for you,
perfect strangers living separate lives.
Saying hello every couple of days was enough
to push you away on the current.
Offering to help you when you needed it was enough.
We said hurtful things to each other
and the scars they left have gone
but the memories are still fresh.
This is goodbye, the hardest word to say,
so I won’t say it out loud.
We’ll meet again.

I heard stories of you, Romania,
lying far in the east,
communism and beaches side by side.
I heard of the bullets
and families hiding under tables.
The women were beautiful, so I heard.
Turns out they’re nice to look at
but peel away the layers
and you’re left with a rotten core.

Romania, I would wipe you off the face of the earth
and plant cancer in your soil,
AIDS in your rivers
and watch every one of your people
die in exquisite agony.
They don’t really deserve the sun on the necks,
the wind in their hair,
friends to call family.
Romania, I would watch you bleed to death
in some dark alleyway as a thousand men
have their god-awful way with you,
I would watch you drown
and hold you under just to make sure.

I have a very large box of hatred
in my head set aside
specifically for you.
Dare me to
open it?

I hopped into a
boxcar and ended
up somewhere
in Wisconsin,
mid-winter froze
in the air
and my breath
crystallized into
dead angels
that hung like
gargoyle icicles
hanging from the
gutters of cathedrals
of fog.

I found a bar
with bikes outside,
the lights inside
too dim to lighten
the sidewalk.
There was swearing
and the sounds
of poker chips
sliding on wooden tables
full of scratches
and gouges and
knife marks.

It was ***** inside,
dust clung to every
available surface
and none of the clientele
had had a shower
in weeks.
I ordered a whisky
and found myself
a dark corner
to watch the locals.
I was as happy
as a spider
in a cauldron of
dead flies.

There is something
magical about places
like this,
seeing the real
side of humanity,
the dirt and the
grime, the fights
and the blood
and the camaraderie
of like-minded souls
not fit for
public consumption.
These places were
perfect and I never
wanted to leave
any of them,
but tabs build up,
money runs dry,
glasses get smashed
and I get my
*** handed to me
by some ****
barmaid wearing
leathers and chains.

I think I’ll be good
tonight, a long
journey just behind
me and I need
a few drinks
to forget who
I am and where
I live in the universe.
Give myself the
company of a
different mind
for a while.

I think I’ll like it
here, in the snow
and the warming
whisky
that flows through
my veins like
hell’s blood.

they came from the woods equipped with vindictive teeth
and they ripped my skin off and my internal organs
they scattered ubiquitously and left me for dead
but i am no mortal, i am a god of my own design,
and i will take my retribution on them from the woods.
i drag my body through the thorny bushes and sticks
and up the hills and down the valleys as mountains tremble
to the ground and fall as pebbles from the stormy sky
and my claws dig deeper into the soft belly of the earth
and she screams in agony at this **** of her soil.
i drink from the river and find shelter in a dead horse
and lay its still warm organs where my organs were before
and there i sleep until the sun appears and again i drag
this useless body as forenoon becomes afternoon becomes e’en.
a starry sky offers itself to me but i cannot navigate
with this pallid tepid light illuminating nothing of this environ,
so morning again i drag and i drag this sack of skin and bones
and my teeth chatter in the cold and my breath becomes angels
and they dance for my amusement as i continue up broken hills
and there before me is the city of a thousand lights
siren calling me towards her open arms and seedy *****
and i roll down this steep escarpment and paralyse my hands
as i grab these rocks so jagged like mica or quartz or flint
and now my hands are gashed wide open and blood
smears the path i took but that does not matter because
my enemy lies before me in this city of a thousand lights,
a city that refuses to sleep to man or beast or godlike dead.
i slide unseen into a school and wait in a closet until the morn
when all the children fresh from adventures as robin hood
and his merry men running wild and rampant in the woods,
who found me sleeping and with their army of vicious teeth,
they ripped my skin off and threw my internal organs away
and now i lie in wait for them so i can cut off their skins
and i can disperse their internal organs everywhere
because you don’t disturb the gentle slumber of a tired godman
and don’t expect the godthing not to succumb to blind rage,
so as i lie here and imagine all the horrible things i will do,
i cannot help but laugh a laugh of a beast on the cliffedge of death
but i will always get my requital and **** what needs to be killed.

