another stumbling block:
this one still called i,
this one,
stuck in this season's still belief.
one that
if any further summer
would be seen from
previous years, would
back streets still hang
dense in these heavy
melancholias? how
could i have bred this notion?

how could this shirt
pocket hold
such small demise for this week, right
beside the place you,
with uncertainty,
may someday call home?

the lights flare, i
curl up again.

i let light trickle down:
thoughts of a life i
could stand to
be less weary,
to
have some sweet smile,
in the doorway,
or on all sidewalks,
or between the sheets.

some sweet something,
like you.

finally, grasping an idea,
a want;
your gravity
coalesces, in small bundles about me.
i am inevitably drawn,
in tightening circles,
to the thought
of my mounting resolve to
give you
all of the world,
the skin of my lips,
point eight litres of oxygen,
all stars, all nights.

and, so,
i tie strings to your fingers,
in dreams.

i bide these two weeks,
in hope.

streams of light crawl under
the door and through
three windows:
left
reeling as though wound out
on a thousand lines, fallen from
last night, later on,
before, and this
bed is too large. even if
i hang over both ends,
there's still too much space here.

the depletion drags tracks,
eleven kilometers end to
end,        
how
does this end?
not contained in
this emptiness, surely? i
am too incomplete to halt now; but
we surely perish in slower cities.

we all die in a small town.

losing conscious life,
i walk down the hallway,
arms cradling a bowl of
rain water, carrying animacy to where
your eyelids still
pretend to breathe.

i reach the room, and
find myself waiting, find
you missing.

sure, anyone could just as easily live in
this kind of wishful state for
ever, but we'll know:
in between seconds,                      
all wishes are lost. we fall like fat raindrops  
into the ocean;
we diffuse.                  

our lives separate.                  
we could
pretend like this is all so meaningful,
but i'm just lonely. and    
you just want to fix something.

i could lie forever. i could wait forever.
i could pretend this is all going to plan
or just going alright.                            

to what end,
though?

{the sea runs out, leaving only acres of sand}

this last part hurts the most.
but don't worry,      
you
won't feel a thing, sweetheart.

Because you slay me with every pinnacle of triumph and ruin, oh mechanics. You rewind, even in progression; you tell me all the words to say, in which sheet set to lay. You hold my severed head on display, for the entire universe to witness.

And my demons are like butter knives, not sharp enough to draw blood, but that still doesn’t stop the hurt. Or, worse.

Spent summers beneath the trees, winters beneath the weathers, years amongst all that which I will never understand. So, when you gave me your hand, I said ‘aye’, for I was never sure anyone would want to realistically be mine, never convinced my tiny heart was anywhere somebody could draw their line and say “Stop. You don’t have to say a word.”

As good as asleep in the crowds and mobs and downward cast eyes, three abreast in some channelled breeze, the main streets are the ones that mostly step on the tender part of your foot.

You know where I am, though, at least in body. There’s always the mind which never follows, which instead chooses to wallow in ‘what-if’s, vague references to reverence at its darkest moments. Because blind faith will get you nowhere and I have no reason to believe in anything, save the fact that I have this idea in the back of the recesses of my most null-set mind; and did you let the angels tell you lies?

That you’re not coming home tonight?

Well, you could rest in these sheets of mine. I guess they’re not the best, but I won’t tell any lies. So don’t
cry, don’t cry. The saline runs through all the gears in my chest, and over the season you’ll keep pulling what’s left, ‘til all I have is not an ounce of this mess, this beating arrhythmia I try hold dear ‘twixt my ribs.

So call me accountable, I can shoulder the blame. And ‘cause I’m never quite sure if anyone else would want to do the same, all I ask is that you remember my words anytime you hear my small name; just remember my lips and love of rain.

For some god built me on plans it kept locked up for so long, as it never did quite figure out where it went wrong; and so now flows through my lips as I utter my songs, as penance for all moments in which I am never strong.

So I keep confessions locked inside my book, I keep its wry disregard at length of arm’s crook, the broken blood carriers and my eyes it shook, said “Son, don’t you worry, for today you are your own hook” I replied: “Oh, wonder and majesty, I’ve done you oh-so wrong, and for what? The sake of singing sad songs?” “I knew there was no answer before you came along, I knew not of your virtues nor the day, eternally long.”

