The fortress is soundproof no more,
And the voices I had once blocked out,
Are creeping in, seeping in, towering over me,
They accuse me, they shout.

Peaceful silence marred by vengeful shrieks,
Blissful ignorance quelled by demanding questions,
Pristine air darkened by black tears,
And surrounded by all, I stand in the centre.

A spotlight of love-turned-ugly encircles me,
And for the first time, I feel insecure, alone.
I take my hand and place it on my chest,
Trying to feel, in vain, my heart of stone.

Silent  heart.
Pulselessness.
Vacant chest.
Airlessness.

Such a curse- this emotionless machine
that swells up on others’ despair!
The robotic pump that never breaks down,
That’s never needed any healing or repair.

I hear the frantic beats of all the hearts
I stomped upon, nonchalantly broke.
Then, smothered by the darkness of my own being,
I gasp and wheeze, I choke.

When will my veins distend with passion?
When will my heart spout unhindered blood,
And add into my lifeless existence-
Fire and pleasure, pain and love?

I’ll unlock now, these strong iron gates,
And stand outside into the hot, harsh light,
I’ve been huddled up in the dark all my life,
I’ll expose my soul now, to set my wrongs right.

And for the one-
Who’ll unfold, unfurl, enter, penetrate,
And my stony abrasiveness, slowly grate-
I’ll tear open my chest, and silently wait.

Revel in space, yet not darkled, still
the **** and span of things that breeds
airlessness; The trees are evenly cut,
and their overgrowth seems like a forethought.
Where I am from, we eat fish with
our bare hands and our furniture, from bodies
of sandalwood, crushed with the scent of
peregrines. The morning makes you conscious
of space, and altogether the height of trees
syncopates to a nauseating stillness. In the awning
hours, leaves punctuate the ground – the cicada
with its machinistic song prowls, spills like
water from a broken vase toppled by me
years younger, raw, agile, deftly windless,
  wounded in love, lovingly wounded,
perhaps if there is a word for it, then let me
have my way, easily fraught with its meaning:
   a casualty. Sometimes the timeworn folks
would light cigarettes underneath the canopy
of a mango tree to banish ants and send them back
  to their queens – roosters in their wrinkled stations
croon in stasis, a song for the somnolent. I become
what the seasons evict. Constancy. Rearing weight
and gravity from nocturne. Tears are communal.
They make us aware of the weight of the Earth.
Somewhere, a funebre stilts through the silence,
and the jangle of little pieces spells out fortuity,
men in huddles mending pain by the sleight of hand,
a toss of a card, spinning in its imaginary axis: fate,
   feigned and fine-tuned to belief that it is controllable,
a variable, or a tabulation marred by frailty. From where
I am from, people stride through the streets naked,
soldering baskets filled with fruits gossamer from the
harvest, children suckling their mothers, the music of sweeping
metastasizes throughout the afternoon, and the same clouds
contort themselves to afford wry proposition: it is a day tender
with wonder, its allure overwrought, its sheen unremarkable.
  The funebre leaves with a necessary abundance of absence.
All the leaves depart from their mothering boughs,
  collapsing on the dreary back of the loam like penitence.
Like how once when you were young, you tinkered with
the fresh scab of your wound and felt the pain confine
  itself there, a part of you, that has now healed, but is still
      available for the world to break once again.

There was something
about the peasant in her
as she lay there
in the tall grass
the sun shining on her
the white clouds overhead

birds in flight
there was that aspect
of the peasant
in the simplicity

of her manner
the gesture of hands
the look
of the big blue eyes

and the skirt pulled up
nakedness revealed
and he
lying beside her

taking in
her whole aspect
the summery smell
the heat

the almost airlessness
about them
distant train
steam sounds

and she said
you're to tell
no one of this
( she had said that

about the first kiss)
and he said
of course not
whom would I tell?

he lay his head
on her soft *******
cushion like
as if afloat

she murmuring
more words
he lost
in the softness

of her
the scent
of her mother
(borrowed lavender scent

from the dressing table)
if my mother ever heard
she said
there'd be hell to pay

so say nothing
my lips are sealed
he said
nosing between her *******

muffled words
a rush of birds overhead
her hands on him
resting on his back

he tongued her
breathing her in
you're my first
she said

at doing this
say nothing lad
his inner voice
suggested

words wound
say nowt
he felt her hips
fingers running over

finger tips sensing
smoothness
moving lower
sensed thighs

she breathed harder
words gone
utterings wordless
she spread herself

like a butterfly in flight
he pinned her there
in the tall grass
as he'd seen

butterflies pinned
to a board
in the glass box
at school

he breathed in
she breathed out
he smelt apples of her
mixture of lavender

and apples
and that earthly scent
of bodies in motion
the tall grass

became an ocean
waves moved and sank
she sighed
he uttered wordless sounds

she kissed his shoulder
bit flesh
he kissed her neck
lip bit

****** skin
the summery sky
the birds silent
clouds drifted

she saw them
white over blue
over white
her palms on him

pressing
caressing
he journeying
to a heaven

birds gone
sky above him
unseen
just the ocean moving

a huge expanse
of green.

