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.

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.

i hunger for you in the emptiest room

"I want to hear you say something dangerous, to touch on something more than the two of us, to turn these midnight whispers into plans (these words to shaking in the earth)."

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.

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.

I'm here to lie and look beautiful

When I have children I will be
ancient beyond counting and wield infinite power
with unimaginable cruelty.
I will go on epic journeys in infernal machines
which spirit me away to the exotic lands that lie
at the other end of the motorway.

These journeys will be epic.

I will travel to the edges of infinity and return
with brightly coloured plastic parts which,
fitted together correctly,
make nothing like a car.
I will pretend that my life is as interesting
as their small scale makes it seem,

that I was once the sort of person who
woke up naked on foreign beaches
and ran faster than the police,
whose lives I held like spun glass in the cup of my hands
and who, along with everyone else, I spared
in my infinite mercy.

(On my more deluded days I clench
my fists into bitter balls as if to crush
the glass that isn't there.
I bite my nails to the quick and squeeze).

When I have children I will probably be declared
an unfit mother. The law
will see my ragged palms and hand
my babies to some girl, some smiling woman
with scraped-up hair and too much truth
who will betray them with the closed fist of her kindness.

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!