These used to be windows that kept the cold out,
that frosted over and made the harsh winters translucent.
Now they are nothing but the staring eyes of the dead,
offering the hope of a view but there’s no one behind them,
no child blowing breath on the glass and creating new shapes,
one pane now smashed and if neglect needs something to be broken.
The lives of so many fractured minds found their fate here,
it’s little wonder the ghosts don’t walk down the hallways,
there’s nothing to see but the decay of unreliable paint,
nothing to hear but the silence a building like this once craved.
The dead do not dwell here, the darkness is too empty,
the beds are empty and echoing footsteps do not pass the doors.
So much sacrifice went into the destruction of every dream
that even the living find the atmosphere repulsive and vile,
that even in its history, this building wails like its occupants
once did when the typhoid was bad and the madness set in.
A grave without a body, the loneliest place in the world.

This is my room, these are my four barren walls.
This is where anxiety keeps me in chains,
this is where I shield myself from the hurt.
Here I’m alone, nothing will rip my soul in twain.
This is where I wear my heart on my sleeve,
this is where darkness will find no home.
Here is my life, like superfluidity,
flowing free as a waterfall with an infinite drop.
This is my room, these shadows are mine alone.

These are my heavens, this is my burden,
to hold the world within its bounds,
chained to the void stretching infinity.
I watch time pass and witness the birth of mountains,
observe your nations and empires come and go
like the polluted waves on a nuclear beach.
I watch as you divide your home,
borders separating each other for no reason,
the folly of men with power in their minds
and a darkness so corrupting in their hearts.
I see no artificial borders from my vantage point,
just the blending of ecological systems
in satisfying rings around this beautiful world.

I wasn’t in chains at the beginning,
you portrayed me as such and then it was so,
chains suddenly around my ankles and wrists,
disappearing into the dark maw of the universe,
and you all have the key to set me free.
These are my chains, this is your burden,
to hold my boundless soul in a confined space.
I cry out sometimes and crack the earth open,
blow tempests into your atmosphere
and watch as they spin with the Earth,
and you give them names, how cute.
You just sit there until they pass.

I suppose you’ve all forgotten about me,
too busy with big dreams at small prices
to remind yourself of the burden of being.
I am here, in my little corner of the universe,
holding you up and steady in the cold gloom,
thankless and forgotten and so ******* old now.
My shoulders have been sore for a long time now,
one ***** thought I shrugged, I just shifted my weight,
and all of a sudden, capitalism bounded to the forefront.
I must be more careful, I told myself at the time.
But at least you discovered heavy industry,
your blanket of smog keeps me warm at night.

Think of me sometimes, holding you all up,
whatever struggles you have in your lives
pale in comparison to my duty of care.
One slip of my shoulder and your world,
quite literally, comes crashing down.
Play your music, create your art, write your stories,
they are what you are here for after all,
to share your creativity with everyone else.
If you are overly concerned about being happy,
struggling to sleep as you try and figure it all out,
there’s your answer, don’t say I’m not good to you.
Goodnight, may you live better lives than me.

After days in the jungle, I came upon a tower,
black as darkness, ivy creeping up its walls.
It smelled of thousands of years-worth of death
and turned my stomach in knots from the energy it gave off.
Someone stood by the door, wearing a brown gown,
hooded so I couldn’t see his face for the shadow.
He held a staff carved from ebony wood,
the handle crafted from gold bought in the Orient,
the foot covered in rubber from the Malay lands.

I approached with caution knowing this man meant no good,
an ill omen for sure, the only kind that dwells in these places.
The wind gusted at my back, forcing my march to quicken,
growling at me for delaying what seemed inevitable.
This is a land of horror; I knew before I left home,
but the promise of riches and freedom consumed me,
my all-too-human greed getting the better of me.
There was nothing here for me, but I was too far gone.

That horrific creature never took chase when I fled the ship,
instead, he stayed aboard, dining on my friends.
I looked back now and again, making sure he stayed,
and I wished I had not, seeing the flesh fly, bouncing off the sails,
the arm of my neighbour entwined by one of the ropes.
The man in the gown grabbed my shoulders hard,
pulling me out of my memories and back to the tower,
rising like a monolith to some old forgotten gods.

I followed him inside, the base of the tower as dark as death,
the flame on the wall doing little to combat the slimy black,
but doing just enough to illuminate the first few steps
of a spiralling staircase ascending into god-knows-where.
The man in the gown draped a wet cloth on the top of his staff
and lit it on the fire on the wall and gave it to me.
As I took it, he told me to climb in a voice I had heard before,
the voice of the creature that attacked and killed my friends.