The first thing he smelt was charred ash. A dour, stale smell that drifted in the air, staining the walls and ceiling of the room like a bad birthmark. If you'd have asked him 3 weeks ago prior to today never would he have considered smoking. That was before the bad thing had happened, and now he was puffing away 20 a day like a run-down steam engine.

Stacks of crumpled cigarette packets and empty beer bottles cluttered the floor, along with discarded business cards that seemed to taunt his name, William Shaw, with a bitter humour whenever he looked at them. He had it all - money, a career, an established identity, and yet never had he felt so lost, so meaningless. It seemed the period before when the black event occurred, when the tone and texture of life had suddenly dimmed like being turned down by a dial, was merely a gold and fragile vail, strung up in front of realities true, decrepit, face. A face that had clawed it's way through the happiness, the blistering rays of the summer sunshine, the mounting financial wealth and job promotions, like a pathetic wall of paper plastered over a back street entry.

The first thing he saw when he awoke this morning was the tan coloured ceiling of his flat. Through the sleep induced blurry vision of eyes that have not fully woke, this looked strangely like a vast desert, the minute crack that lay in the middle stretching before his tired eyes into a huge smiling ravine. It reminded him of the grand canyon, something as a child he'd always wanted to visit. He had spent a lot of his school holidays, and acrylic paint and canvases, drawing pictures of it, inspired by its many twists and curves, imagining it as an entrance to another mystical world below where dinosaurs and other creatures hid from the world above.

To a child creativity is essentially their way of interpreting life, and coming to terms with it, and for William Shaw the thing that got those cogs whirring was nature itself. He'd write stories, draw and paint pictures, and whilst his skill at all these was clumsy, his imagination was striking adept, confusing and wowing his parents who had been expecting a crude stick man drawing but instead were presented with a clunky, Van Gogh-style picturesque scene. Being an artist isn't all about the skill, anyone can perfect brush strokes, but looking at the ordinary and somehow visualising the extraordinary.

He never ended up going to the canyon, nor anywhere else for that matter - his mother was unemployed, utilising her time by taking piano lessons and gardening, and his father was a forklift driver at a logistics company. Barring the one-time trip to a seaside holiday camp, where the apartments had smelt of salt and the bedding was scratchy, Will had never been on holiday as a child.

But that was okay, he told himself, they struggled but never neglected me. Now, lying here as the amber hues of dawn startled trickling through the middle of the curtains, those days all seemed like a distant dream. Breaking down financially, they were exhausted and living in worry, yet he went on all the school trips, always had milk money and a cooked dinner waiting for him when he got home.

I have more than I could ever want, and had then, so why do I feel like this?

He knew why, it was because of the bad thing. It had lodged itself inside him, like a festering tumour. No amount of running or distracting himself would make it any better; it would be like running a race against a car or a train.

Or a speeding bullet -

[Hush! Don't want to think about that]

And it was in that split moment he felt an image rising to the surface, callous and cold - a champagne glass exploding into a shower of shards, and oh the screams all he could hear was their screams rising like a tidal wave, ready to submerge, to drown -

BANG BANG!!

He rose with a jolt and glanced over to the digital clock which blinked 8:49 in the far corner. He was running late again and needed to get a move on if he was to arrive at work on time. He hadn't been late ever, but over this week getting up had been a struggle. Sleep just seemed more of a priority right now.

He grabbed a cigarette and stuck it in his mouth, grimacing as the acrid taste filled his mouth. The first was always the worst; causing slight nausea as the nicotine rushed to your head. However the feeling of airlessness afterwards was amazing, temporarily stunning all the nerves in your brain, giving a confused floating feeling only drugs can better. His best mate John, who'd subsequently introduced him to smoking, often said the best cigarette of the day is the first as the 12 hour sleep hiatus allowed the brain to detoxify itself, thus catalysing the nicotine rush. The fact John also thought the Queen was an alien and that Donald Trump should be president made Will take his advice with a pinch of salt - but, in regards to smoking, he was almost spot on.

