up, screaming

The night is divided into fifteen minute parcels
fits and spurts and the sensation
of falling, the blind terror of being lost in your own body,
of having nothing to catch you for a long moment
as you spiral
downward
like dead wood falling through water,
third person, high angle,
watching as the girl plummets, screaming
and the hero, the eleventh hour, the fifteenth minute comes
just as she crashes into a nothingness thick enough to break bones.

Your days are your sonnets

This is the last night you will ever be young,
she said
as you barrelled headfirst after buses,
slipping through streets with your hands fisted in the fabric
of your top where it fell, buttons through worn holes,
and you trailed smoke and scarves and laughed at mirrors and tasted,
for the last time,
like someone you'd never really met,
and this was it this was
the ever-unfolding night
it was something bright and shameful and beautiful and you felt it,
running faster, as you slipped and skidded and swung
arms out
round lamp posts, free-wheeling circles and shapeless noise
this happiness, trailing after you like
scarves or smoke or messages on mirrors saying:
this is it, this is
everything that you will ever have to look back on
the last night you will laugh with your arms wide and your eyes open
and not feel ashamed.
This is the last night you will ever be young.
And you will fall through cities when they're fever-bright
and lie barefoot in the sun
that shines into your locked room
and you will dance to music you do not remember
because this is it, this is all, this is the end
of the beginning.

But you're running
and screaming
your final secrets
so you do not hear her,
but race on, happy, through the night.

these are a few of my favourite things

possibly slightly less ancient than the others. hopefully.

Schnapps and Cigarettes

If you were to kiss me now,
I’d taste of schnapps and cigarettes –
a different brand, as if to mark
the distance desperation put between us.
Now that I’m out of my bracket,
my socio-cultural depth,
I feel the need
to cling and cry, be comforted
by tear-softened words about
the old haunts, the old times.
Thirty-eight days is far too long
to go without familiar whispers,
far too much time
spent lost among privileged, precocious faces
who know more than I’d ever dream.
(You are their best reflection,
their wisdom and refine without their air of superiority.
My blasphemies and ignorance endear you,
you see me as a different kind –
a sub-species, a Darwinian freak,
to be held and helped and guided to the lighthouse,
and there bathed in sun-like beams,
my imperfections burnt away
by the dazzling glare of infinite knowledge).

I’m minute-counting now.
I am pathetic.
But, should I taste sour and deformed,
I know you enough to bring me back,
a swimmer plucked from the flood
as the undertow threatens
to take me under, smother me
in unfamiliar waves and take away
all I ever hated; all that ever,
in the end,
gave me any definition.
I am an Ilson girl and through my veins
runs not the solitude of hillsides, stone and earth;
not the capital’s diseased yet vibrant beat,
but squalid concrete and sick-stains,
starving mutts and morning drunks,
paint stripper booze and Richmond tar.
I am an Ilson girl who knows big words,
who writes verse in crooked syllables and thrives
on her suburban contradictions.
You are the caffeine-coloured star I steer by,
my familiar waves
and in this storm of schnapps and cigarettes
I wait for you to pull me under.
I wait for your embrace.