In my eleventh full moon of freedom,
her soft contours are memories;
scars speaking tales of collisions
like the pale dots sandflies left on our ankles.

a pearl gazing to a thousand faces
how can we breathe like we will remember
teach our feet to paint the paths from the mountains
into a story we won't forget?

On the news, they said she will be blue,
not in colour but occurrence
twice in the month of July.
A blue moon, once in our blue year.

So we stand beneath the open sky;
we watch her rise as the sun sets
and the belt of venus draws a soft lilac curtain
across an aching night - we wonder

will the moon feel the same
from our grey pavements when we walk home
in a yellow-tinged darkness
or is she waning into her final sky?

We are growing together an album of stars,
of countries, and oceans and freckles and scars,
of songs in new tongues and new airs that we've breathed,
mountains carved with rivers and divergent trees.

There's nowhere we're going and everywhere to be,
We spend days chasing lookouts or swimming in seas,
We learn from the people we meet in the streets,
We fade out our clothes and wear out our feet.

And every time my toes meet new earth,
and I discover a new corner of the universe,
I glance back behind me and your eyes see it too:
Nowhere is everywhere when I'm with you.

I dipped my hair in the ocean head-first
and a wave gulped me up and washed into my breath.

I chased you with a fistful of sand
but the shore caught you first
and swallowed your feet whole.

as we walked home
the moon tickled the hood of the waves,
lacing them with pearls

and the glowing beetles mimicked the stars
on the cusp of the jungle.

at last -
our routines collide;
a daily walk, kiss, sweat,
our letters turned post-its
phone-calls to real life sound waves
bounding home.
The strange comfort
of arguing - knowing you're in the next room
not the next stretch
of foam-etched ocean
away from a 'sorry'


and knowing
it still grows, away from the distance
the aching, the halflife,
it's growing,

maybe more than before.

It scares me that a muscular *****
and repeated rhythmic punches
are the only things keeping you
from being eaten by the ground.

It scares me there will always be
cities I will die without seeing,
always a little more
I could have done.

It scares me that you like to rock climb
and balance three fingers
from a cliff face, four hundred metres
above the ground.

It scares me that when I go to sleep,
I lose eight hours I will never get back.
Sometimes I lie awake
and ******* eyes aching.

It scares me that the world
could consist of electrical activity
raging inside my skull
and I would never know.

Your nails are crinkled,
like a soil bed ready for seeds,
they lived in water like soggy tissues
when you were nurse.

Now you live under a centipede's
back, an exoskeleton of notched
houses, with the wrinklies.

You keep falling now, but
it doesn’t seem right
that they can't pick you up,
like you used to, them.

We converse in loops,
as though my face triggers
a cassette tape you recorded
eight years ago.

You like the view,
you can see the church spire
and the road is quieter
in the evenings.

You wish that you could still
ride a horse, and
you never learned to drive
because he said you would **** someone.

They tell you not to put
bird food on your balcony
in case of acrobatic rats.
You feed a friendly pigeon in secret.