░ January, 2025 ░
[untitled]
Now if there was a God, he didn't put her on the Earth for me, nor did he put I for her. That guy didn't design the way our threadbare eyes blinked each other in, didn't carve the hollow metal that sank our dragging feet down before each other at the fiery pulpit we stoked with whispers. If anything, he might have done that grove where our tresses took roots, where we whittled each other down to kindling.
░ Spring, 2024 ░
Bitterness (I felt my size)
It began by placing an index finger and curled thumb to the bridge of my nose, my eyes moving in stop-motion clicks to my spine's synced up cricks as I gazed up to a sky. A pair of swallows whose wings and tails would wane into wishbone trails, their beaks that bore out the blue into black & the stillness into swiftness whilst they dove. And for the taste of two-pences creeping up further, I pinched down harder and failed focusing on young birds in flight rather than crow's feet, chondrolaryngoplasty, bitterness and of course you, each oesophagus gulp like Geiger counter clicks.
I wished then, knowing it to mean nothing, that I had acted differently.
The rupture seemed to have stopped, so I stuck my sodden fingers into the dewy grasses below. Crimson coagulated clots weighed down weed ends and bent, bowing in the way of windfall. So green, so young, all bloody red and ruined now. I hastily choked down some more bitterness and pondered on when I became this way. When it changed from occasional to chronic - certainly not overnight. I tried to watch it all through the glossy eyes of my prototype self. But now, it was much too misty to ponder on.
I remember apologising to your face, knowing it to mean nothing.
A small wood louse scuttled down a stem to my bony, wrinkled finger. I watched how every jointed tendril-leg cast its millimetre marathon onto my skin, each music-box movement like magnetic tape winding round endless spools. I watched how its appendages crumbled into each trench of my finger- pad. I watched it yearn. I watched its exoskeleton arch in those same stop-motion clicks. I watched how it struggled, and I saw Sisyphus in you, little louse. I fidgeted - and you fell into yourself, and you clutched into your defences.
Knowing it to mean nothing, I set the louse gently back into its home.
I sat down in the field and felt siroccos cross my skull. My crossed-legs in the soggy turf and my still- stained hands clasped together, I dammed up any thoughts of that prototype self, how he'd think about this all starry-eyed, because he is not here now, he is not feeling the warmth of these siroccos. He is not seeing these beauty of saw-wings and pill-bugs, with earth and blood underneath his fingernails. For a second, I chuckled, and forgot all about him, and you, and
knowing it to mean everything, I closed my eyes.
░ Winter, 2023 ░
Potter
Shape me with red clay, push and
crease into whatever form you
see fit. Your drawn out breath, the kiln -
my shattered pieces beneath your feet.
Radio towers
See if I tried to think about the pre- and not the post-
I get lost in that old fear of that character I initially created of you
only saying character because it wasn't really you. I only know you now
and that version is very different to my preconceived dream, that
materialised wish of something better that never made it to you
through the radio towers in my dreams, always too tall to scale.
Boy
I had it then, caught in a closed fist
about enough room to breathe but not enough to stir.
Between tight knuckles light leaks
out. I peered through the narrow hall ways
to get some idea of what it was, that bursting narrow blur
its buoyancy dormant in my hand.
"Lie still," I pled. I don't think it can hear.
Brighter and brighter now, it's beginning to burn -
you can't stare at your sun for too long.
That's when I first heard the hum
androgynous harmony ringing out and churning
out louder overtones like seed lings in my palm
I tried, I swear I did try,
nails scoringthroughflesh as I try to con-
tain its form in five fingers,
but in all that expansion I let it
go.