What is this tender mix of anger, bitterness and relief? Everyone is a stranger now and I am finally alone. Here is my silence, my desperate gravity. A child winds a torch in the darkness to make it shine, its mechanical sound the only interruption to my descent. I am afraid. I am elated. I am lost. I am free.

I’ve been quiet

And it’s not that I have nothing to say

But that I don’t know how to say it

Or if it’s worth saying at all

It doesn’t make sense to me

Unless it’s in poetry, and that speaks to about

1, 2, 3 people I know? 

I don’t want to make speech audible

Unless it cries my truth to the sky

That I’m here, I’m alive

Expressing this individuality in harmony

With the wonder of the universe

I’ve been quiet, looking for words that describe

All those things, which emotionally scream red

But society says are dead, those things

Nameless in their indescribable enormity

That I see with my heart. That I feel.

A question

Would you write a novel that you knew would break your heart? Would you read one?

Love never dies, but there are nights when it closes doors on you. Sometimes your heart spills like a hard night on an empty pavement, and no one puts their jacket over you and walks you home. You wander, bare foot and half crazed, wondering if there was ever a door that let you in at all. Perhaps it was a random dance on a public thoroughfare. Perhaps it was never there at all. But it never dies. It rises like a flood when you think of them, and there are times when that tide of emotion looks like it will break down that door which closed on you. That door’s not there any more. That place will always be on the wrong street for your heart, and its scent will have you hunting your own memory for the way back. But there will be other doors, if you keep yours open. Not like the 24/7 glaring fluorescent of a convenience store. More, a forest deep with life and mystery, that has no walls. 

We were missing a lens, both of us. Looking back, I don’t know if it was that poverty is a mindset, or that we were too in love to notice. We looked past the squalor, the scruffy clothes - we had bad haircuts. Yet driving down chapel street in his ancient black Celica with its tinted windows and its stolen spoiler, we were king and queen of our own universe. I had never been so beautiful, and he had never been so smooth. Hands black with car oil, he framed my small teenage frame with love and cleaned away the blackness of my past, the fog of my future. It was us against the world, until I learned to see. 　

She ruled him with the sharp arrowhead of her tenderness. Pure and rich as lunar stone, he built palaces in his mind of her beauty. Every night he thanked her silently for her kindness, though she only gave him light. Only lit the path home. 

Reflecting life, but not giving life

The moon, even at his broadest

Was a mere cuckold to the sun　

Darkness has fallen, and the rain is so heavy I almost feel the house is rising up into it, pressing into the wet sheet of winter. This electric lit pocket of air that I call home muffles with its warmth, the wet drops on the tin roof. I have survived something today. There is an exultance amidst the exhaustion. There could be an ocean outside this room, and I would still be sitting here sinking into this winter dream. Where words mean what I want them to, and nobody leaves or dies without my say-so. Let me stay here and rest a while, before I set my armour straight and step into the torrent once again. Let me live as stories do, on crisp parchment, where yesterday and tomorrow are the holders of today. Where nothing changes, but the readers, and the colour of the page. 

I don’t believe in angels but there she is, singing inside of me. She won’t give her name, only raising her voice to call heaven into my being. Beatified by a moment, I listen in silence to the song beneath my skin.