It was lust we were building.
Moving in the dark, all elbows and ankles.
Found each other’s lips, leaned in for a kiss,
the first of what would be countless that night.
Your mouth tasted of strawberries and wine.
On the stereo, our favourite song.

You said ‘I love this song’,
peering out the window at an opposite building,
one hand clinched around a glass swollen with wine.
We still wore our socks, cuddling our ankles,
and we kept them on throughout the night.
In my head, replaying each previous kiss.

We’d never wanted to kiss
like this before - as soon as one song
ended we did it again, the night
oozing like a wound into early morning, the building,
our bodies alight with desire, ankles
knocking between sips of wine.

We soon finished off that bottle of wine.
Drained my glass of red, placed a kiss
on your shoulder, shuffling my feet, my ankles
into a more cosy position as a new song
kicked in, swirled into the building,
a hot breeze of music disturbing the night.

I didn’t want it to be just one night.
There was more to discover and plenty more wine,
every word we spoke echoing through the building.
I could savour your smile with every kiss,
loved your freckles, the daisy tattoo near your ankles.
It felt like writing our own story, the lyrics to a song.

But you didn’t want to hear our song.
At the end of the night
you went cold. I wrapped my arms round my ankles.
I felt sure you’d gone off me. Maybe it was the wine.
My lips were anesthetised from every kiss -
when I asked what was wrong, you said 'get out this building.'

Something had changed; I didn’t know what. Night dissolved into day. We stopped listening to Kiss.
Your lipstick stains the colour of wine on my neck. Was it the final time I’d see your naked ankles?
I took a mental photograph of the building as I left, though I’ve forgotten it since. But not yet our song.

Unrest sits inside of me. Scratch that. Unrest riots inside of me.
Tonight I knelt face down in a shower hotter than a Sydney inner city summer day. My skin burned. I hate water. I hate heat. In as much I particularly hate hot water. It intimidates me and steals my breath from fear and a terrifying blaze in my lungs. I often dream nightmarish of drowning in an ocean deep with blood red boiling water.

Still. I figured I could burn away this cold feeling that freezes me from my heart to my skin. If this were frostbite I would be a darker pitch of black. Head to toe. Inside out. Charred flesh and bone, sewn over a fevered mind.

I knelt on the pads of my shins, feet flat out behind me, knees scratching the tub, chest heaving with my hands clasped desperately behind my head pushing down. **** up, face down, no grace in this morbid search for self comfort. Trying so hard to become undone. My forehead rested in searing water raining down; that puddled hot and ***** beneath at my mouth. I prayed for tears. I ached to open up. One bleeding stitch at a time. To bleed tears of salt water amongst the fresh. Just to myself. For me if not for anybody else. Alone. Uninhibited. A quiet fury unleashed.

I searched for my voice and willed it to cry out. Urged it to break open and spill, a mess of confusion could at least be cleaned up. Without that mess I was still just a disaster waiting to happen.

I answered myself with silence. The only noise I could make was a low, guttural, throaty whine. The sound murmured in the water, muffled. Wasted. Washed away. Just air and water. Leaving. Draining. Just. Gone.
Salt burnt in my throat. More heat. Tears stung at the back off my eyes so I opened them and let the water in so as to coax the water out.
Nothing. Nothing but heat and emptiness.

Scratch that. This is not emptiness. I know emptiness well. I remember the echo of nothing. I remember non existence and its dumb witted mercy. I recall the dull anesthetised blanket of apathy.

This. Is. Feeling. This is being full and riotous. This is toxic and seething.
Appendicitis yet burst.

Even a toxic spill can be cleared, a burnt forest regrown. Degenerative. I feel like I am both sinking and replete at once. Both burning and washed out. Scarlet bright and discoloured. Alive and exhausted.
I am a vacuum through which no sound can travel. Waves of compression travelling through matter. From particle to particle I travel silenced, with no substance through which to reach a listener.

I am not listening.
I am unsound.
Unrest and riotous.

Even as I write this
My face burns.
My body aches and quivers and my stomach turns over and over and over until I stand and reach for my tobacco and roll to smoke to abate this ache that is eating me.

Alive.

I am a thousand words unsaid.
Five thousand tears yet spilled.
Words fall from my fingertips
But not from my lips.

I am the quiet in the storm.
Stilled, Stalled, Appalled by what can only come next.

This skin. Of mine. Is prickly and If I could just step out of it, for the sake of feeling settled, I would. I would stretch and unwind my mind then slowly furl back into myself, ironed out and calmed. Fresh stitches, less itches and the sense of having been free. From me.

Funnily enough, although I’m not really laughing, when the tears do come, when they bite at the corners of my eyes until I feel like my face is about to tear apart, a mess of salt and flesh, The darkness reaches out a cold and unforgiving hand and pushes down. Until the brackish brine reaches back into my throat, slides into my stomach, dragging with it that fleeting chance of reprieve. Then comes the sick. Then comes the smoke. Then comes the still and ever threatening silence.

I am a stranger to myself.
And this is not the first time.

what is this life?
what is this gelatinous mess?
what has been done
has been done
willingly or reluctantly
   - I know the moments
that have seen me
judder the gearstick the wrong way
that have seen my bones
rattle with a dreadful calcium clatter
my lungs like sandwich bags
flimsy against my heart
which throbs as some malformed peach
when a white chocolate blonde goes by
it reminds me of ice-cream
the chilly fuzz inside my skull
my nerves anesthetised
gone blue gone slow
   - names clamour over one another
until I can’t separate the letters
the worth keeping
the junk mail
a train spewing passengers outside
I am knocked all over as a conker
bruises blossoming into pools of Ribena
where is the asphyxiate button?
that would wipe this page clean right?
   - here is what I offer
passion by the bushel
and while I have not fired Cupid’s bow
or slurred my way through a Taylor song
I can make it work
I can learn to drive
and stop being a moth toward the light
flapping my epileptic wings till they burn
   - I will scrub the soil from my skin
latch onto you and be the best possible me
float within your ripples
swig the air as if it’s lemonade
just taken from the fridge
say I am not who I was before
I am new I am fresh I am sparkling clean
like a toddler as they wobble
to make their first step

A grinding halt, one fragment at a time.
Up front, that fierce direction I might need
consuming days with more than air to breathe.
Instinct to catch the sun, soaking bright light
through glowing skin. The pine to step outside
and wander in a warming morning breeze.
Dark urgency to touch; desire with ease;
it slowly slips away by flawed design.

Eventually, a breath can seem a chore
when every gasp brings aching disregard.
If breathing turns to wasted life support:
who wants a working, anesthetised heart?
To force the lungs to fill and then to fall
seems criminal when lips don’t want to part.