Now it holds me, now it speaks.
Crumbling the skin away to see what’s underneath.
Cupid kill me, cupid teach.
Beyond the heavens, with the devil at my feet.
I want to heal you, I want to kiss.
To consume the time that threatens abyss.
For in this moment your beauty lies.
Inside my heart, my hands and eyes.
This illuminating version.
Drifting.
Loving, only when the time is right.
When it’s uncalled for.
Who knew?
Who cared?
A scorched soul while the film played on.
And all roads led to the same.
Your heart curdled up tight.
Wearing out my mind.
Melting the plastic of the world we once inhabited.
Central now.
Gaining control of a need that was needed.
Crazy, only to know we were always driving.
Using our knees to steer.
Hoping to crash and burn.
In a beautiful all consuming fire.
So central to our survival.
Like the night.
Soft velvet expanse.
Reaching through time.
Through misty eyes which open wide.
They devour me.
In a kiss that kills me.
Over and over.
Yet tenderly I swim down.
Passing jagged words you keep inside.
Released, only to the moon.
As you howl them into nothingness.
For tender is your way.
Sweet bruises of affection which stay,
within us forever.
As we nestle into the tender wings of love.
Slipping into time.
I love your silver dressed dreams.
Those darlings, they call us all to look.
To peek and prod in an unforgiving time.
Hook your hate around my hand.
Thrown in the bag to drown.
Kittens, pebbles in your pocket.
You call this your pilgrimage.
A racing stumble through our great beyond.
But that was where I found you.
Heaped and tired, all covered in stars.
Can you walk the line?
Can you take some time to change?
Wrap this love around you heart, swallow and then re-arrange.
Your pilgrimage.
You deep mistake.
Your breaking through, my privilege.
You rage within me. A silent storm.
A tempest with temptation to drag me through heaven.
Cutting my wrists on the divine.
I let go, disappearing into the eye of all your wonder.
Lost in your turmoil and torrential rains of change.
Truth hidden in a liar.
Like drowning petals.
Pearls covered in dirt.
Beauty sunken to unfathomable depths.
Those eyes are like black ponds.
Revealing nothing, reflecting all.
Does this light shine back?
Does it tweeze anything from your hidden soul.
You have our love now trapped.
Stored away and silent.
Vanished for all the world not to see.
I know that goodness lies inside your shell.
A bravery that can rise above the fog of this war.
Yet it is impotent and quiet.
Buried in the sand of time passed.
Like those ever-elusive weapons of mass destruction.
It cannot be found.
But I know it’s there, next to your beating heart.
The sea lion awaiting the time to roar.
And break through the waves of this pain.
This Monday morning evaporates the weekend.
A horrendous hue of change.
Your absence now in my bed, as our bodies break.
Twisting the world apart.
The world, now on show for bright eyes and coffee headaches.
Stretching out the happiness as the day rolls into grey.
For without you next to me, I find it harder to breathe.
The eye blinks of necessity struggle under the weight of it all.
I do not mean to be a burden, of self-serving theatrics.
This production creeps out of the stage you set.
For each time you go, and the curtain closes.
I’m left picking popcorn and ticket stubs off my dirty heart.
Rushing once more for the weekend, to be first in line.
This heart a needle, in your hay.
Stripped back today’s waste.
Our suspicion rises.
What you choose to do, what flounders.
Prepared to turn me inside out again.
Airport lighted, with the sun still sleeping.
Bore me down to my appled-core.
Picking out the seeds you planted.
And that I washed with tears.
Alighted.
My boarding pass heart in hand.
To see such new wonders in your eyes.
Breaking from home.
Rest your head on my shoulder.
I will read you bad poetry.
Whispered deeply.
Into your heart.
You loved me today, as the night colours away.
It breathed new life inside.
Returning from Saturn and watching the universe tip over.
The others none the wiser.
Souls that were drawn out of committee.
Leached from the darkness.
Hard to take off.
Now night-time while travellers sleep.
With you, I always fly.
That south western sky, heading to the red earth.
For you are everything.