Up I climbed, the man in the robe close behind me,
whispering incantations to a god that hid in darkness,
a god that lay in wait at the denouement of these stairs,
a god that chose me for something I could not fathom.
The shadows the fire cast kept me on edge,
sometimes I would gasp for breath when one moved too quick,
too unnatural to be caused just by my dancing fire.

The stairs ended in a rotten oak door with iron brackets,
a handle of brass and a peephole like an old man’s eye,
a cloud of cataracts caused by years of neglect,
like that eye had seen too much and was better off unseeing.
The door opened slowly without any interaction from me,
a blast of wind blowing out the flame on the staff.
The man in the robe grabbed it from my hands
and with a swift kick to my backside, I stumbled through the doorway.
I could hear his footsteps rush back down as the door closed,
creaking a presage until my only exit had shut.
The smell of its breath invading my nostrils and clung to my eyes,
as its own eyes blinked out from the dark like fiery orbs,
its teeth blinding white with speckled blood by the gum line.
It laughed at me, and I knew I was just a game to it,
for it spoke only four words and those words followed me,
from the ship, along the beach and through this jungle deep.
It looked me straight in the eyes and once again those words,
Run, it said.
I am hungry, it said.

Every dark thing, a turbulent mass of nothing;
every forgotten hope, a sanctimonious silence;
every lost dream, a memory of ******;
meet me by the tree growing in the echoes of violence.

These old woes, heavy in your beaten head;
these philharmonic nightmares, blessed with ultraviolet light;
these sorry worries, pontificating to the ignorant;
meet me by the tree with leaves that shimmer out of sight.

Too many ugly voices, stretched thin in your clothing;
too many stranded friends, veiled in your weathered face;
too many judges, stealing notes from the executioners;
meet me by the tree that holds it all in place.

And you, lonely little girl,
far from the envy of a century,
sing the quiet war songs of your ancestry.

~~

o brokenhearted girl


why do you
cry yourself
to sleep
at night


you're already dead


let go

~~

My soul has a spark that ignites a flame inside,
the engine room of my mind machinates a response,
and all the world’s a stage, they say, on a trembling tide,
ebbing and flowing like the metaphors of a beautifully-constructed sentence.

I act out a scene no one cared enough to write,
the other players reacting to the shadows of silent words.
Still life painted in gold, no movement in the moonlight,
dreaming of evolution and the voices of other worlds.

Was it love of life that shimmered in that ethereal glow,
or the faces of angels in the gloom that made me heart beat fast?
Never mind the silly stories I was always told,
those who live with their heads in the clouds don’t always finish last.

It’s a cold comfort knowing I’m not the only one there,
feeling the breath of a gentle wind against my reddening cheek.
The voice of a love carried from beyond the sea somewhere,
colours the dark with a splash of light and the night seems so less bleak.

The tide rushes out and the moon rides high in the dark underbelly of the sky,
and the audience has dispersed into the cold still of the night.
You and I are the only two remaining, singing songs that get us high,
hand in hand, shoulder to shoulder, waiting for the first crack of morning light.

Constellations gather in her eyes,
and from her sweet lips comes the faintest of sighs.
I don’t know what goes on in that head of hers
but I bet it is just the most beautiful verse.

Dance with me a little,
let me feel your hands in mine,
your hair brushing against my face.
Speak to me a little,
let me hear an angel’s voice,
your plosives giving way to silence.

But the dead don’t sing like they used to.
All the movies are black and white.
All the women look like Greta Garbo.
All the men look like James Stewart.

I’ve been walking this road for hours now,
heat from the dark sun burning the back of my neck.
I don’t know how or why I survived, but I did,
the universe perhaps playing a little joke on me,
let them all **** themselves but keep this one alive,
let me see what he does all on his own.

People always seemed alien to me,
especially the ones in power, the ones who controlled the triggers
and all the buttons that could send missiles halfway around the world.
What must that feel like, all that power?
However it felt, it wasn’t good for the rest of us.
As far as I’m concerned, I am the last one alive,
trying to tune radios on to different channels proved fruitless,
the entire electrical grid was damaged beyond repair.
Whoever else may be alive, they had no way of communicating.

I reach a diner and gather up food and other supplies.
I have no idea how long it’s been since the wars ended,
there’s been little way in being able to count the days,
but I reckon it’s been a few years now,
my beard has grown from stubble to now reaching my chest.
That’s my calendar, a beard that rarely gets washed.
I had read lots of books and seen lots of films
about how the future might pan out if everyone went mental,
and Cormac McCarthy came closest, I think.

