you didn't know
the moon leaned drunk in another hemisphere
or that the street-steeped colours would dye your soul

that you'd forget how bread melts
instead of noodles that slide down your throat
after three months
of breakfast.

that beaches would cling
and that children playing football in the dust
would be painted yellow in the echo of a memory

how the crumble of a chocolate cookie
is what you remember about that mirrored sunrise
and pips from a lemon speak  
as you let a crashing waterfall envelope your pale limbs.

didn’t you know you are brave enough
to ride the back of a motorcycle
on seven hundred and sixty two turns
to a jungled hot spring and a wailing band

but on the tip of a domed decision
you’ll crumble into the altitude
with four songs spiralling in your mind.

you didn't know it would finish
and rain speckles of memories onto your tired head
so you’d ache for no mattress
where you once hoped for a shower.

conversing in loops,
you seem content.
they burnt
down your home, I kept a bag
of the special things next to
the door for a time.
Now you live under a centipede's
back, an exoskeleton of notched
houses, with the wrinklies.
your nails
are crinkled like a soil bed ready
for seeds, they lived in water like
soggy tissues, when you were a nurse.
you keep falling now
but they can't pick you up,
like you used to, them.

A glimpse- and rushing
Your fingers rough
But warm as they find the skin  
beneath my hair-
grasp the back of my neck and
we’re embracing through heavy coats:
a sturdy crush to reach our organs,
placate the crave for your trace.

It’s always elation, first.
A squealing burst I stifle-
My brain is jelly in the station.
It’s a stinging cold but I won’t wear gloves
as we walk home and
our united skin blends as our fingertips
grow numb.

I’ll say, “I’ve missed you”
and mean more- only because the words are missing
and it’s easier – less syllables
to say than to explain
how you’re the colour to my scenery;
and without you, my kaleidoscope gives
only grey triangles.

She breathes in their shadow-
the terracotta dust sands down her weeping lungs
she curls in silence, tearing.

They have dented her skeleton
enveloped her dreams in a pounding cloak
she crushes her knees with her brow.

In the kaleidoscopic blackness
She dances shapes into her mother’s softened guise
“I am thinking of you”

A crack in the atmosphere barks,
Shooting splinters draw constellations beyond her eyelids
She crawls underneath the table.

She prepares the book to be closed.
Bends back the spine so they will know where she stopped reading
The next half will be different.

You haven't looked back for weeks.
As though you've forgotten how
Your life lines are straining through my palms
Up, you're reaching, pupils fixed on Pluto

I haven't dotted your mind
Or crossed your dreams
Though
- the rope hooked to your stomach
Dangles in my fists.

I tried to turn you into a poem,
to reach my thumb to the crown of your head
and compress you, deflate
and swallow you like the pill.

I never made you into a poem
because you had me pressed to the wall,
and the blinking cursor couldn't swim
in our plastic hugs.

Now I've made you
into a poem, and squashed
three months to thirteen lines
I can fold you up; crumple
you into a sock drawer.

gargling laughter pours
through hands and
cloaks fingers in slippery
oil
so they slide helplessly
around the pencil
like a fly creeping up a
car window only
to thud back to the leather,
but

lexicons bloom
like cancerous lilies  
when the gentle flicks
of the black letters kick
a barbed ball into your
lungs.

Kashtanka had lost him on the street
Instinct had stung her mongrel brain
tiny legs had span out of control.
And when she looked back
a grey desert hid her friend,
And had she been human
Tears would have pooled in her
Gummed ducts.
She padded through pavements for dog days as
Umbilical hunger for a scratch behind
Ears pulsed through her vital organs.

Simultaneously, it was ethanol that pulsed
Through Luka's.
And had she known how little
He was thinking of her,
Her tiny canine heart might
Have faltered.

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.

you look but you don't see me
you see her without looking
you look at me whilst seeing her
you look at me without seeing.

she sees me when she looks at you
she looks at you without seeing
she looks at you, seeing her
she sees me seeing.

I look at him seeing her
I see how it's looking.
I slide out the door without being seen
despite them both looking.

Dip your toes
into receptacle of embellishments

whilst
hoisting your trouser-legs
above your shining ankles thus
preventing traces of
immodesty.

conjure an entire
genus of rhombi
to  think
                                                                              outside of

at interview:
bubble
and dress
in clothes, preferably.

try not to fold your arms or look bored
and always remember
to be someone you are not.

It is time
that devours us
In its envelope of becoming
It yearns for our uttermost
Rose-flamed desires
For its own
immortal daybreak.

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.

She is eight or nine and she sits
in the playground
on the bench
with the teacher standing a
happy distance
Away and her lunch on her lap
She watches all of the people running
and crawling through legged bridges
to set each other free
and inverting their bodies
so their legs dangle,
confused at their new-found
flight
And she thinks about how
it seems there is a screen
where the
paved slabs meet the grass of fun
and that if she should
press
her face against the divide it should
crackle
the same as the one
At home
and if someone was to sit on the remote
The children would mould into black and white jumping rectangles that shuffle and bump shoulders and hiss.

