Lost compass, sliding off a map.
The ends of the world, as the world ends.
Jettisoning everything of surplus.
Keeping only what is sacred.
What is precious.
I leave a trail, across the sky like a distant dream.
Exploded into nothing, vanished as the night rolls over.
Yet locked in the DNA that rains down.
Are memories and fragments of this soul.
Particles of god and echoes of love.
Like you I am no longer.
And without you, I am nothing once more.
A story unfolding at the speed of life.
Unplugged or imbedded.
They missed the Milky Way.
Drinking once more from a cup of stars.
Do these words seem familiar?
Rub it on your teeth.
Ugly and sweet
As they slide once more into focus.
Chewing on your past like a shark in a bathtub.
Filled to the brim with sorrow.
Eyes, that are empty.
Calling for tomorrow.
Now your moon hangs heavy in your heart.
Blue, like the subterfuge.
Shrieking past on a shooting star.
All light and brilliance.
Call it what you want, taste it like confusion.
Lifting into that lunar bloodstream.
But be sure to rinse your mouth with the irresistible.
And swallow the sublime.
A little, then more.
Nothing is ever enough.
In this world, where hate is king.
He’s an angel of sadness.
Watching it all from space.
Seeing molecules and indifference collide.
What remains, what took him away.
Stained with pain and cruelty.
Reigning like unlucky stars in our eyes.
Walking it back in photonic blackness.
We only leave the ground for a minute.
To spin on the atoms.
And feast, on the junk of these hearts.
With mercury in our eyes.
There is no difference in what is happening here.
As above, so below.
You catch the sparkle, your reflection off a million diamonds.
Twinkling in the heavens.
Radiating your truth.
Do you blur with movement, or by the lies that cough up like dust.
I was once unsettled.
Once covered with earth.
Repositioned by the hand of fate to a terrible place.
The blood in the diamond that knew my face.
Yet it is more precious now, the life I hold in my hands.
Why ask the sun not to shine.
For the moon to course through the years.
You ask for simple but wish for different.
Which disrespects God who has it all planned.
Unstitch the heavens for me.
Open up your veins for him.
All the same yet convinced in its difference.
If you want to bring the heaven and the stars down to earth.
You must rise at least to meet them.
Wait for this dust to settle.
A hurt that’s wrapped tightly in a bandage.
Squeezed into numbness.
You asked me here, you want me to stay.
But to remain means deserting me.
Leaving myself alone to drift into space.
You handle my heart so divinely.
Picking off the dirt that reminds me of my past.
Scars that taught me not to break.
To catch you, half a world away; lost in the fog of tomorrow.
Cancelling time zones as the tock and the tick irritate.
And your kiss, inebriates it all.
This Atmosphere changes everything.
Up here, I cannot see the fall.
Don’t take this from us.
As the heart hovers and throbs.
An unending passion that is born in the slightest smile.
And the most agonising cry.
Your words caved in as the world collapsed.
Ushering happiness and banishing the ghosts.
What worlds do we hope to die?
Which ruins threaten to drag us down?
You meet me on the dock, that inches out into space.
Into time, dappled in joy and the yet to become.
Like a swirling candied apple planet in our hands.
And we dip our feet into stars.
Watching it all from above.
This sudden shudder and retract.
Of a past that wishes to bury itself.
In a book so eager to close.
The whisper in my ear as, the night fades, is you.
Promising me tomorrow.
As dawn washes into my eyes.
That endless world they talk of.
A Drowned world.
It opened in my heart when the starry waves washed inside.
When you looked at me.
With that light of god in your eyes.
And in that moment, like that pebble in your hand.
You grasped at the infinite.
You consumed my soul.
And we would remain forever bound.
Like that pebble in the ferocious stream.
Washed endlessly by the cosmic current.
Until clean.
There’s a resonance within.
These bones that call.
Out to the nothing, across god’s table.
The banquet to the stars.
Which hearken us home.
Though it’s hard to try against a world of darkness.
One that creeps in with the rain.
It calls to me daily.
Blinking out of my mind’s eye.