It’s incredibly lonely here, haven’t seen another live person
since the wars ended, everyone panicked and fled to higher ground
but the world didn’t get flooded by water,
it was nuclear pollution that did everyone in
and hiding on a mountaintop wouldn’t protect you from the toxic air.
Every day, I walk past dozens of bodies, mostly skeletons,
some still have vestiges of flesh clinging on,
what’s left of the crows picking away at the last morsels.

My backpack is filled mostly with bottled water,
food I only really eat when I visit diners or motels.
What I didn’t get in those post-apocalyptic stories
was why all the survivors seemed to sleep outside
when all the hotels and houses had perfectly good beds.
I stayed at the Ritz in New York a while ago,
spent a few days living like a king ruling over
some small country that only existed in a history book.
I had no subjects to rule dominion over,
just myself role-playing a fantasy in my head.

But I have freedom now like no one else has ever had,
I can truly do whatever I want to do, no repercussions
except for an occasional nagging voice in my head
reminding me that I should feel guilty for taking that skeleton’s shoes.
Yeah, I have freedom, but it seems like an illusion,
having to write my story down in a little girl’s diary
that I found in a bedroom a few weeks or so ago.
I tore out all the pages that she had written in
because it was so difficult seeing her writing,
trying in her own way to come to terms with what was happening.
She didn’t have a clue, just like billions of others.

Right now, I’m heading into Pittsburgh,
somewhere I haven’t been before and probably won’t return to.
The blue of the sky is a lot darker than before the wars,
all the clouds are orange and brown, and fog smells like death.
Thankfully, it’s nice just now, and the heat has died down.
I pick a large suburban house with a big yard
and gather some paper and card from around the house
and build a little bonfire in the garden to cook with.
Everything I eat now comes in a can,
except for the odd berry I spy when I travel,
but because of the radiation, I can’t eat too many.

My cough is bad tonight, but there’s still no blood.
I’m sitting at a desk by a window in the master bedroom,
watching the last of my fire die away,
flying embers like tiny angels, the briefest of lives.
Some nights like this, I wonder why I don’t just give up too,
I’m fighting a losing battle here; I know how it will end.

I’ve just seen smoke, coming from another neighborhood,
snaking up into the dark sky.
It’s no more than a mile away, but I can’t go tonight,
I’m too tired from the walk today.
I need to sleep.
I need to investigate.
I need to sleep.

Want to know what I really think?
Are you sure?

You are the hat on the bed.
You are the bird in the living room.
You are Wednesday’s child.
You are the goodbye on a bridge.
You are the broom leaning on the bed.
You are the black cat walking away.
You are the broken clock chiming.
You are the six crows.
You are the itchy left ear.
You are the twitching left eye.
You are the flag touching the ground.
You are the milk boiling over.
You are the broken mirror.
You are the white moth in my home.
You are the owl in the sunlight.
You are the middle of a photograph of three.
You are the raven killer.
You are the three gulls flying overhead.
You are the seventh son of a seventh son.
You are the shoes on the table.
You are the sneeze on a Sunday.
You are the dropped umbrella.
You are the red sky at morning.
You are the spilled wine.

And you are so much more to me, darling.

More of these celebrities
cascading through the TV screen
selling me **** I don’t want
telling me how to live
how to donate for starving kids
in a country they’d never heard of.
Look at their eyes,
nothing. Nothing there.
Vapid curiosities
the lot of them.
They fascinate me,
in the way a kitten
is fascinated by a bug.

Look at those eyes,
nothing there.
Death in a fur coat
and high heels.
Mascaraed with hairbrushes.
I can’t see myself
bedding someone like that.
For once,
I don’t hate myself enough.

I’ve fallen for a black magic woman
and her spell intoxicates me,
tints my world with magic
and I am infatuated with her.
We make love beneath African skies
and she conjures storms
to wreak havoc on my dull days.
Her eyes the shade of mulled wine,
her lips sanguine like fresh wounds,
her soul the steel-blue of juniper berries
and I am drunk on the gin of her tears.
What fool I was to fall in love
with the dark heart of a loveless woman,
to exchange my happiness for her satisfaction.

A dream took shape, defined by the contours of the hole
you cut into the fog when you left that night.
You were walking on a dark cobbled street,
the drizzle coming down like sheets of silk,
the pale streetlight reflecting in the sheen
of the cobbles your gentle footfalls fell upon.
A man in a flatcap holding a skull-handled cane
smoking a cigarette with strong, yellow-tipped fingers,
watched as you ambled past his eyeline and down the hill.
He looked up to me, threw me a wink across the distance
and turned to follow you, his slippers sliding on the cobbles.

