the average human
describes their heartbeat
as a thud-thud or a few
rough pats to the chest.

i fall asleep with my ear
pressed up against your
chest. all i can hear is the
echo of a captain yelling,
"let me sink...let me sink..."
i ask you how you would
describe your heartbeat,
you point to the ship
in the bottle mounted on
your father's bookshelf
& faintly say
"the glass bottle keeps the
ship from sinking, completely
blocking out the captain's wish
to learn how to breathe
underwater because air just
isn't doing its job with keeping
him alive."

your break up letter to me
went a little something like;

"you were built in the fire,
stop acting like you burn in it.
you were never made to be fragile,
you were never made to be my glass."

my plead for you to stay
went a little something like;

(20) Missed Calls

your final goodbye
went a little something like;

a thud thud to the pavement.

& my final goodbye was
cracking open a bottle on your
headstone & standing in the sea
with the water rising up to
my knees, with a small ship in
the palm of my hand, a dunk
underneath the tide & a faint
whisper, *"breathe."

"She was carrying a book, and the hand-picked flowers she placed on the bed outweighed even the drag of his dying. We believe it's the silence that's fearful, never the words; and yet whenever she stopped reading to turn the page, he would smile. Perhaps, in that stillness he felt his heart stop searching for instructions on how to live."

Jude ****** - Boys Throwing Baseball

And that is the only thing our heart does without understanding why; it searches.
We are too human to love change, something that is as dangerous as anything we could ever willingly let pass us by, and too human to not look for it anyway.
How some things are so much of themselves that they become their own language, like a bright red silk sliding against the shoulders of a woman, how these things are not made for each other, but made for the moments they are intertwined in.
How silence even weighs from the things that never were, taking from the miracles that were one opened mouth away.
And now, as you remember one specific death the most, you desperately search for the life in everything that passes you by, even the things that you know have nothing to offer.
Even the World, in all It's isolation, gives back to us by pushing us away from It.
Even the small things that we decide to keep for ourselves have come a long way to find us.
A cigarette. A person. A rainfall.
All spend their whole lives waiting to be found.

You send me a song every Wednesday,

a soul offering; a slice of the strange radioactive
lunatic madness -
love-
growing inside your wonderland.
(It is not a cancerous tumour, please stop calling it that.)
You say it is dark, the Arctic's lover;
I say it is dark, like
velvet punk music and
stained checked shirts and
almost-blood wine (in shared glasses); like
the colour of your skin.

Come on.
We've both been more fascinated by the depths of the ocean
than the blue glass surfaces.
Isn't that why we fell into bottomless black holes and called it
love?
Isn't that why we branded ourselves poets,
seared the red hot poker labels onto our backs,
so that we wouldn't have to say we're just
sad...?

Yes, we are carefully disintegrating;
the world already gave us a head-start
by curling our spines into the snakelike 'S'
It was preparing us
for our careful meandering
into a river mess:
living.

No doubt, in the pool depths of African evenings,
you drink,
*****-tinged cereal or tea,  
the glass Roobios surface reflecting
a lover's face and the boredom of sadness.
No doubt, I drink to you,
coffee or warm milk,
to try and wake myself into
dying without a purpose.
No doubt, we both drink
the night itself.
And let it fester in our veins,
to curdle our blood into that same wine-shade of
darkness.
We drink.

Virginia Woolf had courage,
Sylvia Plath had courage,
Ernest Hemingway had courage,
you and I don't.
We are too fearless to live.
So we drink
and clutch at each other desperately
without reaching out a single finger.
We form shotguns with our hands, make pacts, go
home again.
And drink.

We are helping each other to die
and live
at the same time.
We are helping each other to try fit the day
too
into our arteries.

You send me a song every Wednesday;
this song will save our existence.

All of the routes have shown up around you and
Your suitcases are packed with
The scent of memories permeating the air.
You've put on your toughest coat and
Nostalgia will not let itself in
But, the more you look around and
the more you listen to the sounds
Being screamed around you
The more clearer it becomes that,
None of the routes are open for you.
None of the routes are open for you.
On the road that passed between escapism and development,
Someone forgot to tell you that
You can't make friends out of open rivers.
No matter how translucent the inlet,
No matter how unfathomable the depth,
No matter how elating the scent,
You can carry the stones before they're cast into the waters,
But,
You will only feel their heaviness,
When you are watching them float away from you.