Stuttering psalms and pearls from my mouth.
Dropping all mortality.
Reminding me that I am divine.
How dare you illuminate and steal this heart.
You glisten there with your tide of treachery.
Luring many to the edges.
My heart was strong, yet you broke it apart.
Forcing the pieces to drift in their gravitless state.
You are a thief and a liar.
For the light you shine is not your own.
Stolen and reflected from the sun.
One that gives much warmth and life.
You are cold and capricious.
Showing different faces to all below.
Keeping your dark side at bay until it’s too late.
I wish to break free, to kill you completely.
Or at least break away from your orbit.
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.
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.
Crawled from the cobwebs of a translucent dream.
Stretched out across the fingers of the gods.
Held down and wrapped by you, suffocated in love.
You are in the air as I breathe.
The god particle that explodes within.
A bigger bang than the galaxy around us has ever witnessed.
The seismic shift of you.
Burrowing deep into these lava bones.
I see the eye dart to the corner of the room.
The words tumbled too frantically, too concocted.
Emotionally too soon.
Sometimes, is never quite enough.
I can live with never, never is stable.
Structured and tragic.
We pave our paths with bricks of never likely.
Now a sigh follows a kiss, and with this, I know.
The illusion fills out.
Like fog trapped in a jar.
Making my soul opaque.
The eyes that darted roll over then.
They should have gone blinded for all they did.
Such sinners in the sockets.
What was once, is now rejected.
Cast out like needful blood for another.
A life to suckle on the sweet blood of a dying Christ.
Me, crucified here on the beach, which beneath, lays a million stones.
The remnants of angel bones, and dinosaur teeth.
Monsters who lost It all.
But never knew until it was too late to cry out.
Hurtling through space, like a spec in god’s eye.
Jasmine, and if he closed his eyes, the sound of the ocean. The smell though was always the strongest, it was what always clung to him. The ghost that gently haunted, touching his heart. It came and went, sometimes intense, taking him to that place where he always felt safe. Always felt them there.
He looked out of the window at the planet below, the strange orb spinning silently in its indifference to him. The purple hues lifted off the surface as if into a dream, blurring and smudging with the swallowing blackness of space.
Jasmine and warm sand….
The world opens, the moon shines down like a second sun.
Highlighting the scars of the earth.
I sense you and smell the enthusiasm.
Every day is mine to win, each interaction a snapshot in time.
It’s not how we fall, but how we stand that matters.
The heart of the matter.
The rub, the centre; the deep filled gooey splatter of time.
Stretching away like a blurring desert.
I step stone towards the unknown, letting go of uncertainty.
Restriction dropping, heart opening foolishness of youth and wisdom.
I pull you out of the cave, bring you into the light.
Dazzled by your brilliance, and mesmerised by sight.
Too long have we lingered on the dark side of the moon.
Freezing in the ill commitment to abstain.
Come, take my hand and let us drink in the solar flares.
Turn the moon to gold.
Get high on the mercury rising and dance into the fire.
Singing our solar song.
These trailing stars that shatter through our existence.
Leave chaos and beauty in their wake.
Transcended diamonds embedded in our skin.
Fires burning deep within.
What golden light are we trapped beneath.
Such hazel eyes of god.
My soul is a blackness wrapped around your galaxy.
As you pass through like a luminous shooting star.
Leaving varying traces of your continuance.
Vibrating this space with only departure and grace.
Caring not for the planets that fall.
Lost to everyone but myself.
As I stream through the cosmos.
Touching the stars with my fingertips.
Pausing by the swirling galaxies which shine.
Like glistening pools of diamonds.
Would I find you here?
Carved out of something seen by no-one but God.
You speak words of another time and place.
Resting softly in my head like feathers from the future.
Teasing from above like angels dropping thunderbolts.
All around but absent.
Could I lose you there?
In that place only you and I know of.
Cut in half if you begin to forget.
Faded in the half light of a dawn you once promised.
Erasing the earth like a solar eclipse.
Yet I feel you, on this night.
In this skin that’s cratered like the lunar surface.
And I touch the place you once kissed me.