He disappeared from view and soon I heard the shrill
call for help come from your hastily muffled mouth,
but I just stood there and waited for the cries to die,
becoming drowned out by the drizzle pitter-pattering
upon the old cobbles and the stone wall lining the street.
The man came back up the hill, breathing heavily,
a line of blood trickling down from the corner of his mouth,
and he stood back under his solitary streetlight,
lit another cigarette and threw me another wink,
licking his lips and giving me a secret freemasonlike nod.
I picked up the shovel resting against my thigh…

When I woke, I thought of vampyres from the near east,
Transylvanian midnight hunters longing for the blood of virgins
to soothe the burning pain flowing in their centuries-old veins.
Still wearing my overcoat, I stood up and looked out the window,
overlooking the gaslighted cobble street enshrouded in fog,
the cemetery across the street, the stone wall doused in drizzle,
and I swear I could see the hole you left behind your body
as it vacated by world to find a new life to forage from.
I tapped out the dottle in my pipe, stuffed in fresh tobacco,
and lit the pipe, creating a large plume of smoke that quickly filled the room,
indistinguishable from the world-weary fog crawling beyond my window.

And then I saw the man in the flatcap, the cigarette hanging from his lips,
bent down from the rain, surely much too hard to gain anything from it,
but the smoke did indeed snake its way up into the air from the end,
like snakes of blue that decided gravity was far too cumbersome to believe in,
ready to escape the atmosphere and find a better way of living.
I began to feel empathetic for the smoke when I noticed the focus of the man’s gaze;
the window I was now standing at, where I too was smoking and gazing,
and he threw me a wink across the distance followed by an almost imperceptible nod.
I dropped my pipe, the wood splitting upwards along the shank,
almost shearing the tenon, but none of this I noticed as I stepped away from the window
that allowed the figment of a dream to gaze upon me and for I to gaze upon him.

I sat on my bed for an indescribable length of time, planning to stand up,
find the courage to step towards the window again to lay me hallucination to rest,
but the smoke must have still been stirring in my eyes because tears flowed,
and all I could think of was that figure of you disappearing into the fog
and how I let you disappear without saying but a word, without so much as a fight,
to try to convince you that I could change and that I was ready to change for you.
I may as well have picked up a shovel and started digging your grave,
or would that hole in the ground have my name upon the headstone?
Whatever recourse led me to this situation, I was surely now stuck
with no mode of transport available to allow me to venture to other pastures,
to view upon other cobbles, ones not lined by a cemetery,
ones not housing an hallucination that smokes snakes and winks and nods.
But here I am, wearing an overcoat in my bedchambers, dreaming of you,
because that is all you are now, walking away into the fog of a memory.

The words lost their meaning when people started losing their heads,
how they scurried about trying to find new meanings for old ideas.
Not one of them considered to look inside themselves for answers,
too busy hoping some miracles would happen to fall at their feet,
so they could hold them in their hands and show the world it was true,
their slightly deluded extrospection coming true in their own eyes.
It was not to be, however, as the skies turned black as coal
and the stars began to evaporate, and the smog replaced the clouds.
They lost their view of what was great and what was so beautiful,
how starlight had travelled for thousands of years to end in their eyes,
how every atom in their bodies reverberated with the universe’s energy,
how every painting ever painted contained its own secret magic,
how words always had their meanings in poems about love and hate.

