i am numb.
this is the one place
i cannot bear to take you,
even though i am prepared
to go to hell with you,
i will not bring you here.

it is a bathroom.
any bathroom, really,
as long as there’s something
to lean over,
something to flush,
something to destroy
the moment the room is occupied.

it’s alright, though,
because there’s a whole world
out there for us,
with gorgeous architecture
and natural allure,
so let’s go there, instead.

yes, i’ll be out soon.
if you have the tickets,
we can go anywhere.
just give me twenty minutes
to make everything okay again,
and i’ll take you
to see the taj mahal,
the colosseum,
the broken ruins of rome.

but i can never take you here.
i’m sorry;
whatever metaphorical journey
you may have thought you were on
ends here.
it’s just not something i can bring you into.

this is mine.
and i’m calling this the end.

i don’t think i love you any more,
whoever you are;
i guess i talked myself out of it
like i talk myself out of impulse purchases
or loving myself fiercely.
the point is, i don’t want to go anywhere
with you, only home, alone,
even if this isn’t finished yet.

i think there’s some finality
that neither of us will reach here,
but what you’re reading is the beginning
of the end.
i’ve fallen out of love with you,
yes, i don’t think it any more,
i know it.
this is so nearly over,
the page is breathing a sigh of relief.

so i’m going home.
i’m going somewhere safe,
and the door will be locked behind me.
the bottles of wine
in the bag against my door
will windchime-beckon my arrival,
loving me far more honestly
than anything you’ve given to me
or i’ve taken from you in here.

i’m bursting the bubble that i created,
and you’re going to hate it,
but i don’t love you any more,
so i don’t think i need to destroy
what i need just to see you smile, now.
here’s me, picking up the knife,
and you’re not begging me to do anything,
you’re just staring
at whatever i’m saying
like these words are somehow real
and not present in the moment.

it’s been fun. just fun,
but i’m going home now.
whichever sense of place
i’ve tried to lay claim to
will forever be lost on a plane ticket
or a scrapbook that i won’t make,
because i’m going home, now.

i’m nearly there.

in my daydreams, there are two beautiful things;
you, and the possibility of not being alone.
everything else is pretty, but cannot compare
to these two non-facts.

even when the sky chooses colours
that have never been combined before,
and clouds wisp across the sky like a marching band,
i only want to look at you, and be together.

even when the sun peaks over the horizon,
crowning another day in such bright gold
that i have to squint, i can stare wide-eyed
at you, and i am no longer lonely.

even as the breeze seeps into the grass,
blowing kisses to lovers and losers alike,
gentle and soft and unknowing of hurricanes,
i have you, and i am not isolated.

even as midday blazes with all the force
of commanding attention, and birds scream-sing
songs that i’ve never heard before, i will listen
but not look, because i am with you.

even when eternity stretches out across the daydream,
calling up wonders of possibility,
saying that anything can be real if i can imagine it,
i only imagine you, and a world that loves me back.

even when the day fades into brilliant night,
and stars ***** themselves into a pinboard-reality,
i cannot bring myself to count constellations,
because you are there, and brighter than them all.

it sounds romantic. it sounds like i am in love,
but really, i’m just terrified that if i look away for a moment,
you’ll be gone, and i’ll have to find a mirror to shatter
so that i cannot confront what i am missing.

even when the dream fades,
and the world sets in, all train tracks and buildings
that i can jump off, i don’t,
because i have my mind, and i haven’t lost it yet.

don’t worry, i realised it for both of us;
how immaterial we are in terms of this
high rise plumed against the sky.

how there may be a man -
any man -
playing guitar below, but he
is playing for nobody, not even us.
we’re just singing along.

and the clouds whisper down
that it might rain later,
but i’ll still take your hand
on the railing,
illuminated with neon,
half-life filtered
through ***** glasses and ecstasy,
and we’ll talk about
getting back to the present.

because now, it’s nighttime,
and now, you look
like me in this light
and now, the immaterial
is taking off into
what we could have been,
had we only stayed in this spot
thirty years ago.

but it doesn’t matter
who we are.
we are here.
scratch it into the railing
with the key
i gave you
yesterday.

these indistinguishable streets,
walkways, crowning themselves
into a sense of uniqueness;
not quite defined
but solitary, and ripe
in their loneliness.

crooked bricks,
vying for sunlight;
the endless yearning
to be free. streets
slanted, disjointed,
quite confined in song
and history.

something shared
between the potholes,
passed forth
and forth again,
like garden twine
binding something
against something else.

it’s vague;
by nature, perception
is subjective
and you may take from this
what you desire.

if you listen,
you can hear the ticking
of everything
that has passed this by,
alleyways branching
into each other, snaking
circles around the easy way out.

so let’s work out
a sense of place.
something that you
can lay claim to, as understanding
l’histoire de la vie
from all of this.

see it yet?

i’m going to have to dress you up for this one, i hope you don’t mind,
it’s just that we’re flitting between identities and trying to change the past.

by change, i mean we’re keeping everything the same,
but switching out her for me,
in the white-washed hallways with that imagery you fear;
a pregnant factory belt birthing electric dreams.

it’s all about what they do to women
and our brains and our autonomy,
it’s selfish, really,
to make this about me sitting alone in my room
but we’re still choking out the space we claim.

if there’s a film camera, there’s a film,
and if there’s an eye, there’s an i.
get those cinematic shots of long hallways where nobody knows what’s next,
and play the nurse, play the exorcist, thrice.

you’ll never know how many years you have after leaving western state,
but i’m hoping for less;
life afterwards is the transitional period between salt and freshwater,
and i need to distance myself.