Believing once more in ghosts.
It was cold, the floor was always cold. Bare foot or with socks. The coldness seemed to spread with each step, like walking on ice. But it didn’t matter so much tonight.
He flung the duvet back and they woke with a start, their eyes suddenly ablaze.
“Is it time?” they asked, sitting up and pushing back into the deep plush pillows.
“It is, let’s go.” He spoke, calmly but with an urgency…..
TAKE YOU APART
To pull open your world, and sneak inside.
Tearing out your heart, giving you mine.
Feeling each rise and fall of your chest.
Would lay me out like gold.
Each breath conquers me.
As you lick your lips.
Suggesting that is where we build our home.
On the tip of something beautiful.
We’ve cried out our past.
Knocked down each remnant of uncertainty.
Covering our delicate present in feathers and down.
For this is where we shall collapse.
And watch true love collide.
Collecting it up in a bucket of flesh and stars.
SKELETONS IN THE SKY
I hear the angels whispering to me, quietly in my sleep.
Loudly when I wake.
Cracking my skull like an egg.
Dipping their fingers inside.
This life.
Sun shined yellowed and fresh.
Stretched out and taut like a lamb on the rack.
Hurried time, and love spent.
Empty like a tramp’s bottle.
You gave me the promises you couldn’t keep.
Tucked under my mattress for the day it rained.
Waiting for the monsoon.
It poured, and I was washed away.
Washed out to sea like sardines and ship wrecks.
So I wait now.
For that dark sky to open up and swallow me again.
Suck the light from my bones and spirit me away.
Like skeletons in the sky.
Solar pirates for the soul.
Yet gone before it happens, before the decay.
Drifting in the cosmic sleep.
One you can’t undo.
Until I wake to discover, you loved me too.
You no longer know god like you used to.
Angel, spill my blood.
Too afraid to believe your hate.
So justified.
Now fire sky.
Falling like consequence.
With nowhere left to run.
Your damage is done.
With holes in the ground.
That pull you in.
And spin, on devil fingers.
Cursing science and space.
Jasmine, and if he closed his eyes, the sound of the ocean. The smell though was always the strongest, it was what always clung to him. The ghost that gently haunted, touching his heart. It came and went, sometimes intense, taking him to that place where he always felt safe. Always felt them there.
He looked out of the window at the planet below, the strange orb spinning silently in its indifference to him. The purple hues lifted off the surface as if into a dream, blurring and smudging with the swallowing blackness of space.
Jasmine and warm sand.
He stole himself a moment to close his eyes, feeling the history shiver through him. An irritant beeping began in his ear, and his eyes opened to see the planet once more, slipping slowly from view as a stream of white slithered across the windows. He stepped back, releasing the metal banister from his grasp and turned to the yawning corridor behind him. There were a few people making their way along it, eyes glowing from the screens that ensnared them. Detached from the beauty that space could offer them.
Why should they be so dazzled by its brilliance? Space was taking something away from them. Distance and time.
He had come to terms with his own arrangement, but for the others, he guessed it was difficult still. He walked away from the huge windows, away from the calling of the beyond and made his way back to where he would spend most of his time. Alone, which is what he knew.
In his own little pod, his room of sorts on this floating chrysalis. Many of the travellers would enter one way and leave another. Changed by either their own trauma, or the perils of interstellar travel. He would not of course, he had already changed enough. If anything, he would retrograde, like Saturn returning, back into the pupa of his early days where things were so different.
Alone in his room, he turned off the lights, casting the space in the neon blue phosphorus glow. It was known to aid sleep in these conditions, but he would not be sleeping. How could he? His insomnia was welcomed back the moment he stepped aboard. Nights and days meant nothing up here anyway, so his patterns of rest blended and ebbed away. The blue now though comforted him, like an incubator heat lamp hung over an egg. The yoke of his mind turned, tumbling over the memories of a world he knew was forever lost.
“2.377.8”
The soft voice whispered into the room.
He turned over, the blue phosphorus blinking slightly like a heartbeat.
“Keter.” He replied to the nothing, and the room hung there in silence for a moment.
