I fell in love for the first time on the edge of a burgundy seat. You were not there. Only the crowd and their hands and a stage and words. The words of a man whose stubs you’d turned into legs in a matter of breath caught mine. My whole life seemed a prelude, a pause for breath  always meant to be borrowed from you. I closed my eyes and took you in. I learnt for the first time how it felt to breathe by the Book.  

2. We’d fallen into a silent-servant-who’ll-write-a-page-but-never-raise-a-word-of-mout­­­h kind of love. I’m a bashful piece of a lady with nothing more than a writer’s willing hands. I’m better found making things out of moments so I made a home for you in what had become of my heart:  A furnace, with only your name in the walls of its memory.

3. Death has a way of tapering the curtain from the blink of your eye, has a way of leaving a view that calluses your heart, has a way of drying up your bones and your throat and your mouth and your love, so Love, I can no longer sing of you when I’m alone, can no longer hold candles or burn sacrifices for you. The furnace has tapered, but I do remember you. Every day. I am neither brave nor stupid enough to say you broke or put me out, but the writing is on the walls.

4. On the days that I think of you I will always close my eyes and pray that you’ll breathe the death out of me. Borrow me more than a moment on a burgundy seat, prepare a table for me and we will feast in the presence of death.

I fell in love for the first time on the edge of a burgundy seat. You were not there. Only the crowd and their hands and a stage and words. The words of a man whose stubs you’d turned into legs in a matter of breath caught mine. My whole life seemed a prelude, a pause for breath  always meant to be borrowed from you. I closed my eyes and took you in. I learnt for the first time how it felt to breathe by the Book.  

2. We’d fallen into a silent-servant-who’ll-write-a-page-but-never-raise-a-word-of-mout­­h kind of love. I’m a bashful piece of a lady with nothing more than a writer’s willing hands. I’m better found making things out of moments so I made a home for you in what had become of my heart:  A furnace, with only your name in the walls of its memory.

3. Death has a way of tapering the curtain from the blink of your eye, has a way of leaving a view that calluses your heart, has a way of drying up your bones and your throat and your mouth and your love, so Love, I can no longer sing of you when I’m alone, can no longer hold candles or burn sacrifices for you. The furnace has tapered, but I do remember you. Every day. I am neither brave nor stupid enough to say you broke or put me out, but the writing is on the walls.

4. On the days that I think of you I will always close my eyes and pray that you’ll breathe the death out of me. Borrow me more than a moment on a burgundy seat, prepare a table for me and we will feast in the presence of death.

I am no wave thing
No Moses basketed, noosed to the hip of an ocean,
born to be carried away by the tide thing
I'm not a thing that dips and dives and dies under this rubble and salt and sky
Not under these ******,
and sea lions
who charter their unlicensed vessels on my intimate things,
with no caution or care
they trail and leave their spills there
But i'm no wave thing
I'm not a thing who whips and crashes at the break of the wind
or the pull of the sky,
not created that cycle of fall and rise and fall and rise,
where the depths and heights you reach don’t even move you
Don’t even change you no more
or ever
How you look like yesterday's tears and damp and fog
and still cling to the dry and parched of things
How you baptise their bodies and their mouths
and get nothing more
than yourself back
in different form.
Cannot be that blind a thing,
that pushed to move to nowhere and everywhere at the same time
and back thing
and blue thing
and black to reflect the moods of the sky thing,
a neat mess of a thing
huddled to look the same as
and cling to everything else you were created next to forever thing,
void of choice, helpless,
yet so full of strength
and potential if you could escape thing  
inanimate and life at the same time thing,
a slave of creation thing.
Just a wave thing.
I will never be just a wave thing.

I hold you.
Tender, tentative, trembling,
thing of beauty in the palm of my pen.
Exhausted from flight,
you lie in perfect trust here
Your breath still,
mine held,
it takes you in.
Your heart,
a cathedral of all I’ve needed in oblivion,
the kind of holy my hands hold only to break.
I am of human.
My members are manned.
They know only the chase for things,
even after they’ve found them.
They are of effort and proof, of reason and time,
they know better than to count on anything other than themselves.
They will not hold on long enough for this love.

I’m afraid its been a minute of you
and a lifetime of my heart,
a black cavern of half-truths and blue lies.
It has turned hollow by evasion,
a grid of tears lines the insides,
a reflection of your kind
in the eye of its memory
it is empty,
and oddly heavy at the same time.

You’re breathing still,
each breath a stub of lead anchored in my chest,
a cog-wheel,
rolling a heart-beat and a breath out of me.
I’ve held it as long as I could.
I breathe you awake.
Your eyes are raw
and red
and longing.
Your heart rushes at the heat of my humanity
Aware, I suppose of how easily it lets me breaks things.
Its been a minute of you.
Now a looming memory
Exhausted,
you return to flight.

It is Sunday 

Sundays are rest and wrestling

Are knots knotting in stomachs

Are heavy with food and feelings with no space left for settling

Is a farce, is a distant fallacy like freedom

is not mine to have in the world