“Gonna tell me where we’re headed?”
“You’ll know when we get there.”
“Come on, man. You haven’t said a word since we left. You turned up unannounced, told me to follow you, and here I am, following you, once again, and again you won’t tell me ****.”
“You’ll know when we get there.”
“No, I’m not playing your games any more. This is it. Tell me where you’re taking me. Too many times I’ve had to do this, This isn’t your time, just a warning. You know how many times you’ve said that now? Eighteen. I’ve been keeping tally. Honestly, I’ve had enough.”
“This is your time.”
“Finally, a ******* answer. So, what, I’m supposed to be all depressed now? Too late, you’ve been winding me up for months now, teasing me with this ****. Finally I get to spend the rest of eternity not having to look over my shoulder every five minutes waiting for you to turn up and ruin my day. You know, I hope you enjoy yourself, I really do. You need to be a complete ******* to do what you do. Did you ever have a life, or have you done this for all time? I bet you have no idea what it’s like for us, constantly in fear for when you knock on the door. You just saunter about in your flowy robe looking all menacing, but you have no heart or soul, you’re just a puppet the universe had to create to chaperone the creatures that actually have hearts and souls to some afterlife where we do what we already did when we were alive. Honestly, what is the point of you? Why have life then death then life again? What’s the point in that? It’s just job creation with you, isn’t it? Middle management, pointless to a fine point. Ha ha. Death is a job, nothing more.”
“I have no heart, that is true. You have no idea what that feels like. You get to feel, you get to see, you get to experience love and hope and fear and loss. I have none of that, just the words used to describe them. They mean nothing to me. You can make jokes about me, about how unfeeling I am, but you don’t want this, no one does. You’re right, I never had a life. That is my curse, not yours. You get experience. Death keeps you in check, gives you purpose, a finite time to try to force you all to do good in the world. Without me, without even the concept of me, living forever, you would have no deadline in which to do anything. You people think that if you had eternity, you’d learn every musical instrument, teach yourself every language, travel to every country, love countless men and women, but none of you would do that. You would start tomorrow, and when tomorrow comes, you’d start it tomorrow, ad infinitum. An infinity of tomorrows. Nothing would get done, you would sit all day and stare at your TVs and computers, idling away eternity. We are here.”
“A grave. You brought me to a grave? My grave, I suppose?”
“Yes.”
“So what now? You want me to lie in it, stare out of that rectangle at my little patch of sky? Wallow in self-pity, start regretting every little ******* detail of my life? I’m not interested in that. Just tell me what I have to do or where to go and I’ll be on my way.”
“You have already been judged, I have been told the outcome.”
“Surprise me.”
“You failed. You spent your life caring only for yourself, without any shred of humanity for your fellow people. At the moment you died, there were seven billion, five hundred and twelve million, seven hundred and twenty three thousand, two hundred and ninety nine other people alive. How many of them did you care about, how many did you think of when you threw away your leftovers, how many of them did you fall in love with, how many did you help?”
“Look, if I’m not happy, how the hell can I make others happy?”
“By being there. You don’t have to be happy to make others happy. Making others smile and laugh will cause you to smile and laugh. It is infectious. To help yourself, you must help others in the process, it just doesn’t work one way. I have been around since the beginning of time and it has happened far too much. You have failed, as so many before you have. This is your punishment. You will stand here forever, unable to move, staring down into your own grave. This is your reminder, this hole in the dirt. This is the culmination of everything you have ever done, every thought you have ever had. This is your life, confined to the darkness of a grave.”
“Wait, this is ****. I don’t want this. No book ever told me it would be like this. Where’s the fire, the torture, the pain? At least I’d be kept busy. There’s nothing here, no feeling, no company. Why must I be alone? Because I was alone in my life? That wasn’t my ******* choice, it was the choice of everyone else. No one took any time to ask me how I was doing. What happens to them, will end up like this?”
“Perhaps, but that is not for me to decide. There is more than one punishment, those who decide on such things have decided this is befitting of the way you lived your life. I must go now. There are many more souls in need of me.”
“Wait! Is there anything I can do? This can’t be it, I have time left, I can do good.”
“That time has passed. There is no time here. I must go now. This is your punishment; your trial has already finished.”
“So I stand here forever?”
“Yes. Goodbye.”
“****. I don’t want this. I’m sorry! Can you hear me? I’m ******* sorry! Give me another chance, please. Just one more chance.”

You sit by the window watching nature be nature,
silhouetted against the sunlight raining in.
You appear as nothing but a shadow
but my mind slowly with care, starts to colour you in,
hair the colour of hay and barley, scarlet streaks,
skin the colour of balsa wood,
a dress of burgundy hugging your figure,
your feet bare, making circles in the air.
I whisper your name without thinking
and you turn to face me, smiling,
wondering why I said your name.
I can’t come up with an answer and you laugh,
something so delicate, so fragile,
that I thought it would shatter before it reached me.

Now…
now you’re sitting somewhere else,
somewhere I can’t see but you’ll be back tomorrow,
You’ll be back with more stories
and I will listen to each and every word
as they roll off the tip of your tongue
and journey to my ever-receiving ears.
You’ll tell me of Arizona and a phoenix in the desert,
how the heat gave you intense sunburn
and now your shoulders are starting to peel.
You’d go back, constantly looking to explore.

You are someone who makes her own maps,
draws in new boundaries and new sights,
offers stories instead of facts and figures,
people’s faces instead of country’s names.
Pointing to a blank part of the map,
you’d tell me that this is where your next story will be,
and I fall in love with your passion,
but I don’t travel so I can’t write stories,
so instead I will write about you.