1. The seconds roll by and you're starting to realize that you are becoming wearily accustomed to this way of living- the way where you are so obsessed with emotions,now that you do not feel them, that you are surrounding yourself with accidents. Almost as if you want to be in the same area you were at before you crashed and burned, by re-instituting an old lie you thought could never be accounted for, and crashing and burning a second time- all in the exact same places.
You've started changing and merging so much that you're sure you've left everyone without them even knowing it. As if you move with stealth whenever someone starts to realize just how tragic you can be- how you don't really need to feel to make others weary, you just have to be there. Your existence is enough.
Maybe that's why nobody really knows you, it's like being a thin piece of paper in a world where pen can only leave ink on thicker substances- whenever somebody asks you "Who are you?" you just turn your head shyly, and read from someone else's page.

2. It's been a while since you've substituted blankness for a renewal you thought you could find inside of another human being. You tell yourself that their words inspired yours, but are realizing it's not true. Love was not made to make the expression of detrimental things beautiful- the absence of it was.
Now that you're here as a mosaic of bruises that were left from somebody's poor negligence, you've begun to see that loneliness is an escape that treats you better no matter how hollow it is or how much work you have to put into fulfilling it.
Your hands get strained, your spine starts to curl, all under the weight of forgetting the emotions you had when you were writing for someone and not about them. A weight thats heavy and makes you miss the feeling of being in love more than you miss the person who you were in love with.

3. Instead of only being able to find inspiration when you hear specific footsteps walking away from you, you've tried to simulate their echoes every time you close your eyes, and then hoping for the best. With love, you knew about the withdrawal symptoms before you knew about the substance. When you had it and watched it fade away- you were left with that familiar feeling. That familiar longingness.
But now you understand what you must do when people enter a home uninvitedly. The next time you have it and lose it it will hurt, but it will not hurt in the same way.

4. Sometimes situations have a way of making you both aware and unaware of different things at the same time. Being in this state you realized; there is more than one way for a person to actually disappear.
And it never starts within them, it always starts around of them.
You started seeing less, feeling less, talking less, hoping less. You just followed what was there for you and hoped you wouldn't fall into a hole deeper than the one you were already in back then.
By the time you'd lost enough of yourself, you had the motivation to climb back up but just not enough physical strength to actually do it. You just followed the path and blamed its emptiness as a feature of your own intentions. When in actual fact, you only followed it like that because nobody wanted to lower themselves to be able to have the ability to walk with you.

5. A natural stationary position of yours is the position where it looks like someone has pushed you to the ground: you are always posed at that exact position, where you have just been pushed and you are simultaneously trying to get back on your feet.
Whenever you find yourself at a dead point that is caused by something that isn't a human being, you realize that it's always been 'too long' since you've dealt with a heartache that you are not used to.
Too long since you've carried a dilemma whilst thinking, "I don't know why this is here. I don't know why I am feeling this."
It's become this sort of pleasure that you sleep with knowing or not knowing just how far away healthiness is. Lying in bed all day pretending like you are whole- pitying your own broken heart as if you were not the one who broke it yourself.

6. It is hard to convince yourself that you are an optimist because of the way you express hurt like it will actually start saving you when you are not just feeling it, but when you are actually seeing it as well. But then again it all makes sense when you begin to realize: you beautified terrible things when terrible things began to happen too regularly.
It is not that you are trying to feel more of the pain because you are putting it into words.
It's that you are actually doing the opposite.

7. It's hard to keep up with your own identity when you are constantly turning people that know you into strangers.
You sometimes want to say it was spontaneous, but you've always known that it started with one small problem who always lied whenever they claimed to care more than they actually did.
They'd treat you with a kindness that had no actual action and you got used to depending on it like it was the only thing that you had left.
I guess when you get older you realize that sometimes people make mistakes and open things they're not supposed to- sometimes they rip holes in your mind that are big enough for the thought of their love, but not big enough for their love itself.

8. You're discovering that submission is more a habitat than a personality trait. You've pulled so many defenses around you that the only thing you dominate is the ability to come up with a false pretense. All the things that once meant so much to you seem to be running and fading away- they seem to be blackening out like the developing of a Polaroid in reverse. Slowly suffocating an image until the surroundings are disappearing slowly and malleably. Leaving only the person in the picture- surrounded by the blackness of the film.
Deemed to become an island in a great mess of things that could've been-
Deemed hopeless and passionless, hopeless and passionless.