You had sand in your hair,
freckles under your eyes
where the sun kissed your face
as I would have liked
I watched your hands as you drove
watched them turn the wheel
not knowing how in seven years
those hands would make me feel.
That they'd be bound by gold
and a solemn vow
to love, to hold, through any how
and that, by then,
our plans would be
entwined together, endlessly.
That we'd have seen the sun
from each hemisphere
balanced on the equator
lived out of a backpack for a year -
that you'd become my home
with your arms as the doors
your eyes as the windows
your feet as the floors.
That we'd bloom together
throughout those years
explore with each-other
our deepest fears.
That one day we'd stand
with our dearest of friends
and make a promise to
make-do and mend -
to patch up our souls
even when we find winter
might creep in and freeze up
and love might seem splintered,
that we'll wait for the spring
and that when the frost thaws
our stream will flow free again
fresher than before.
For now your heart lives within me
I'm keeping it safe
I'll cover it with feathers
of love and of grace.
Those hands that once turned
the wheel of that car
will now hold me through life
on this road that is ours.

You haven't looked back for weeks.
As though you've forgotten how
Your life lines are straining through my palms
Up, you're reaching, pupils fixed on Pluto

I watch your hands bite
To a hold out of their reach.
Your hungry fingers
With their goal set to the clouds.

You chalk your grip
And the white dust trickles-
Spirals though the space between us
And lands on my sweater.

I haven't dotted your mind
Or crossed your dreams
Though
- the rope hooked to your stomach
Dangles in my fists.

I still wonder of those whispered words
you latched away
in chains of a tongue
I couldn't reach.

I wonder if they were slippery nothings
to erode my clumsy fences
or denizens of your subconscious
written in a bolder ink

I envied your elegantly robed secrets
as the morning sparks
brought the weathered realisation that
we had waded too far

You're asleep, I think
I can tell by the way your lung contents are squeezed from your nostrils
In ever so slightly a more
Forceful motion than when we lie awake
hiding from each other behind eyelids.
And your recycled air brushes my forehead
And I think dustily of how the same molecules
Dance in my lungs
That have visited yours.

And our skin coloured mountains form scapes
On the expanse of wrinkled bed sheet
And I am dead still
As I try to keep this frozen hug
In a capsuled memory
To recall on one of the nights
You can't make it.

now I see you were chipped from these streets
and your beauty sings like a starling picked from his nest
you don’t belong with us, our sun can’t colour you in
without going over the lines
and our drink will erode the stone beneath your skin
you had better return to your glass city
before you hold too many of our hands
and we pull you into our grey sleep.

It was mutation. An  aside that pushed
the boundary and slipped
further than madness  
                                           (Distilled water sank
                                   the cup on the sideboard.)

Necessity prevails,
                                  But
(sister, don't project your ugliness onto me)
It aches. The muscles of normality (the ones that pretend)
                           burn with the acid that used to feel satisfying.

Now, chiffon veils tug away in fingers of
neon sprites              (floating over Naumburg)

A spirit can only be free for so long
before it's locked away.

I asked you why you walked with a stick,
and you said that your legs were worn out
from walking the whole of England.

I asked if anything else could wear out,
but you grown-up
smiled and did not answer.

There are no curtains
At our windows-
Our room opens into the sky street
Of black -
An asphalt continuum
Broken with a glaring street light
That fizzles like a cloud
Into the edges of the sky

One day soon,
We will clothe our windows
And envelope our home in a
Blanket of cosiness
But for now, I enjoy
The nakedness, the vulnerability
Of an open chasm, as though
We are still camping, perhaps,
Under the rockies or in the atachama
Like we used to, can I say when we
Were young?
When inside, I still feel so young as the night
falls,
Or does everybody?

when you call out for me again
and another hot plate of food turns cold
with  each second that I hold you to sleep -
I remember
that I am teaching you what if feels like
to be loved without consequence
and never to accept less from anyone

when you say ‘mama’ and hold out your arms
I remember
I am creating a home in your heart for a hug
that reaches to your soul and warms you from the inside

when you tug at my ankles when I’m making tea
I sigh - but then I remember
that one day you won’t be glued to my hip
and you’ll sit moodily through a meal
desperate to return to your room

when you’re having one of those days
where you need all of me - and it feels like there is nothing left
I remind myself
these are the moments you might not remember
but that will stay etched like a blueprint
and become a part of who you are becoming

So I will read you another story
and I remember
that together, we are writing yours.

There’s a pigeon in our chimney
His cooes are like an unreliable
Cuckoo clock-
Your face lights up when he calls,
In recognition - something you can place
In this brand new world
You are still discovering
His voice echoes down the chimney
And lands in our dining room
Whilst you are eating tomatoes
The vibrations are playing tricks on us, as
Though he might just be a metre away
BIRD
you call, and I nod, yes, a pigeon
Which sounds like it might be
A contradiction
So I smile to reassure you
Every time I see your delight
In the everyday
It’s as though I am remembering
Or perhaps discovering?
Just a little each time
What it means to be alive

He turned us into palm trees, dusty toes
pressed into my inner thigh.
A cold wind of collective breath,
breathing in, breathing out,
pulls me sideways and under
yellow man remains inert, straight-faced.

Then we fold, the room breathes in,
breathes out, my calves whimper.
Toes and fingers pull like magnets
my rope in place of his elastic,
unravels.

Now we are dogs, my paws crawl
to the front of the mat. I think I am
a Labrador, downwards facing,
upwards facing, breathing out
breathing in the stale studio air
I want a walk, or a biscuit
my spine extends, somewhere in my head
I growl.

Yellow man wants us all to be cobras
our spines dissolve, we twist carefully
slide a wave across the desert floor
and swallow him whole.

You are reeling in
an unformed cord
gently tugging yourself into existence
through my longing

Like a grain of sand
in a soil bed
we cannot know
if you'll see a day of light

if you'll bloom
into a million thousand cells
like petals opening up
to a star filled sky

like a universe
which may or may not exist
in light years of time,
will it be, or matter?