8.

She tried to call again.

A powerful sound, a ring that never gets an answer. A lonely, endless trill. The sinking heart encased in a plastic box.

Daring to hope, for that swift truncation, the kick in the ribs. Still, nothing, a heartbeat slowing to a resigned stop. A runner hanging back on the roadside, knowing they can never win. Something was wrong, very wrong.

Sometimes you know someone is gone. You can feel your heart stop as theirs do; you can catch a breath just as they catch their last, the heat in the air turns a little in another direction. The stones melt under your feet, the sweat turns to tears, and you do not know why...

you just know.

She felt her limbs were concrete now. Tired and spiritless, she wound the line in her fingertips, shattered from a day searching, quickly turning her world now into a muddy swamp. Images crept into her mind, pushing and forcing their way through doors simultaneously, gasping to reach her surface, some submerged into drowning pools, some taking a dive then saving, becoming a saving grace.

That night, she lit a candle and shivered under her sheets, dressed only lightly, and feeling nothing, the silent dark her only embrace, her only friend, or lover. She knew, this was the end. The ceiling hung over her like a crushing block, her eyes closed, the noise of static rushed her head. She sat up, sweat pooling in the small of her back, the sheets soaked,

with all her life

with all she knew was now gone.

My love, I guiltlessly entwine with your shadow, I am within it, always, wandering, following, never giving up, even though you are gone. I crawl through these broken bones, I stay alone, in vigil, in hope, that you will turn and see, see me.

I dance fuildly and with effect to your music. I never have to beg, never have to question, for I know. In your gaze I am uninhibited, clean and perfect, my footsteps are a fine tusk, sharply cutting the morning's flesh.

You tell me, tell me again, these thrills are meant for me. I am not meant for this darkness of my soul. Lay me on the soaking earth, kiss me to life, for all the little wet shards to penetrate me again, for you, for you, I live.

I love you.

I am writing a book about love and death, and memory in there too. Here is the updated version.

1

“You’ve been here a long time, haven’t you?!”
She whispered, cooly into his ear, stroking the fine hairs on his scalp with an impossibly soft finger. Sitting on one knee, she laid the flower on his chest, and kissed the tip of his nose. Then left.

He had not woken for several years. His sleep was dreamless, manufactured and mercilessly long, a deafening silence in a shattering crescendo.

She let one solitary tear glide down an olive cheek and sighed as it melded with rainfall to simply fall away and die on the stone at her feet. It did not help to cry, and she rarely did anymore. She slid her sleeve over the shining black face of her mobile phone, and in cold type read 18:06pm.

Sliding into her reverie one last time, she remembered. The rain replaced with sunlight and a laughing, happy throng appeared in front of her. Her hair, long and shimmering black and as formal as office paper now bursting with flowers and pigtails, as her scene shifted into a memory held healthily at her breast.

“We use memory to keep someone alive; to lie to ourselves is sometimes the best thing we can do, to actively resurrect.”
She had been using memory to keep him alive. For so long, since his physicality had gone, since the earth had taken him, absorbed, decomposed, blanketed, smothered and suffocated. She couldn’t stand it, couldn’t deal with it.

So she stayed here, and huddled in an endless tangle of reminiscence.

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
I cannot wait to see you,
Anymore
I cannot be alone, I cannot wait to die
To wake up in your arms in oblivion
Would be worth the price
-‘-‘-‘-‘-‘-‘-‘-‘-‘-‘-‘-‘-‘-‘-‘-‘-‘-‘-‘-

2

Nothing. Then, something. A thought, just enough to puncture the endless void. A voice, female, lone, cut glass and piercing eyes. A dense, throbbing pain become a warm glow, he was alive.

He was lying on a long stretch of sand, curving away into a perfect, amethyst ocean. A cloudless sky sat benevolently above. His eyes blinked sand and salty seawater from his vision, and he sat up, holding his chest as his heart would itself into a frenzy.

“Who am I? Where am I?”

His heart stopped, and he died once more. To him, dying was the same as sleep, it was a never-ending loop, an infinite, tragic constant. He went from memory to memory, losing his love time and time again, the past changing in his death, the birth changing his future.

Only one remembered him, and it was she who created him now. He spied in the black, familiar veil a lone, singing bird, beating furiously its frantic wings, trilling and spinning away into those corridors of nothing, begging him to follow.

And he did.

“I knew I would never see you again.”


It’s okay, it’s just a little rain. As you walk through those familiar closing curtains, you knew. You knew that the story had to end like this. You are a romantic, after all. The clean farewell, the huddled hug in the corner, the stale, stark lights breathing on your back. It is what you wanted…

isn’t it?

“Perhaps that is all this is…a constant farewell. Part of me wants it like this, but it’s never easy to know it, in your gut and heavy feet.”

You always wanted this. I am a note in your drawer, a sliver of silver that you dream of. I am real, perfection in a picture frame. It is not me, I am electric signals long shut down. I breathe in reality, full of life and health; I dim my lights and sing my own praises, you do not need me. You need the story.

“Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps you are always right. But then I did want so much more.”