And all I need.
It came, not in the darkness.
But by a light I willingly placed.
A devil may come in many guises.
And his was a most handsome face.
The flowers died upon arrival.
I did not look or care to see.
How the birds flew out and yonder.
All fleeing the threat unknown to me.
Love was what was offered.
Unconditional, placed at the door.
Hungry was the being who entered.
Devouring lonely souls, longing for more.
The cuts came as sweet as honey.
And the bruises bloomed like spring violets.
The blood seeped, yet I felt nothing.
Unaccustomed and deaf to such violence.
Never ready, aching like a muscle in the heat.
Tired and silent, hoping for it to pass on by.
To float through like dreams of change.
Holding my breath.
Catching my heart.
It always comes, they always do.
Those feelings of love that split my cells.
Love. Love. Love.
Even when solitary sense surrounds.
It doubles down.
Attacking where I’m weakest.
You know how to make me feel.
Punching the darkness out of me.
Leaving halos around my heart.
You come on with your disease.
Spreading like an immunity that I will never possess.
Tasting the trauma of before, I hesitate to move.
Watching while the soul dances the dance.
Bones that break with ease, cannot protect a heart that bleeds.
For you, seep on through.
Forcing me to love you once more.
The sun illuminates such maddening visions.
Of logical paths I dare not tread.
A way to your soul that is covered in thorns.
The heat burns and chars like the wattle trees.
My bones like their branches.
Crumbling and dead.
Yet words you whisper on the Nullarbor winds.
Reach me over oceans.
Washing into my veins like scented magic poison.
An oxygen for my heart which longs to be with you.
So I twist towards the sun, though it burns in your direction.
Blaring up from below the equator.
Through a lens of love and reproach.
Like a plant feeling a new growth, bursting from my skin.
A love is grown again within.
Hoping to be potted, once again in your dusty soil.
8pm. Half awake.
Sonic ringing in my skull like sonar.
Crash through your words that splinter.
Deadening my star.
Sweeping up my sparks.
Picking the petals of me into nothing.
I curl back into tomorrow.
Soaking in the dew of innocence.
Dreams ignite like a Chagall construction.
You and I, flying over rooftops.
Exploding in colour.
I lay you down and crawl into your skin.
Kissing you intimately, feeling my way.
Your body entices and your heart entraps.
Yet it is your soul I’m after.
The bruised, damaged, fraying thing.
Shaking and asking to have life breathed in.
Frantically unable to be cupped in my hands.
It runs from me like a feather on the breeze.
Escaping like a Bharatanatyam movement.
Colours and light, burning my sad lonely grey into nothing.
Love on your fingertips, sticky from the centre of me.
Though this may be transitory, I give in and go under.
Falling for you again as the waves crash over.
Disappearing in such wonder and the perfumed smoke of you.
Coughing up clouds of devotion, and descending like the setting sun.
Weighted, not by gravity.
Or the tear that hangs like lead on a golden cheek.
But pulled and suffocated by a lack of understanding.
A love you swept underneath those neatly placed rugs.
Pushed me to the back pages of the book you barely read.
Maddening words and itchy eyes.
The scratch on your heart you cannot itch.
You replace my thoughts, pull them away like calendar days.
Leaving me wandering in a limbo with ghosts as friends.
Familiar now, to those empty souls.
Who roam and moan in a void you will not listen to.
But the love is there, I saw it fly like a sparrow into your ribs.
It flutters madly, though you clipped its wings.
Locking it away, with your tiny golden key; kept under your tongue.
Behind all the masks on your face.
A world now sees only callousness and indifference.
But you are so different.
Underneath.
Metal hearts and paper crowns.
I anoint you in the night.
Deep when the blackness washes the walls.
That’s when no one can see.
No eyes to validate or void your divine right.
Over me.
Under my benediction which tiptoes into your skull.
Preciousness weighs on our fingers now.
Consequence hangs in our soul.
And as the yokey morn cracks over your eyes.
It may all disappear into the dream.
And buried by the burdens of the day.
I shall lay, to be haunted and spent.
