Carrying cranberries in the folds of my dress
Walking down the highstreet just before dawn.
They’re crushed and they’re leaking through my palms
Through the stiff salt cotton.
****, brilliant juices.
I’m leaning to the right:
Crunching sickening gristle and
I’ve new moles on my shoulders, marbled after
These berries.
I haven’t meant to squish them.
Has no-one noticed the blood?
I’m draped in it walking down this high street, sticky.
I’m shaking in hunger.
It’s been ten months, it’s been two weeks since I saw
The hollow rosiness of your face.
I am covered in blood, is this normal for them to see?
If I’ve killed someone they will find out eventually.

They’ve called you 52 blue
A siren call of soundless longing
Your frequency untrue.
Do you even hear yourself?
A song so empty, even to you.

Yet the ocean is kind, in it’s endless view:
Kiska, it brings me to you.
The ageless ages I have been searching
Lost without a cause in this unbounded blue

For a song I thought only I could hear.
You and I in perpetual motion
Singing to deaf ears
We must’ve passed a thousand times
Year through year through year

52 blue,
Look up to the sky.
You’ve written yourself up there
And your lonely ode matches mine.

I’m fraying at the edge of your canines
Attentive on March’s hairline.
There are beetles on the ceiling
They are roaming around searching for you
And they find nothing but each other
There's never any middle ground.
Winking behind your ear, tilting
Opening wide so I can taste the light
Inside your throat.
An appetite for rhetoric can hardly be quelled.
Salt-soft and sunbeams
Can the sea know your flesh like I?
Hammered to your nail bed I’m drowning
With every blink
And I’m always swimming in it,
The heat death of the universe.
In my mind you’re sun drying clothes in a meadow
You’re laughing and it drips over the ink like
Wet sunlight.
The more I know about you the less I can breathe.
The beetles, they never meet,
Teething, scuttling, catching in the plaster.
Dust in the air, a yellow film
Settles on your dictionary bones:
You word swallower.
I am speechless
You are speech. A dreamcatcher
Weaves your mind in magnolia cat’s cradle.
The alternate molar grazes on the inside of my psyche
As you play in the rightmost key
Almost inaudible until I press my ear into the hollow
Of your piano.
Where did the beetles come from?
It’s far too cold, the mulch of humanity.
They hang around here like breath under a microscope
Like you in my soul.

What a life in inertia
To breathe your sighs as a dew cloud
And let it graze my eyelashes.
You’re so close we’re one.

Soft and proud, gentle.
Tracing sonnets over your skin
White hot on dawn’s horizon,
You yawn, lazily and beautiful

What are you but sun-basked
Bright-blue just-floating myth-beauty
Peaceful.
Time is tapping at the window.

What are you but a cathedral
Embodiment of my thoughts and yet,
You’re the wind twitching the curtains,
The morning swallows dipped in gold.

You’re shielding your eyes from the sun
You’re smiling
Why, if I cease to be yours,
I cease to be anything at all.

We used to have a passionfruit tree growing in our garden.
From ours or the neighbours?
The weather never got hot enough here.
They’d shrivel up fawny dappled globes, dry.
The fence would buckle under the weight of effort.

Look at me with your many eyes, with your many eyes:
Five rays dyed purple
Died waving a white flag
In the coughing August breeze
Died wide-eyed. Turn them to me.

Purple. Sharp. Feelers, whiskers, spikes.
Begging and pleading and clinging and not.

Take me back to bleeding your seeds in your free moments
Opening up, arms in arms.
On your childhood bedroom floor.
You won’t look at me the next morning.

You tell me your insides are like mucus
I can only taste the sweet
I can only taste the sweet I
Can only taste the sweet I can only
Tastethesweeticanonlytastethesweet.
Many eyes.

Change me.
It was something you said in your last hours
And I can’t quite recall.

We are cutting down the tree tomorrow.
What if you had managed it?
What if the summer was warm?