Hanging on
                    by
                        a
                           t
                             h
                               r        
                                 e        
                                   a                    
                                     d

Me and the drizzle
Are two different things
Who loves every strand of your hair.

Me and the moon
Are two different things
Who hopes to fall in the pool of your eyes.

Me and the air shiver
Are two different things
Who wants to marry all your embrace.

I sit at a wooden bench
faded and etched with words of old love
who was here before me, and before them?

My eyes are thrown out to the sea
wrinkled blanket of green and blue.
That knot in my head has been soothed

by the salted air and the sun
and the delicate pebbles beneath my feet.
And I am grateful to be here.

There's something so beautiful
about this beach with the pulsing and hum
of a city so close

and everything that this city holds
that you, or I, don't know.

How long can an affection last?
How long can one ride a jeep?
How many times can a person shift from a jeep to another?

Would you ride along with me?
Would you accompany me?
If you do, would you sit beside me?

I felt you beside me...a strand of hair, perhaps
I wonder if you felt my goosebumps;
I'm rubbing my arms for you not to feel it...

All of those were mere imagination,
It's a long shot
How can you be beside me if you were the one driving?
How could've I felt you, if I never rode shotgun

Lastly, how would you feel me if I'm still riding the previous jeep;
And I only saw you from afar and thought, perhaps we could be...something amazing, something beautiful, something that could last

I unpacked your boxes too quickly.
I exposed the whiteness of your thighs
freckled by the reddish-brown hairs
I uncovered the wrinkles in your blue iris
the lies and tears behind your front teeth
evenly crooked

I wanted your words to flutter from your mind
but they dropped from your throat to the floor
I wanted your laughter in your core to be kind
but it came from a shallow, envious drawer

I pulled strands and veins out of boxes
Found bundles and tangles
that I assumed should be unraveled
but when I pulled and twisted one straight,
you left in your car with a crunch in the gravel
Drove straight into the arms of
Malbec wine
at low rise tables with one chair,
an excerpt from a novel bent at the spine
and the sweater you never let me wear

I drank from the pint glass you brought home for me
and it wasn't a statement.
I wore no mask.
I simply sipped.
It's only meaning to transport water to my lips
Calmly, coating my belly
So slowly I'd wait
Imagining water burning like *****
Barreling down my throat
like an interstate

I wanted it back
the feeling of feeling
the fear that walks with revealing
the love, the artist, and the lunatic
all cooked together and left to steep

I pulled out my own strands
the ones anchored deep.
I worked endlessly to straighten
You wrapped yourself in my veins
to tightly
You were trapped in the bundle
so you ran, then came a stumble
forgetting that I was anchored too
and so you pulled me right down with you.

And I left you there
with your tearful stare
I bunched up these strands
and laid out my demands
I carried them off, the tangled mess
You once announced was yours to hold
but you overestimated yourself
and watched me become cold
A block of ice, you could never melt
you were not all, you were not my wealth
you were only the weight I felt.

I was clutching on tattered vines
Praying fervently to all that are divine
To let it hold
Please make it hold

I was gripping tightly on my last strand of faith (I'm slipping)
Just let me hold
Let my life hold

Then you pulled at me
And I went crashing
            d
                  o
                       w
                              n
So here I am with a shattered heart, a broken soul and a tattered gown.

The tide collects it all by morning;
The drama and the ***** napalmed across the path.
The scenes at second warning for most had been swept away
Before they wiped the sand from their shoes.

Empty cans of Dutch and Tuborg slouched on the dunes
Are tight-lipped about the Velvet Strand's secret ecosystem;
An underground microcosm;
A peripheral cluster of seething emotions drowned.

Memories of those years - although some expired,
The vestiges take pride of place - hold a cosmic clump of smells,
Tastes, firsts, goosebumps, hangovers, and ends.
I never before understood what I was holding on to.

Winters down in the shelters nearly killed us but we
Huddled through the cold, lit cheap firelogs and
Found our oblivion. It didn't take much for me to develop  
A stagger - tolerance for a lot of things was learned later.

I narrowly recall my first taste of poor judgement and
Hazy-headed stargazing. Six cans of Stonehouse
Dry cider - most of which ended up on the hillside -
Was a ridiculous endeavour that will always be sublime.

At the heart of it, I did it to impress a girl;
The one every boy has or has had that sticks;
Who holds your firsts and your hands and makes
Things simple if only for her complexity;

The one that never fails to bring upon digression when
Pens are involved. Revisiting reminiscence on a jarring note,
I think of my Junior Cert exams and a cross-dressed man
Exposing himself to two uniformed boys behind the public toilets.

This one doesn't stir the joy of the others.
This one I wish would dissolve;
An ugly, awkward blotch on a childhood.

Luckily fondness trumps disgust when recalling that place
Because of sunrises and sunsets absorbed from the roof.
The Summers spent jumping the gap and drowning in the
Heat of the sun were everything.

The fugitive sand between our toes and under finger nails
Became an accepted nuisance, a part of the territory;
A lingering grain or two to drag you back.
I miss waking up with the smell of last night's faded fire.