Your prince, left in a pauper’s grave.
Your voice, it calls me higher.
Cracking this concrete world which tethers us.
The challenge in arriving, with a heart still heaving.
Shaken to the core, for the love you try to give.
You turned away and I was lost again.
A return settles in my soul.
With eyes that learned to love once more.
And hands that try to heal.
Don’t speak to me yet, for I may shatter.
Listening to such sweet benediction.
From lips I wish to meet.
To taste again love’s magic.
These expecting steps, lead me further.
As I clumsily tumble into now.
You say you want me.
But the moon begins to weep.
As you begin to wash away my sadness.
Kissing the scars, some made by you, in low starlight.
Skin to skin.
Drenched now in honey, sticky within.
Sweet sparkles.
With strung up stars waiting to explode.
Disintegrating now into brilliant lights of diamonds.
These moments, like pearls on silver lips.
Gently spun and mouthed in wonder.
Consumed by the burning fire of solar saturation.
A golden treasure that I can sit beneath.
Counting coins and constellations.
Never equalling my love for you.
We are but pieces of a shattered moon.
That fell to earth when the world was sleeping.
They never knew how I kissed you, pioneered your love.
Discoverer. Sweet foreign terrain.
Unknown to them in the quietness above.
We are blank space and white noise in their muddled worlds.
Silent, like the dawn.
Tiptoe with me now, to the edge of the unknown.
These transparent moments.
Into the corner of god’s pocket.
Un-stitching fabric and time, eager to breathe the space of the infinite.
And air that sets my soul alight.
Burning the past and dancing on the surface.
Of a moon that those below can only howl towards.
The noise was smothered by the night.
Lain down in god’s whisper.
So deep the mind fell.
Beyond fossilised creatures and secrets in tar.
The moon hummed in its milky orbit.
Delicious solitude descended.
A quietening of existence.
That is where I’ll find you.
Beyond the chaos and the trauma that litters these lives.
Your sanctuary for my soul.
A marbled palace adorned with tears and precious memories.
A temple I wish to practice our religion.
So light those candles and sing me to sleep.
With conflicting thoughts of tomorrow.
And your voice crawling over me.
That when the day blazes into this skin.
Purifying each sin.
The renewal within, is possible.
Only by your sweet vow.
To remain.
Cocooned in a love that had died.
Brought to life once more in this time.
In a moment, connected not by space or matter.
But by the golden dance of hope and perseverance.
I’m on the verge of ecstasy again.
So I swallow it down, keep it all in.
The smile I suffocate with my lips.
Breathing in the heady acceleration of this future.
Trapping it in amber.
No words come from you, yet I hear your voice.
Within, spinning spiderwebs of trust and delicate touches.
Heaving my ribs to make way for the love.
Expanding.
Melting this iceberg.
Though this moment won’t last.
As I feel the morning rays creep over the windowpane.
Threatening today.
And tomorrow you my choose to go away.
Now is all that matters.
It feels, as I collapse into forever.
Washed in your eyes, the drenching of starry hazel plumes.
Making me divine.
So I keep you in time, trapped like beauty.
Forever.
Mine.
Varied in hues, blurring to a view of angelic replication.
Divinity leaking from your bones.
I find you there, holding on to the edge of redemption.
Picking pearls up from our past.
The beach weighs heavy, cresting out from our circumstance.
I had to travel to find you.
You had to forget to believe.
In this peaceful rush of sweet sea air.
Mottling the very face of time.
I have returned, to that place where forever was promised.
Now, as sparks in the sand threaten joy.
The colour of contentment washes over you.
Knowing that the next step will demand such strength.
And in the arms of each other.
We are rock steady and prepared.
Your tissue and bone, like hammer and stone.
Lay me down with this poison.
Counting heart beats, the frenzied heat of your touch.
Leads to my defensive corrosion.
Strychnine, and baths of turpentine.
Which strip away all doubts,
In a sweet sublime watery grave.
Your kiss. The dangerous list of a vessel.
Aching to be near you. Pumping to please you.
