the loneliness of stamp collectors

The abstract part of you abstracted,
absent,
giving guest appearances on the other side of the globe.
It didn't tell you, just sent home the stub of a ticket,
second class,
cyrillic stamped across the back in purple shades of blue,
packed in sugar pink confetti caught at the party every other
threw to say goodbye.
You didn't know, you want to say,
but the part of you that persuades has fled,
has fucked some other part of some other person at some pink confetti party and gone.

You see it sometimes,
single frames spliced into films that make you sit up and say
nothing, now, but still,
in the stutters of white noise that you've left
in six-foot-spaces up and down the country
where you quaked and trembled because there was nothing left
to protect you from the answering machine
there is something;
a paper trial of need that never quite became desire
and now cannot because the part of you which pleased,
the part of you which knew where it was going has gone.

Write it back.

Your monthly dose of disgrace

Vines on vines

You’ve yellowed since I saw you last.
Shrivelled and shrunken,
curled inward like heated paper,
the same tea-black shade.
You’re sour and shamed.
I can’t pretend
to understand what you pretend or why,
or tell when your laugh
is genuine and rising as opposed to pebble-water cold.
These things are codes
which I cannot consciously unravel.
I can merely twine myself
around you,
vines on vines,
choking out life with our hands clasped
tight in borrowed understanding.

I can tell when your heart’s up,
your heat’s up, your skin’s
pricked with sweat even if I never knew
the marks drawn dark across your
yellow-paper spine.
There’s an ocean between you.
A cavern of mildewed cold
where the small stones of your laughter tumble,
like the clink of held hands,
togethertogether,
towards the bottom.
Towards the beach in the bay where the sunlight’s stored,
paper-yellow and pebble-cold

where you’re frozen
squinting in the light of something long gone and smiling.
There’s an ocean.
Three feet of cotton and an eight hour night
which you stare at
and pray to
but cannot cross.

scooters, vacation, fall

There's something in rushing out early
with your hair wet and your make up off,
dressed in the clothes you spent the night in.

Something in the way the creases concertina
round your joints, the folds of your favourite
positions. Something
in the smell of sweat gone sour and warm, of dirt
and home, the way they crumple
like brown leaves, brittled
by their winter between doors
on the bottom of a boot
creased tight in the corner of a checkered floor,
as you sweep out into the spring.

Open the windows.
Let the light rush in.

*

I will probably edit this later, and probably badger people as to whether "light" or "fools" works better in the last line. Until then, yay! Something new!