So, don’t you dare take not a single of my words, for whatever I call mine is already gone to the birds,

to the birds,

to the birds.

to have been lead through
slumbering paddocks by
held hands; hope, the  
deity, nonexistent and relentless,
i felt alive-  
was i but the subject
of her meticulously-planned humour?
was i the joke,  
or the punchline?

boldly ripening into
mistaken aphasias, i
find my melting thoughts
matriculating into sharp
movements in the dark:
curves patterned,  
ribcages' separation, a gaussian blur of
intertwined epidermal rivulets,
your soft, slow imaginings becoming
tiny flecks of graphite smeared
a page's width, intricately sown
across skin, that light trickles
through a sliver in the curtains
to wordlessly illuminate.  

seventh memory: a peeling away,
a mandarin on the kitchen counter.
watching stars disappear  
from atop the balustrade, we sit
mere fragments apart, yet
at great distance, like  
the fog of the cities we carry out
the moments of    
our regularized lives, within.

finally, i become translucent.
yet,      
what have the stars become?

inside surfaces; a couplet affair of
mess and lost movement,
what small safety is left to believe in
can't make me or
you listen:
desperation makes soft
rainfall outside seem like
splinters,
chopsticks neither of
us would bother split,
anyway.

and now i
'm drunk and
now, i can't figure
out
how
softness works (am i weak and formulaic?),
or how i've
switched heartbeats
to some small
distance that won't capitulate.

capitulation would be far too easy,
of course.

how built up speculation,
inevitably in isomorphism
to your sweet ruffled hair,
to another lover,
who won't care anyway,
(will she?)
wines and dines my
foolish mind.

is all this pursuit futile?

just;
please care for me,
new darling, you,
as anyone in rainfall,
or tomato juice, or;
basically:
i need
all the ******* help in the world,
right now.

give me something.
anything.

dying for new light,
i managed to set sights on
oceans or
footsteps abroad or
just not feeling like this,
if that's ok?

i sit in a back-row seat view and
build up neat rows of cells
to sit, blurry-eyed, and watch
regular coils, wreathes,
noting degeneracies in the
way anyone whispers
1.12am secrets; in my sense
of pre-packaged sanctity:
no matters could be more
unimportant than these i keep
in ever-revolving displays,
to pluck out whilst heading
somewhere or anywhere -back home, i guess,
where else do i go?-
and anticipation wouldn't so
much as slightly glance a
warning, again whispering:

"you'll never get any better than this.
you'll never get any lower than
this afternoon the moon will suspend
itself in the sea and
you won't even care enough to watch."

further out, i am
ankle deep and
my eyes are stuck shut.

nights under canopies under
stars, obscured,
the light pollution pouring down
coastal highways from big
cities, where the
big kids play baseball, or banker; or
cloud cover pulling over
a static blinking light,
a never-moving flight crew, as
seen from your veranda,
but

i ****** up.

and, now,
the sun won't rise,
the stars won't shine,
the moon is just a piece of rock,
just more of the same.

so,
if it's broke,
don't fix it.
don't fix me.
don't bother waiting.
don't call.

stone walls breathe
glossed ice these mornings:
the churches and bedside
table depots, the detwined
compression of intermittent
glances scattered, the quiet
moments of stationary
departure through localized
clusters of stretching limbs,
stark and barely alive,
pausing in the coming
season's absence.            
slowly
wondering what it's like;
to unfold spring at your side, to
let lonelinesses bloom at the
tips of branched fingers and
wash away, to be standing
down there, on the fresh sky,
cutting new droplets out of
beach-long cumuli.

the sky was on fire this
morning. the whole world
stood still, ablaze.
i was asleep, though. asleep
and dreaming of missing you.
like i usually am.

in the interim time periods
amidst two
weeks
too
late resolutions i
always say it's always too late i
think i'm going or gone insane;
asleep and over hills
and hills and
hills that don't exist, how
can the world still spin with
its one glimmering turning point so
far away?

i let the birds open up
the window, let
choke my lungs on
clean air, choke me from
tender clouds, all cutapart endings,
rusty-hinged doorways.
from dreams i never wanted anyway.
dreams of your wet eyes.

i'm not drunk though. just a mess.

*and you know how i love you,
too. in quiet frequencies and
teapots and cold mornings, in
birdsong and my slow
anxieties.
but you already know that.

I pick small flowers from the curvature
of the nape of your
neck;                          
i wake up,        one minute:
you    are    
gone.            

I move on                
with my life,
i move out              
of these same walls,
like the                                                        
next                                                                
fervent                                                                          
dream,                                                        where I still  believe
I'm over                                          it,                                                      
I'm

just still kind of  
in love with  
you.  

i'm sorry always                                                                    
sorry i pretend                                                                        
like I                                                                                        
care                                                                                      
or                                                                                    
don't care                                                                            

and                                                                    

I don't really know where the hours  
went, or the years of life you wasted on
me.              
x