“Understood.” The soft voice replied, disappearing away like a ghost.
He had become used to these intrusions. They were passengers of course, guests even. Many had exchanged their savings just for their souls to be classed as passengers on this voyage through the stars. These numbers, all the time, numbers. Tracking, and recalibrating. Confirming and informing. Many that he spoke to set their times around these indications of location, celestial longitude. As if the mapping meant something to someone.
Only people meant something to someone else.
The number usually meant the distance, or the time left to arrival. For him, they meant something different. Like the length of rope thrown for safety, slowly falling away. The further he got, the closer he was. The journey beginning at the end, like the thoughts in his head. Chasing his own tail. The room scanned his body, noticing some change in the space. He’d found his was extra sensitive, monitoring his pulse and liquid extraction to the smallest degree. He’d stopped crying long ago, setting off too many checks and queries, the systems unsure of what purpose the leaking ever did.
He wasn’t travelling alone, but everyone thought he was. He sometimes forgot he wasn’t here by himself, but then he was washed in guilt. They were here in both places. In his heart, and in the cargo bay that was probably above his head now, the rotating section of the ship which spun around like a carousel. Their body was secure, he’d been assured. Packed next to boxes of memories and other people’s goods. Machines and provisions for a new life for the others. Well taken care of. He’s welcome to come by any time to check, though he is yet to do so and not likely to ever.
What was in the body really? The soul had left long ago. Even on Damara, the soul had slipped out through the atmosphere, heading back to earth. Back to their real home, where their bones would want to lie. He’d have buried them there if he could, but their family wanted them back. It was the least he could give them, having taken so much from them in their departure.
They would want to say goodbye, not through a video call or hologram burial across the stars.
Earth is where they would come to rest, put into the family tomb and forgotten about in a few years. But he would not forget, for their ghost drowned them now. Breathing into him along with the blue. Always blue, blue, blue.
He closed his eyes, hating himself. Remembering what they had said before they had left, those years ago. That death would snatch them there, on that cold side of space. Yet they would go non the less, for he seemed to want it so badly. And in truth, he did. He’d wanted to get away, try something different. Get as far away from Earth as humanly possible. To build them a new home on a new planet, a place where they would live longer, be healthier and stay together.
Home, they’d said is wherever they were.
“2.5, R HH” The soft voice spoke again, harder this time.
Halfway.
Halfway on their journey, from where they’d left, to where they were going.
He closed his eyes, and though no sleep came, fantasies and dreams washed through his head like a pageant. Illuminating visions that meant nothing and everything to him, silencing him for some time.
–
He saw a shell, a purple scallop shell before him on its side. All around a mist floated, he could see the water inside, sloshing back and forth as if the little shell were a boat out on rough waves. It began to lift slowly, coming towards him. The water began to ooze and leak away from the middle. Draining out and away into nothing. The shell continued to rise until its profile faced his eyeline. And with a deafening thunderclap, the shell cracked down the middle and he opened his eyes.
–
Making his way along the corridor, he touched the sides to feel the glass. Just beyond lay space, hidden from him by the greyed colours of the walls. But he knew it was there of course. Many didn’t, they forgot where they were, either by their screen diving or the long bouts of hibernation. It was easy he supposed, to forget you were where you were. Flight, travel. It disrupts violently the ordinariness of life, but in a surreal detached way, it can also be forgotten. Like you were in a waking dream, and things were going on without you.
He turned at the end of the corridor and climbed upwards, through a stairwell which led to the cargo bay area. He didn’t bother to ask anyone or sign in as he was told to do. Instead, he snuck through the huge doors as quiet as he could and was successfully undetected by anyone. He’d been tracked of course, eyes always on them, but nothing had come of it he’d noticed.
Moving steadily, he made his way to section 5t, the ‘living containments’ section. Ironic he’d thought, seeing as everything here was frozen, sleeping, or dead. He could see a red light blinking on the box some distance away, and he hurried forward at the sight of it. Error messages flashed across the box, symbols and numbers which meant nothing to him. He saw the number 16 flash by, and his mind was reminded by their birthday, cakes and smiles, images of kissing and the scent memory of blown out candles attacked him at once. He saw it then, a little pool of water just beneath the box.