I’m still in love with that first chance encounter,
the sweet serenade of the forthcoming happily-ever-after,
the diamond twinkle in those emerald eyes,
the morning greetings and the endless chatter of the nights.
I thought it was a dream, but this was never such a thing,
the way my dark soul danced with yours and how our hearts would sing,
a melody that had no words but full of feeling,
the miracle of hope and the effervescence of believing.
I fell in love with your boundless grace and unfettered desire,
the way your burning soul gave way to an even greater fire,
and we burned our bodies and melded our minds together,
and we lived in castles constructed of mist in moors of heather.
My heart is right where it was when we first fell in love,
anchored to your distance and a full moon high above,
and I know you still feel the same from that day long ago,
your voice still sings sweetly of all we have yet to know.

Inside you, there is a treasure chest I need to open,
full of diamonds and jewels that glisten in love’s light.
Clutching your heart like a key, unlocking the chains,
dazzled by the unfettered beauty of all that is you,
your smile the answer to all of my silent questions.

You are the reason my trees bud back to life,
why the sun rises each day with the moon lighting up the nights,
why the distance an ocean covers becomes a pond in a park.
This is why the Earth revolves in the deep unsettling dark;
so I can write you a little poem and know that you will read it.

I want you to know just how much you mean to me,
but the words haven’t been coined yet for the feelings I have,
even other languages struggle to give me the lexicon I require,
so these little words arranged in no order in particular
will have to serve the idyll of the beauty that is you.

Billions of years crumble in an instant,
the speed of light suddenly not constant.
The laws of physics vanish from my view,
I can’t believe the universe produced a beauty such as you.

You are the Chinese dog howling at night,
you are the Greek bat killer praying for light.
You are the Italian bird flying through the open window,
you are the Thai ghost stealing rice after a bad joke.
You are the Romanian dreaming of dark water,
you are the Lithuanian whistling indoors.
You are the German saying cheers with a glass of water,
you are the Brit leaving your new shoes on the table.
You are the Egyptian hearing the low hoot of a distant owl,
you are the Italian with the owl inside your house.
You are the Icelander knitting on your doorstep,
you are the Syrian playing with a yo-yo in the desert.
You are the Russian gifting yellow flowers,
You are the Portuguese walking backwards.
You are the Hungarian at the corner of the dinner table,
you are the Spaniard walking into a room left foot first.
You are the Brazilian putting your purse on the floor,
you are the Cuban drinking el ultimo.

We lay on the roof of my car under the sun,
the heat was intense but we were
too much in love to feel anything else.
Two hours we lay there, didn’t say a word,
just watched that blue ocean above us
crystallise into a twilit canopy.
Clouds shapeshifted into deep memories
neither of us could quite recall,
the lingering sense of familiarity
clouded by all that had happened since.
We both spotted one like Oregon
and she squealed when she saw it,
remembering her home once more,
her first performance of Shanghaied in Astoria,
her parents so proud of her,
she so **** proud of herself.
Always the actress, playing a part
that someone else needed for a while,
then the next job would come along
and she would fill a new role.

I lie on the roof of my car under the sun,
the heat is intense and I climb back down.
I look for Oregon in the sky but craning my neck
makes it hurt, so I look down at the ground,
at the dust and the stones
and the stars that slowly lose their twinkle.
I jump in my car, the passenger seat empty,
and find a new world to discover.

The bell rings, signalling dinner
and you all rush to the table,
sitting where your name is written
in front of an origami swan.
Eight of you sitting face-to-face,
and at the head of the table,
Time herself, in all her glory,
dining on the bones of the dead.

You all share compelling stories
from your own experience;
no tall-tales allowed tonight.
All stories follow the same theme,
how you don’t love anymore,
last broken heart I’ll have,
and Time herself, held in rapture,
dining on the bones of the dead.

You are all told to unfold
your origami swan and read
to yourself what has been written for you.
Don’t let anyone else peek.
Time herself wrote them,
taking great care and effort
to make no mistakes whatsoever,
and Time herself, in a shroud of light,
dining on the bones of the dead.

You will be ****** and plucked
and served as main courses
for the next diners due.
You will submit to her will
and her whimsy desires,
she always gets what she wants,
and Time herself, full and tired,
dining on the bones of the dead.

Sailing away on a beautiful boat,
remembering all the pretty lines you wrote,
of love and hope and future bright,
of dreams and homes and white moonlight.
Subtlety is key I have deduced,
my wants are now all but reduced.
Now I realise anew,
all I ever needed was you.