We both did. We were both sighing in happy embraces, it was not a story, it was genuine. But you wrote yourself a delicious ending, just like you dreamed. It is not the pefect world, as you wish it to be. You think, my darling, in images with clarity, orchestral sweepings, perfecting dialogue as you go, teasing love from the script, erasing the bumps and killing truthes.

“I won’t ever see you again…..will I?”

It may be for the best. Goodnight.

“Goodnight.”

I’m losing all senses tonight
In your hands a reminder of running water
For you heal with every touch and cradling
But it’s black and white in the photograph
That I’m keeping in my head.

I know we’re trying to keep in touch
But honey, these shadows are growing long
And they’re disappearing over the hills
I don’t think they’re coming back

In silence, I wait for water
For growth, for redemption
For peace in a world of weary noise
For the desire, for that thrilling voice
But I don’t think I still have the choice.

Every so often someone notices it in you. Something in you stirs something in them, be it the elegance of a word that wraps itself around the tongue; a halted gaze that nestles softly in the heart. A mutual and ageless combining of soul and head. A guiltless collision of senses, neck to hand, heat to cold, both of the same calm sea, the same desire to head out to the sea and come back drowned in each other.

It is so rare, that heaving blow, that infinite dance of pleasure and pain, that melting snow and shimmering, gleaming starry eyes. It is the only thing I desire, and yet, it is so uncommon.
I like to lie on my side and listen to the pulse of the earth, imagine someone doing the same, resting softly on the soil, quietly and thoughtfully eschewing the noise of the industry, the cackling Saturday nights, the foghorns in the distance, who can tangle herself with roots and leaves and count the rings, as I do.

Who plays with her hands in slivers of candlelight, playing with fire, twirling her glass and studying the refractions of light. Who is interested, both in the lines she gathers and the movement of time.
A woman who tempers the tempest with a subtle circling of birds. To soothe the wild, swirling core of my being.

I am listless in your gaze. My limbs do not work, my heart is a slow pulse, all time stops. You notice in me the lack of walls, of barriers, of defense. I am helpless to you. I always have been. I put up my fists in a bracing gesture. It does nothing.

I am a smile in defeat. I am a lowly pair of eyes wandering in hope, I love you. I always love you. I am the earnest repetition. As a sleight of hand is, or a wilful wandering of eye. If you walked in, I would be lost. Always, again. I am stupidly engaged in you.

And it never changes, and it never gets better. I am a pair of headphones, turned into a pair of lovers. I will never need you, but I love to pretend. To write us into a poem. I enjoy the linking of hands and limbs just the same way I love the bittersweet, the breaking. Not one word wasted. Not one used out of place.

It's either or, it's always either or. Kissing the sky, or tearing my hair out. Embracing, or clutching at straws. Guessing, or going, screaming in ecstasy, screaming in rage, catching confetti and turning it into thunderclous. Ruining the painting, easing beauty onto the page, and then scratching, cursing, daubing and destroying.

I seek to delicately grace the page with my words. I force them in, tent peg vowels puncturing new born consonants, stunted where they sit, ink lies dripping from bloodied wounds, the cough at the funeral my only breaking of the silence.

A silence with a single sound, the sound of choosing one or another. No calm seas, either stormy, or flat, either sensual, or sexless, never teasing, almost always pitch black, neon and impenetrable sombre nights, never that sweet ache of you in Summer, only the death of our love in Winter. Never the promise and never the hate, never the love and never the breaking.

Either or. You say I never believed you, took all those words and made black and white from an entire palette. You were fucking right, you were fucking right..I could never quietly love, I could only noisily rupture the guts of it, with exclamations and shouts, busily setting about killing us like the hunter with the knife, greedily ripping cartilage, the deer long dying, my words lie etched in such a sweet and climactic end, because I could never do either or.

Senses mean so much.

They elevate a simple event into sublime crescendo, they can captivate through biological responses, senses turn memory into vivid realities, a sensual corner of the mind thought forever lost.

The teasing and happy fireflies. The cool and hot in your breath, the swinging lights and dizzy, vertigo lovers. The bending of fact to suit fantasy. The very sweet lie of your bite on my lip.

This is no comfort, this is no reality. All there is in the head is a rapidly fading black and white image, a scattered, corrupted stream, of pitched whines and screaming silences. I see reds and blues swirling into patterns of thick ecstasy, being drowned in a muddy sea, an avalanche threatens to cover the cracks, puncture the seal.

I lie bleeding like a beast, my love becomes a green shoot from my death; a storm breaks me with lightning, jolts the last life from me, but the following rains renew that which is around me, the soil of my deathbed is a fitting place to grow new life

There is no easy point to arrive at. Each one arrives in the same fuzzy smear, a distant stop in a bar now disappearing into fragments, the voices and faces could be anyone.

I would not recognise you from he, her or they. The night we touched breathlessly, our arms turning to oak were no mistake, for that is where we left them, turning into the earth and forever affixed to a singular desiring, a tuned cable to a giddy impulse. Reality is not kind to our kind.

London's Streets.

Awoke, died, and born
On London’s streets
A simple child’s note scrawled
On a distant balloon,
She is in the veins of buildings
As if anyone could see
She is in the midst of parked cars
And the pollution gloom
Frayed hopes and frayed ropes
Hang all over this city
All dragged out and suffocated
Under London’s streets