Much like himself, John was quite a skinny guy with a shock of scruffy black hair receding even though he was in his late twenties, and his black outlook on life often contradicted his bubbly personality. Will had known him for years since high school, and knew full well his stupid and often sarcastic jokes hid the darker side to him; John had served time in prison for a theft he didn't commit and, although he wouldn't admit it, had lapsed into a drug addiction upon his release. The slight gaunt dips in his cheeks said it all.

Looking at him coping, just, and carrying on filled Will with both admiration and guilt. His best friend was spiralling into a whirlpool right under his nose, and the worse part of all - he couldn't do anything about it. Again the feeling of helplessness, of meaninglessness, was there gnawing away like a bloated sewer rat.

He took another drag and glanced again to the clock. Now it read 8:57, almost grinning at him from the other side of the room.

Better get a shifty on, and with that he stubbed the cigarette out and stumbled toward the bathroom, catching his toe and cursing as he went.

it is not that we are far away
but there is   this stilled candor  that
   there    are   spaces,  gaps,  turns  and swerves   that we   cannot   close.

   as in  a star in  its throne will remain
to be  lit in  diadem of white, cannot be touched    or you   in your silence
   with the drone  of such  tired machine:
  moon's all  round and  all i saw, yet not
    always   the visible,  encircled in flesh and
without  so much question, the  mind's a
     quicksilver marauding to  motion all
things  except   your own   parasols bending
    to such   airlessness,  and  to make tractable, this  unstable   mirage

  
      of you,    fulminating in such bright auroras  persisting within the day when you
    arrive  not with   hands but with chains,
   machineries  and not   bones,  no such lissomeness of skin love-hewn but  walls,
    not   the earthen  night  but only brindled   silence like the world whispering ssmething
     close  to the   ear not   love but   pain.

How many more of my dreams
Do you think
That you can fit
Inside your hands

But

The more you fill
Into your palms
The tighter the space
The warmer it is
The harder it is to breathe

So as you squeeze
To hold them in
To never let them go

They will think
You mean to trap
Them in a forbidden hallow

To keep for ever
With no expanse
To die of love
And airlessness

To tremble in your palms
As you hold them tight
To tight

But

You just thought
You were doing right
How could you not
You were just doing right

I lost my grip and down I slid
And felt no urge to stop
My scanty power enveloped my will
As I succumbed to my downward spiral

The inevitable pulled its peaceful ruse
I felt dead before I died
The blackened fiend sat with twisted smile
And watched me breathe into airlessness
Down down I slid into the well
Where no wishes or hope or light do dwell

And there at the bottom amongst the nothingness
Love scooped me up in gentle palm
And placed me amongst the shattered souls
Pieced together by second chances
And slowly there on tessellated plains
My Life began again

Having been long from your arms
And from your glances,
I have also been long from feeling.
I do not know
the flames of passion
or the airlessness of lungs
because I have had no one to steal the air from my body
like you did.
I forgot how to feel,
and all I wish for
is another,
(if not you)
that can touch my heart
and take my sanity.

o, life — you summon the compunction of
   our beforeness.

with your hands, you have worn me
  like a glove, tending to your footfall
  of soil.

with your voice, you poise the starkness
  of this bleak leviathan airlessness.
rousing the frogs sleeping in their
  fortresses — i give them no unction.

it is because life
        is a shard of glass surreptitiously
flattened out, shifting its balance,
   an obscure triangle. because life
is a rose of the old and my hands, a curious spry — i know not its thorns,
   only the dew that melds to dry.
because life has left me a youngling so old, groping in the beholden dark.

i recover no wholeness, and as i sit
in the middle of cobblestones,
the moon whetted to an inverse dagger,
  the blue of the sky like a cathedral
in twilight has its tremendous secrets
  revealed by lunar markings.

this is the voyage of the derelict;
scraps of paper twirling, blown by wind
from stars, the sodden aroma of the seaside — life, you are a sea and the waves unnerve the true blood of subterraneans.

Whispers in the dark
silence has replaced all the laughter
everyone has left
so you should also leave me here,
forsaken..
Let life pass me by
without a care.

Shut out the lights, I beg of you.
You do not deserve to see
the emptiness that consumes me.

Close all of these doors.
No one may enter.
The person you thought you knew
is no longer here.

Lock all of the windows,
wide and gaping like the wounds
which others have left in my skin.
This dark airlessness is my cage, and although I have no wish to leave,
this is still hell.

Block out these worldly sounds
Pass me by.
Leave me where the dark is dull,
and where I once heard music,
but now the space is null.