Photographers step out of hazy stairwells, tired eyes adjusting to dim light, looking for
their next muse.
“Works of art take time” they tell themselves
they look for the next spark of intrigue, their next fix.
You’ll find them on public transport, in old cafes:
cameras slung around their necks like billiard boards captioned ‘the end is nigh’.
Buzzing with anticipation of their next good catch, biting the lips of their disgruntled
faces like ancient gladiators biting the dust.
Castaways, oil paintings once brilliant and beautiful thrown into apartment blocks and
grey buildings,
ruins of art cast adrift by time.
Haunted by still frames and possibilities, all burned onto retinas, they stumble across
traffic jams;
finding beautiful people, forcing themselves into their lives.
Fleeting whispers rotate into double takes and flickers on the film of a Polaroid camera;
the subjects become muses,
cities are reborn as golden
flood into spotlights:
vibrant, reckless, insomniac.

tonight:
no lemon slice moon,
no searchlight of white.
a black cradle for black bodies.

cylindrical wax, it’s all cyclical –

mike brown, eric garner,
freddie gray,
meagan hockaday

– across the street
white boy shreds black asphalt,

a sloppy chorus of happy birthday
spills like their foamy pints
over brown tables and black eulogies.

those pale faces, those pale fingers,
preoccupied more with the bubbling
and the stretch of their pizza cheese.

look up from your porcelain plates.
hear our rage bubbling,
see communities stretched translucent.

there is blood on your hands
and guilt to your name.

'I love you' means more than itself, it means nothing, and everything. It means that I cannot now live without your voice in my head and my heart, whispered softly in early morning, lucid dreams in which your skin finds mine and we are suffused with warmth and a gentle, deep arousal that is beyond everything; utter rapture.

It means that you have infiltrated desires and abilities that I have always had and never known, and gifted them to me with a deft flourish and a heartstopping smile, halting me in my tracks, making me aware of myself and of you and the myriad possibilities that are all caught up in us.

I tell you in the spaces between these words that you are my dearest friend and only love, that I do not exist in any real way without you; you make me true.

'I love you' cannot mean these things, and yet it means all of them, and everything, and nothing, and when I say it to you I hope that you will hear the catch in my throat as the words fall into your waiting hands, my gift, all and everything I have; now yours.

I fell in love, before you said anything of substance
I felt everything I stand for, slip away from me
You aren´t perfect, not even remotely close
But you made me want to give you a chance

My trouble-impulses are weakend by your presence
and somehow my mind flutter lay silent
Background music is playing around you
and your face, my eyes never find tiring

But still I wish,
Just for once
You would look at me
Like I look at you

- Because only then, you´d know
I can see the whole universe, from right here.
And I wish you could too

What have we become?
The same thing that we despised
What happened to when we were young?
How can I now look you in the eyes?

What was right is now wrong
and what was white is now black
yet we still march on
because what we lost we can't get back.

For we exist within the grey area
lost somewhere in between
we've hit the invisible barrier
the place that's never seen.

I now embrace my imperfections
no longer chase the wind
no comfort or protection
for I know that I am sin.