Listen to: SYML – Where’s My Love

And if this were someone else’s story, they would write me off because I am taking up too much space and the margins of the page are much too tight for the both of us. They would write me off quietly, accidentally; ‘things were never meant to happen this way’, they’d say, and your broken voice would be muffled behind page numbers that count down the few times we touched indiscreetly in a chapter no one ought to read anymore. No, this story belongs to me, and I want to edit out all the moments I thought you were some kind of tragic hero fit for a century that makes heroes out of everyone else but me. I want to edit out the em dashes and ellipses when you still had something to say and I’d stopped you with a mouth that was never made for talking.
If this were someone else’s story, they would write me off because I am taking up too much space and the margins are much too tight for the both of us. But this story belongs to me, now, and you can always stop reading.

Some days you matter. Like early morning sunshine. Like tea-breaks in a basement parking lot, like rain. And some days you don’t.
Some days the distance between us rattles inside my bones. Often it comes alive in symphony, music that echoes in the nooks and crannies you had carved into the walls I built to keep your melodies at bay.
And other times it falls like dull knocks, off-tune and out of touch with my the beating of my heart, but loud enough to rouse me, loud enough to remind me that we are hollow bodies staggering back to each other in the dark.

Rose: A Valediction

And if it is the last, let
it be grand and gentle;
let silence leave unkissed mouths
with the evocation of an
ageless past that hovers
on the tips of phantasmal fingers
begging to touch
on abandoned shores.

XII

Listen to: Tom Odel – Heal

And we spoke 
like lovers do
of the things
that will
remain
after we are
nothing
but shifting
sands
that dance in the wanton wind
of this city’s
warm Decembers. 

Voids

Linger longer than they should;
I’ve stopped trying to fill chasms
of silence with voices that only 
sound like yours when I am not looking.
Tonight I hide quiet tears in the endless
emptiness. There is no replacement
for smiles that teased the shy child
too terrified of your perpetual
presence, your towering temperament;
but you return to your youth
in the silence of my delicate dreams
and your hopeful voice
speaks to me of eternity.

Portrait of a Poet in Her Lover’s Studio

Listen to: Ben Howard – Promise

A window. Two figures repose in a dim light. There is little left to say this time of night. There are quiet, supple limbs, skin near skin, a warm embrace lingering in the pale hue of nights that cling to the hours. There is small silence, a room hushed by the poetry of bodies in subtle motion, by painted words immortalised on a tired easel, a study of careful hands caressing tender voids as they make of breathing a portrait of primordial passion.

I Pray

To Gods that belong to other people
Because I do not dare face my own;
I’ll look up at deep red skies 
the colour of
Heartbreak
and I’ll hope for the gentle
rain of some tragic mercy
As I utter words that belong
in other mouths
And beg
for some tender version of forgiveness.

And I wonder what it must feel like
to fall in love with a poet,
to be touched by hands that
make sanctuary
out of scattered sentences,
your body molded by skin
hovering,
feather-light,
above your own,
an enjambment
of limbs intertwining
endlessly
on the blank pages
of white bedsheets.

And we are both awake and wondering
where the breathing will take us:
if there are still spaces
in between the letters of our names
that can fit our bare bodies;
if the shadows of our words will
fall on our skin like
the shadows of our bodies fell
onto the pages of
the stories we wrote in hurried script.

In Memoriam…

In deep dreams her
frail figure falls;
my arms catch
a scattered soul
and I try to collect
the convulsing body,
piece spirit and self
together, two halves of
one no longer whole.
In deep dreams my
eyes apologise for the
sincerity of my skin;
It touches her and knows
his love in her bones, reads
the memories of flesh*
that merged only
in fantasy.
I make room for myself
in her mourning, crying
into crevices that
will learn the weight
of goodbye.