when i was young
i never intended on living to adulthood
    i didn't have any dramatic plans for my death
    but i hadn't planned for the contrary, either
and so
time rolled on, the way it does
and through pure neglect
i found myself here
   alive today

and the years keep passing, the way they do
time's funny that way:
it increments in loops;
      another year forward,                
      another revolution of the same.

when i was younger
i didn't believe in the future,
i still don't, but now i find,
that the present tends to stick around.
and one's seeming imperative thoughts and actions,
one's urgent sparks of actuality,
aren't flames of some eternal logos,
but are more
the random shower of a Catherine wheel
spinning aimlessly on a pike

and so, through sheer inertia
the world keeps on turning
and you with it
till one day
you stop
and are left
disorientated and thrown
into a wall

i'm not sure what i'm trying to say here,
or if this maudlin sentimentality amounts to much
but if i had any truism
from my time spent,
it would be this:

the self is a clear plate of glass
onto which meaning condenses like steam
at first invisible to yourself,
you become aware of your shape through
the foggy coalescence of the things you cherish.
but sometimes,
those meanings become too much to bear
and they condense
into a liquid
and silently drip off.
then
maybe you wait,
slowly drying out,
for the process to hopefully start all over again
but in the mean time
you're left there,
gently and vacantly
estranged
translucent

and damp

xvii.

my dear neurosurgeon
failed to find my eyes,
he only looked
at my mouth, my
left jaw,
whine a little,
and gave me analgesic - i f

orgot what's the na
me - that replaced my f
ace with the mo
on. it's moon face. still

present until this very moment
just because my body wants to
remember. i
maintain my diet like there's
no tomorrow but actually there is &
boy did it
grace my stomach with a

crying gift, an angel's tears,
an angel lives near the volcano
everything turns sour.

i wasn't hurting at that time.

now i am. turning not only
my face to the moon, my whole body
is the moon, even my
fingers are the moon
but they are the crater part so
when i touch a boy he

disappears - when i
touch a girl i disappear.
i've never wanted to be a boy,

only some nights
i am so fragile i become masculine.
it's not that i've never felt
feminine, i do, every time

i am catcalled i do, every
time my father kisses me like a jewel
i do, every time my brother
treats me like a marionette
i do, every time i'm seen as angry i swear i do.

my mother is angry all the time but
that doesn't do anything about
her womanhood - her husband
still sees her as a good, and yes, the eyes
of a man
are like the sun, nothing at all
like mine.
my eyes are the only part of me
that is not the moon, that is pluto.

i've been to so many doctors
i am very sure it's not
the minds nor the medicines.

it's funny
that

my dear neurosurgeon
didn't even graze my skin -
the only time a knife
tore my epidermis open

it was a slim box cutter.

i've been to so many doctors,
i am very sure.

they're nothing but glorified bus drivers*,  said my father after i told him i wanted to become a pilot.

the opposite of love is not hate, but contempt.

what causes the kodachrome to fade little by little to grey? is it really bred of familiarity. the wear of gradually learning the truth about somebody. the minutiae of the everyday sanding away at the idealised, sculpural dream.

or is it triggered rather by the dull shock of an identifiable disappointment; the inevitable transformation towards sallow disgust justified by the devastation of slap-to-the-face betrayal or loss.

must we fulfill the dream simply to learn that it was only ever empty?

my father, a devoutly unspiritual pragmatist, had nevertheless as a young man fallen in love with the expansive embrace of the blue above. the son, grandson, and great-grandson of farmers, he worked his hands down to shredded red sores to put himself though flying school only to have his application for a commercial licence rejected due to a doctor's confounding eleventh hour diagnosis. colour blindness. an all-or-nothing man, my father never once returned to the enthralling blues, yellows and pinks offered up by the cockpit, and from that point forward became a farmer.

i gave up on the thought of becoming a pilot, and later, (much later), developed a fear of flying.

you are eighteen and you're in love
with a boy who hates his birthday.
you don't know it yet,
but the world gets so much bigger than the back of his car.
you think he needs you to be happy and so does he
but both of you are wrong.
it'll take you almost a year to stop crying.
and then you don't talk for another three
and when you finally do,
he thinks he still knows you,
but your heart is heavier than it was then.
and you **** him because you're lonely
but it isn't the same.
neither of you can fake love.
at least he still makes you laugh.
you'll pretend it's enough
because at least he's a body.
at least you're not by yourself.
at least you're alive
and you're good at *******.
because bodies are distractions
from the things we hide inside them.
you have him inside you
and he wants to gut you of your ugly, your sad.
he scrambles for an excuse not to stay the night
and you laugh.
you know what this is and how it goes
and you both love someone else.
you swear you won't **** him again
but you do anyway because you're still lonely
and you like the way his hands fit around your neck.
you **** him because it's good for your art
and you get bored of your own hands on your body
and you're fine with letting him feel useful.
and you think about when you were sixteen
and how *** was supposed to be special
and it makes you cry
because you're not who you wanted to be.
it makes you cry, because the world got so much bigger
after you left the backseat of his car.
the world is so big and you don't know
how it ended up on your shoulders.
you would have died for him.
you have been ready to die for every person you have ever loved.
you have dreams where he dies
and you can't save him.
you have dreams where people die
and you can't save them
and you're the one who tied your hands.
your mangled heart and all its bleeding.
nobody asked you to die.
what good is all the love in your chest
if you don't leave any for yourself?

- m.f.

there were tears,
many, they
flowed regularly
from
porcelain bowls
down drains
I'd hoped
would separate
the pain, cleanse
them, make them
water again,
free to roam
amongst
their own in salt
lake streams, banks
bursting at
the seams with
ripe green,
so different to here
where all they've
ever known was
fear, housed behind
eyes, between ears,
counting each
shallow breath
like they were
anticipating
their death.

there was a
          house we
didn't visit,
no detail
           beyond
four walls
           & a door,
we looked for
a map
       but were
forced to
         resort to
our own
      crevices
& pores,
      subconscious
grid works
              so dimly
lit we vowed to
         clear the
mist,
keep on riding
           through its
endless
abyss.

reflectively i
      opened &
closed
                regularly,
i was
petals blushed
        in the
height of
summer & a
           frostbitten
bud
in the throes of
winter, except this
                year
   the sky not
grey brought
a heat everyone
              could feel 
except me,
i waited
for an
          opening that
didn't come,
                  a flower
refusing to yield
to sun,
                limbs
staying firmly
crossed, lost in a
place where
             nothing
warm survives
for long.

nothing hurts worse than the cataclysmic rot in your heart
ache in your head
this burden has lips and a mouth and can speak and can shout all the things you've done to deserve the bitterness in your breath
his bestfriend's bruises on your neck
gravel on the ground fades, a grey background
father gets out of jail tomorrow, always bad news
silence has a sound and the static you hear when I'm not around, running, always running to what end? where are we now?
why's it taken you so long this time to speak up, admit you miss me,
you always do. I make fun of the parallels in history only until
they're through