9. You may or may not have been stronger when you were younger but you were definitely more content and aware. How many times have you looked at an old picture and thought "what happened during the years? was that really still me?" It is almost as if the time between then and now turned into a vast ocean and you were fast asleep whilst you sailed on it. You sometimes sunk and you sometimes rose above, but you were always unconscious. Always unconscious.
You guess that it is all what is eventually planned for you. But you can't help but shudder at the thought of it.

10. You hide away from attention because if people start to see just a little, they might eventually see too much.You're hoping one day you can show yourself as whimsically as you once did before you were forced to hide from a light that demolished you after it blinded you.
Maybe one day you'll exist under the presence of something that doesn't need to hold you to give you the same feeling you once needed to be able to carry on hoping.
You're just looking for a motive to keep you surviving even if it is only partly- You're just looking for an excuse to become addicted to something that doesn't have a heartbeat,
For once.

Wanderer.
From window to window.
Seeking
             something
in different glass scenes
from offices and trains and restaurants.
Like she'll see something or someone
or somebody.
And the world will no longer be
a tilted painting.

Clear spring cold
papers over
the scene of the city of her world.
She's freezing.

There is a cafe at the end of the
road
where sidewalk snow has mingled
with trod-on mud
from commuter's shoes.
It's called
'Les yeux qui voient tout'

She can smell coffee and cigarettes and paper and words
and smiles and wine all the way from Bordeaux.
She sits by the window.

Tendrils of hair cut
across her cheek
as she lowers.
The seat is cold.
Legs crossed,
                       arms clasped,
high-heeled shoes with straps
that cross,
head bent
over a crossword.

'Un cafe au lait, s'il vous plait.'

Last four-letter word pencilled in so
she crumples up the paper.
The eyes don't notice
origami birds dangling above her.
Somehow
they're all angled
towards the glass window
like sunflowers reaching for the sun.
Perhaps the casual
shuttered-open winds
are the birds' oxygen;
reminders that
                          something
like
sky,
air,
wind,
exist, beyond
coffee-smoked counters.
Reminders that
they could breathe, live, fly
in some other city of some other world.

Cup and saucer on a silver platter
hover over.
Idle fingers
and then a clatter.
She stares down into
the white porcelain pit,
teeming with hot brown
                                           alarms.
It isn't a portal
into
       something.
Just a cup of coffee.
Now that is an alarm.

Slow and
                shaking,
drip,
         drip,
                  drip.
The milk is poured.
Curling, italic, Persian carpet spread
from the cup's centre into warm-cream brown.
She imagines it is
blood in her heart.

She raises the little silver teaspoon
napping on the saucer and
stirs.

'Le sucre?'
Does she want it all
to be
sweeter?

Two packets, long like
Marlboros,
hastily, desperately dumped
into the mix.
Quick and
                  shaking,
she raises the little silver teaspoon and
stirs.
Little sugar grains ******
into a vortex,
dissolved and melted into
the city of the world of the cup.

With her little finger, she
dabs
stray sugar grains
on the table
and tries to bring sweetness
to her sleep-thick tongue.

Slow and
                shaking,
sip,
      sip,
            sip.

She's­ tricked herself
into feeling warmth.
Ticker-tape banner
pops up in her head:
'All of this will not
fix you.'

Porcelain clatter
as cup meets saucer.
Again.
She arms herself with
a cigarette case and a book.
Maybe now she will belong
amongst these people
with sad eyes and burning lips,
clinging on to cups and drinks.
So desperately-lit smoke
trails out of
her warm mouth,
steaming up her face
like a window on a cold winter day.
And meanwhile Camus perches
in her hand.

Her eyes swim
in the choppy seas
of French.
The cigarette dangles,
painting the air grey, grey,
tilting, tilting, tilting.
Slow and
                shaking,
she weeps.

Half-aglow in the white sunshine filter
from the glass window,
a woman is wondering.
She drinks her coffee,
wipes her smudged mouth
and leaves.

Nobody notices the wobble
in her high-heeled gait.
She's just a part of
another tilting painting,
another glass scene.

These simple acts,
           simple things,
define
the speaking soul.
In a scene of the city of the world.