*oh, how the rooms look so inviting, you’ll be cured here,
how wonderful,
that we have groundbreaking technology to fix your brain
when we tell you it’s broken.
how amazing it must be to be you,
this opportunity
to be chained down by something other than fame,
you look so beautiful!
i have to have you, you look so beautiful!
we’ll keep you here because you look so, so beautiful
when drool leaks from a mute mouth.

there’s a lot of things that people say never existed,
like atlantis, and the love between you and i,
but i am not here to confirm or deny either assumption,
merely to speculate what a world would be like
where you can breathe underwater,
and i can drown comfortably,
and we are together in a place that isn’t real.

before i get ahead of myself,
i’d like to talk about sailors,
whiskey-drunk and singing sea shanties,
and i’d like to talk about pirates,
and the difference between the two.
what i really mean, obviously,
is that i’d like to talk about sirens,
and music, and keaton henson in the middle of the night.

things hit differently when it’s three in the morning;
i’ll be able to shop for groceries and write essays
and exist like a real person until nighttime springs around,
and then i’m lying on my bed catching stars
on the ceiling, hitting myself on the head
to deserve a glimpse of you.
only when everything goes murky,
and i see atlantis in the mist of reality,
am i satisfied.

am i satisfied?
it’s a loaded question, yes,
but we’ve talked about pirates
and we’ve talked about grocery shopping
and i think we’ve exhausted the laundry list of small talk,
so let’s talk about atlantis, instead.
let’s make plans like we used to,
and you can use my spontaneity
to make another girl love you,
and i’ll be alright as long as i have a bank of imagination
and a sea to drown in.

sorry - i don’t mean drowning.
i mean that everywhere is connected in some convoluted way
by oceans, and if i can stretch my heart miles out
then maybe i’ll find something that i can hold onto
when the world is moving too fast for me to grasp onto anything
except the possibility that one day,
i will die, and my body will sink,
and perhaps you’ll sing siren-song at my funeral.

i want to take you to a revolution.
i want to take you to the barricades,
and push a flame against the brown jacket;
as wasps on bicycles whir past our ears,
and we laugh in the sun. we laugh in the sun
and it smiles back.

i want to take you on horseback through the prairie,
cowboys of the untamed west,
and halt as the dust tornadoes around us;
as wasps on horseback threaten to trample us to death,
and we laugh in their faces. we laugh in their faces
and they retreat.

i want to take you to a coffee shop.
a coffee shop, if you get what i mean,
and tell stories of how this is how the world should be;
as wasps in business suits spit on the ground near us,
and we laugh at how it glistens. we laugh at how it glistens
and it sinks into immutable nothingness.

i want to take you to where the universe starts.
i want to point at the atoms that created the big bang,
and see in reality how everything is made of everything;
as wasps are born and collide into evolution,
and we laugh at creation. we laugh at creation
and it burns us into history.

this room is full of clocks,
and i’m learning how to be lonely
against your body.
even if you aren’t here now,
i can imagine that one day,
you were.

how beautiful it would have been
to see you silhouetted against time itself,
the ticking of the universe
in time with your heartbeat
laying waste to cliché
and just loving each other.

i still have not learned how to be lonely,
only how to write about it,
scratching the ink-crust
before it dries.
the walls here are pinned
down in eternity
with drawings and sketches
of how the world looks without me.

but the clocks still carry on,
or most of them, at least.
the grandest of them,
ornate and finite,
have stopped, displaying
meaningless times that i pretend
have significance,
like the most beautiful doomsday
showing when i die.

and when it does happen,
perhaps you will be in this room.
perhaps the ghosts
i am imagining
are merely remnants of a parallel world,
in which you are here,
and in which i do not have to confront
a possibility that loneliness will be forever.

there’s two forests that i’ve committed to memory.

one:
if i want to see the ghost of my seventeen year old self,
i’ll have to buy another bottle of citrus *****
and prepare my soft skin for mosquito bites
as i, drunk and free, roll around in the dirt,
still believing that my life has not yet begun.
i’ll **** behind bushes, with only hand sanitiser and leaves
to cover my body, like a modern-eve.
shivelight will sink onto my body,
my laughter conjuring up ageless forest-spirits.
my friends, also drunk and free, will make promises
that we’ll come back here one day,
that we’ll be like this forever;
we’ll never wrinkle and we’ll never age,
but our lives have not yet begun.

two:
i’ll consider myself wise beyond my years,
bu still young. still having the time
that i beg to be a virtue. still working out
where i want my line breaks to be
if i want to conjure percy shelley’s ghost
and change myself to fit a romantic ideal.
the only system i can break is to skip class
to skip stones into the river in the forest,
thinking of the girl i think i love, the girl i think i hate,
and all of the parts within myself that are mutable
and yet have not changed. i’m seventeen, and i have time.
i have time, and i don’t believe that i will ever run out of it,
even though each hour in this forest is spent
and will not return, i will convince myself
that i am merely solidifying a bank of nostalgia
that will make me smile one day.

i am crying, now.
i will **** myself when i get my first grey hair.