It’s not over yet, I’ve convinced myself,
not yet shall I put you back on the shelf,
because the only need I have right now
is convince you to give me a chance somehow.
I spoke today to the wisest woman,
who said to me to err is human.
Do not assume she cares not too,
she too fell in love with you.

I wish I could write what my heart wants,
but wants are ghosts that love to haunt
the hearts and souls of weak-willed men
but no longer will I be one of them.
I am as strong as the days are long,
but I can still cry to a lonely birdsong.
One day I will prove how much I have learned,
and hope that someday your love will be earned.

The birds stopped singing a long time ago,
long before I ended up at the shore of the lake.
The water is a single shade of blue from black,
trees hanging limp and mournful around it,
drooping branches of dead bark and dying leaves
skimming the surface, debating whether or not to fall in.

I swear the silence is so loud, the voice of the universe
reverberating through the molecules of the atmosphere.
I can feel the vibrations through my feet,
rising like the creeping ivy on a dead house,
long ago forgotten by the hands of its creator.

I’ve heard tell that the lake goes down forever,
that it fills a void of limitless proportions.
If I threw myself like a stone into that wet darkness,
where would I sink if the lake has no bottom?
Maybe it flows down into the sky of another world,
my darkness their vacuum of space and light.
Further I sink, the blue begins to brighten
and I fall into another world where I am important.

I take a step into the cold dark water of the lake.
It wraps around my foot like the gripping hug of death,
that feeling you get when you close your eyes at night
and focus on your heartbeat slowing down as you rest,
and the panic you feel when you think it will keep slowing down,
sinking into your mattress and saying goodbye to nothing at all.

I’ll find out where I will sink to,
there is so little left to explore in this vast world
but I have found one more place to go.
The water envelops me and down I swim,
and the current moves around me in a circle.
I take a deep breath and my heart fills with heaviness.
So this is how it feels to finally let go.

You are the best you there will ever be,
so ignore the *******
who try to put you down.
****** your knuckles,
get it under your nails
and fight the good fight.
Get off your ****
and kick some instead.
You won’t win them all
but life’s **** like that sometimes,
******* will *****,
******* will bite,
******* will drag you through the dirt,
but rise up and face them,
you phenomenal creature,
you warrior queen,
you man of the earth.
Pick up your spirit
and with head held high,
fight back with your words,
fight back with your heart,
fight back with your soul,
tear the ******* apart.

The night is immense tonight,
the dark stretching further than I’ve ever seen it stretch.
The gaps between the stars I named for you
are bigger than I ever realised.
And I know all those stars are slowly drifting away,
all those beautiful little points of light will soon be gone,
and one of those stars has gone tonight,
evaporated away because I longed for it too much.
That was the most beautiful star I had ever lain my eyes upon,
but it was always out of reach, no matter how hard I tried
to reach up and pluck her from the night sky
so I could hold her close to my heart and say I love you,
the universe will never let you disappear from my view,
I will protect you and keep you safe in this dangerous place.
But I couldn’t, I left it too late,
and now all the other stars are following suit.
I try with all my strength just to grab one,
but they twinkle and flicker and vanish too quickly.
Soon, the sky will be fat with darkness,
and even the moon will leave,
trailing off into the void of a universe
that never cared for its inhabitants.

You might act like you own the world,
stick that nose up in the air
and force a wry smile speaking
to the lower classes,
but you will die one day,
hopefully really very soon indeed
and I will dig your grave,
lower your coffin into the ground
and jump on it a few times.
Open it up and jump on you a couple times,
just to make sure.

You were born into the working classes
and just look at you now.
You have forgotten where you came from
and where you will end up.
There is no god waiting for you, darling.
You’ll be with the brimstone
and the fire and the sulphur and the devils.
You traipse through your ******* existence like a princess
but you will rot like everyone else.

It’s the end of the world again but who cares anymore?
We’re too busy enjoying the time we have left.
There’s a war brewing and it’s getting closer
but the bombs don’t **** us, we dance in the shrapnel,
the metal’s already in our blood.

It’s the end of the world again but we’re too busy singing
songs of a time where we were safe in our homes.
We’re drinking beer and laughing at good times,
the ones that have been and gone
and the ones we have yet to have.

It’s the end of the world again but the fighting means nothing.
Bullets sing “Revolution!” in the air
as they buzz like ******* flies by our ears.
Let the idiots **** themselves and rejoice
in the fact that we are better than them,
howling under the watchful eyes of a blood moon.