And sinking with your tide.
You see?
All of this remains.
Before. Behind. Way after.
The crucible cracks and splutters in its creation.
Offering golden wings in which to ascend.
Where will those heavy wings take us.
On that lunar breeze which blows from the lips of god.
A substituted living now folds into the ocean.
This blessing of cotton wraps around my eyes.
Yet still I see.
If I wait for you, what dies in my veins?
If I go now, will you remain?
The hesitation catches me like asthma.
Your love pollutes my body like oxygen.
Fixing me to rise only when your lungs heave.
At times we are at a distance.
Calling half a world away.
Yet still I remain, waiting for you to see.
Waiting and believing.
That love in your eyes.
He spun the coin, watching it take off in its own little orbit. Whizzing and chasing itself as it spun around. It usually took a few seconds, it never happened right away. At least not yet. The blurred smudge of the coin slowly began to take shape as it slowed down. It was a pound coin, the closest thing to gold he could find. The year embossed on the metal was 1989, that was very important, though few would ever see the date.
The blurring lines of the coin began to slow, but as they did, they stretched outwards, spreading across the surface like a wave. He’d seen it a few times before of course, but each time he did it seemed to entrance him. The waves grew wider and wider as the coin began to slow. The blurred waves taking on an oily shine, catching rainbow marks as they swam outwards like the tide.
And then the coin stopped spinning, it hung there on its side static and humming slightly as the waves that had spread stopped everything. Time was his now, and he moved in towards the coin, the waves forcing him in slow motion. He felt the tightness in his lungs, but he pressed on, like trudging through water. He reached out, his fingers finding the way towards the coin. When they touched, a radiating light exploded outward in the room, blinding him in an instant.
This was the part he always had trouble with.
June 23. 2014. June 23 2014. June 23 2014.
He repeated it in his mind over and over like a mantra. He’d been told to visualise the numbers, but his mind always struggled with that part. It would make things easier if he did, but he was used to difficult.
With a rush of air and collapsing of light, he was thrown into something that he could never quite describe. He was always thankful to land the other side though, his eyes and his hands always burning for some reason. But his lungs thankful for the air on the other side. The air back in 2014. A simpler time.
It was for him at least. Which is why he usually came back to then. Back to here.
He looked around now, the familiar softly warming his heart. There were different approaches to his time jumping, it had been explained to him. He could land in a different place, anywhere in the world if he chose. He wasn’t restricted to when or where, or if he’d ever set foot on that part of the earth. But these steps always required more, and he was only really interested in this place, this time. It brought him a comfort that the present and the future no longer held.
He was in the apartment he’d just left, but it all looked very different. He felt the lighter atmosphere in an instant. Gone were the heavy furnishings or blinds to trap the light. That precious light was welcomed in, the blinds open and the door to the balcony cast wide as if calling out to the sea. He could hear the see, even though it was quite far below. The crashing sounds of the waves seeming to catch in the updraft and lift the sounds up to the 28th floor. He knew the view well, and much preferred it here in 2014, then in the present. Here he could take their hand and trace the line of the coast off in the distance. In the present it only called him to the rocks below, the sirens that dwelt there luring him to the ends of overwhelm.
He looked at the clock on the wall, and knew they’d be back any minute. He always liked to watch them coming in through the door. That paradox of frustration and relief at coming back from the end of a long day.
And there they were, coming in through the door. He went across to the entrance and breathed in their sweet smell as they walked right through him. He knew his own self would appear any minute, coming out of the shower and greeting them. It pained him not to be able to touch, but he was glad that sight and smell both worked normally. He saw himself then exit the bathroom, tying the towel around himself and coming over to kiss them. He ghostly traced his own steps, merging with himself and following through with the kiss. He closed his eyes despite himself, but quickly opened them and took them in his spirit like arms.
He missed the kisses. He missed their touch. He missed so much of what was now all around him which was why he returned here so often. He watched them both moving around. The kettle now being boiled as the coffee and tea was prepared. Bag dumped on the sofa. He breathed it all in, the preciousness in the ordinary.