“Fuck.” He said aloud to no one.
He scanned his wrist across the glass by the numbers, and the red light stopped flashing, but remained red. He pressed a button at the side and with an artificial exhale, little jets of air hissed the lid open. Whatever the error, or malfunction, the body inside had thawed. The crystal struts that kept the body in position glistened as the liquid inside sloshed around them. The head faced him, but the eyes were closed. He was thankful of that. He didn’t want to see their brown eyes. He would always remember them speckled with golden light, and he knew now the light would be gone.
What to do, what to do.
He stood there, not knowing for some time. The pool of water had spread a little towards his feet, but since the box had been opened, it seemed to have stopped leaking. The display on the side slowly climbing little bars up to a 100% destination. Aiming for perfection.
They looked peaceful at least, they looked like they were unaware of anything around them, even him. And of course, they were. Dead, gone, already back on earth. This body, these bones cared not for the journey they were on now. He reached out then, touching their hair which was wet and trailed slightly in the pooled water around them, floating like leaves in a pond.
The water was warm, and as his feet plunged into the box it rose above his socks and kissed his skin. He plunged down on top, his arms reaching around, through the crystal struts and finding the fleshy body and bones behind at the bottom. He hugged, and squeezed them, his eyes filling both with the water and the tears. He knew they were gone, but he had to hold them. He had to be here now with them, encased in a water filled box shooting through space.
“2.51.” The voice overhead announced, this time echoing in the vast space of the cargo bay.
He closed his eyes, jasmine filling his mind. He was no longer halfway. He wasn’t even before. He was only lost and alone. This he knew was how it would remain. So, he stayed and cried until sleep finally snatched him away, his body drained of energy from all the weeping. The voice overhead continued to call out many more marker points, little dots that now tracked his fall into nothingness.
PIECES OF TIME
Have you seen?
Have you seen this life we lead?
Fragments of space locked in time.
I stand on this beach, with each grain beneath my feet.
Ground down from rocks and God grinding his teeth.
This sea has washed a thousand shores.
These tears have dried a million times before.
Did I miss something? The big reveal?
My hands are empty as I forget how this feels.
Closing my eyes I feel it wash over me.
These pieces of time we cling to like driftwood.
Was I wrong to run? Or weak to stay?
(I don’t know so please don’t answer)
I cling faster now, each splinter a memory driving its way to my heart.
You can find me here, holding your hand.
Encircling this moment that I wish to stretch out for eternity.
Don’t pity me.
Let us disappear and fall once again into your own jealousy.
Leapfrogging to another piece of your own space and time.
Alone again.
We watch as the beach rises and the moon turns over.
Capturing us forever in this bottle on the sand.
Eventually it all dissolves into nothing.
A heart full like a crowded house.
Junk filling up each cupboard.
The brain full of Christmas decorations.
Which have long ago lost their sparkle.
It weighs down upon a soul that was born to fly.
Clipping the wings and keeping it upon the earth.
The flightless bird of an evolved life.
Beneath the feathers and failures, the bones will break.
Fossilized then crumbled, in the rough hands of god.
Blown into dust, cast out into the cosmos.
It all fades into the great big nothing.
Little spots on time, that do not register our existence.
Like flies on a windshield.
Butterflies on steering wheels.
Irritating beauty that falls apart in frailty.
We all go back to where we belong.
Unknown and empty.
Shooting up black fireworks.
Into the oily blank space of our sky.
STOLEN SKY
Watching high from miles above.
A silent watcher, like a mourning dove.
Sees the world bend and sway.
As he cranks the moon to life each day.
And so he watches as the world turns over.
In dusty pools, while supernovas.
Crash and burn his aching heart.
For a world he loves, he sees torn apart.
Which leads him down into despair.
While comets and stars alight the air.
And move on in time with disregard.
Of his moment here, or collapsing heart.
Taken from Everyday Nightmares – out now
Havoc and Consequence 