He could stay forever if he liked, and indeed he had stayed for long periods of time before. But time being the linear monster that it is, he found he had to wait out the times when they would sleep. He could not sleep here, back in time. His body wouldn’t allow it. It was as if it was constantly battling some force which pushed it on. So, he spent hours watching them sleep, watching them dream. This was always a good time to come, because he loved this day. The 23rd. He knew the evening well and he never got bored of seeing their reaction.
He noticed it then, glittering on the table. And surprisingly, so did they. The coin was shimmering, the sunlight catching the dulled yellow from the pound coin. Then they both went across to the table, he watched them move as if in some strange dream. This couldn’t happen, he could not disrupt the past. But it was happening, nonetheless. Before he knew it, the coin was in their hands, tossing upwards. It landed on the palm, their hand covering it.
Heads or tails?
Try again.
Flick, up in the air.
He reached for it himself but missed and watched as they again hid it under their hand.
His old self grabbed them, both of them laughing. Then they made a dash for the balcony. The joy carrying itself out into the outside to share with the world. Grabbed again, but this time fought back, tugging at the towel to share even more with the world.
He watched this all in a stunned state, as if unable to move. He shook himself back to, but by then it was too late. Another toss into the air and this time the coin spun upwards with such a force it was as if it were being called back by God.
Over the sides it flew, watched by them both and by he himself before he launched himself over the side.
It made no sense. He’d never been told this could happen. They were never able to see the coin before. Or had they just never noticed it? He thought suddenly to himself. They couldn’t interact with him, that is what he’d been told. But something was different this time.
He sped towards the coin, himself hurtling down towards the ground, the rocks below coming up fast like pointy teeth. No matter, he would just touch the coin and reset. He could not be hurt back here. He didn’t quite know what would happen if he did land, but it didn’t matter as his hand clenched around the coin.
But it did matter, for his ghostly hand went right on through the solidness of the coin. And those rocks found his body quicker than he could blink.
The pain was real, and instant. In his tumble he had twisted slightly, the jaggered rocks that his body had smashed against had greeted the blood like the ocean spray, disrupting it outward. He lay there for but a moment still alive, looking upwards as he could see the figures on the balcony looking on before disappearing back inside. Back into the lives they would live together for only a couple of more years.
As he passed, he heard the clock ticking and he could see in his mind the coin spinning.
Though he had paid attention to the date of the coin, which was indeed most important, what hadn’t been explained were the little rings of dots that circle the pound coin. A normal coin he’d assumed at first. But each time he had jumped, a little dot had disappeared. The coin, which now lay just below the surface, washed by those south pacific waves, had its last little dot slowly disappear.
Nothing, it seems, lasts forever.
Survived, 4am; too tired to see the world for what it was.
Slipping into the cracks and shadows that fill my eyes.
Too numb to notice that I couldn’t notice you.
Standing with arms outstretched like wings.
The bird that always had strength to fly.
That slipped into the open wounds and found our hearts.
It patches us up now, flitting inside our skin.
Pulling feathers over broken bones.
It does not notice the cartilage cage it builds up around itself.
A prison to its good intentions.
It too now needs help, to lift up and soar again.
Love, please come rescue us.
Make us fit to fly and leave this place.
With only fallen feathers to show we were here at all.
This love is obscene.
How it builds to a waking dream.
Your hand in mine, as we cross the great divide.
Stepping into now as the cliffs crash below us.
I’ll be your aeroplane, your rocket to the moon.
Smear the sugar on my heart.
So numb to the taste of artificial sweetener.
You’re the real thing.
Familiar reflections dancing with the shadows.
All off stage, and now out of sight.
Those long forgotten poses, positions to the left and right.
Wanting it all, wanting only to be wrong.
Your eyes are devouring me and I swim in the stomach of your love.
Crushing bones and the tar that used to keep me together.
Swallow it down.
Change my blood to gasoline and set me on fire.
To light our way.
To drift away, into love once more.
Eclipsing the moon tonight.
Havoc and Consequence 