They’re the same covers, pretzeled up on my futon in a shard of translucent morning. The same ones I folded into the hatchback’s hatch, like I fold the bed into a sofa, or my spine into the driver’s side. The same bedsheets I haven’t found the strength to change since we left for good, stacked with four neat pillows like a cubist snowman, riding in the back for a low-eyelid, 7:30 ride under the traffic’s tide to our old place. Four pillows is too many for me. It’s kind of a joke for one person, a softened parody of the bottomless consuming choices that wait for you in the morning. Or, just a block reminder that the way you learnt to sleep alone as a child has long expired. Sir, are you aware that your current sleeping licence does not allow you to operate a bed this large? Sometimes resting my head on even just two gives me vertigo, like the wind flicking my shirt on a high exposed balcony. Sometimes I feel I don’t deserve any. We still wanted to sleep there, even when it was completely empty. Nothing but spray bottles and echoes, catching our soupy sentences in the corners like spiderwebs. The bed had left, one of the last pieces of furniture. We felt we needed it still, but then one day it needed more so to leave. And so instead of a sensible retreat to our own new solitary rentals, it became a relaxing sleep on the carpet that concluded our weekly discussions. Sharp elbowed practicalities, severely wounded feelings and joking portraits of normality that seemed to wander in from nowhere when the front door was left open. You couldn’t tell if they were truly organic or just remnant chemistry shaking out. Bubbles topping this pool we’re wading in, or just circles still etched on the bottom.
Flowing Indigo Grass
It felt more like home than it ever had last night. My shoebox apartment, tiny and neat spatial divisions like the architecture of a micro-machine toy. But then the artists are invited and the plastic is poured in with gruesome spilling details. Just like my place.
My old home was inaccessible, I had handed in the keys. Keys that jangled against my new set and reminded me for weeks before of the old cellar door left open to swing on its hinges in the wind. Creaking scenes and demands from old times I can feel as they reach my ears, like the photons of millennia-dead suns only just reaching your night sky to rain romantic starlight seasoning across a colossal mouthed valley above the moors, impaled on the cold draft from space that gently combs and caresses the endless texture of flowing indigo grass at the borders of this cratered moonrock lot in every direction, encasing entire colliding galaxies that float in the reflections of liquid silver puddles of molten mirror, like wormholes bore out of the heavy purple dust, slipping right through to horizons of space past the underside of this dark planet. Feet on its ground and you feel some way. Take it all in, they’ll say, as if that’s a fair request. As if that’s possible at all. As if that’s a choice you’re making to discard more than you’ll ever have room to take with you.
Boxes And Boxes And Boxes
Boxes and boxes and boxes.
Every June forever.
The longest day blown apart.
No reflection in a bustling river.
Blotted sky takes its longest to die.
From a seat on the long green bank.
Or a teleporting train threading nowheres.
You have to become so utterly still to make room for the colossal motion.
The quiet pause at the very arc of a year-long swing.
The moment momentum runs out.
And it realises the implications of everything it tore through.
Now that the velocity is abandoned.
The clarity unblurs in every halted direction.
You stop being it.
And suddenly there is room for it.
Good god.
What have I done?
Empty House Era
An empty house is very calming, but in a way that you can look into and appreciate, but not participate in, because its lack of life to participate in is precisely the source of its still serenity. And it only gets cleaner, and gleams more perfect the harder you work to get it back as you found it. Able to touch, but not breath in the rare atmosphere your very inability is filling the empty, sun painted rooms with, bigger and more abundant now than ever they were when you could truly be in them. Your life here has become silent, and the quiet space exhales. It could never be like this for you. It only reveals its beauty as you look back. You didn’t clean it like this, you didn’t clear it like this. Would you have ever seen it like this if you had? Would you have needed to leave, and set it free?
Then hits the moment you realise there’s nothing else left to do.
I am finally here in the emptiness. Nothing left to scrub. Nothing left to pack. And it’s time to go as the sun leaves first. I’m trying to absorb it, the feeling of being here in an important double-year moment of a fleeting life. But this moment isn’t that. I can’t see my life here anymore. The place is the same, but dismantling this setting has taken so much time and pure essence that it feels as though the phase it represents hasn’t even lasted until this bittersweet end. Dismantling it has become its own phase. I haven’t been, for a while, in the place I’m only just leaving. And so how do you leave? How long is it ok to stare into it longing for a reflection? Door ajar, peering in after pacing through over and over. I am dry immersed, I’m here where the memories live but they can’t absorb me into them anymore. I am a ghost of myself that lived here, stalking the hallways long after my life here ended. And yet here I still am and here I still live. And that’s torn me apart, and it’s been fine. But this is the last night I will be here as myself, in a place that I happened. How can I say goodbye over this distance? All that looks back is finality, and I realise I don’t know what I’m looking for here. Old sights and sounds, but the lighting has all changed. This isn’t my place, but I’m still here looking for visions in empty rooms. I wanted to leave but by now it hurts to go. I am alone here for the last time. It is cleaned and sanitised of my existence. It has let me go, but as I cross the precipice and look back inside, unable to close the door or break my gaze from drinking it’s final sight of somewhere so familiar and dear, in ways I didn’t know it was until my last moments with it, it still wants something. I can’t look away. It has let me go, but there is something stopping it from releasing me. It has let me go, but I am still holding onto a part of it. A part that I give back to it the second I break my gaze and shut the door on the last sights of the backdrop to an era. Saying goodbye to a silent old friend. It needs that part of it I’m keeping, the part I’m trying to drink in as much of as I can right now, and for entire weeks before, the part that I surrender as soon as I go. And it hurts to give it that. But after all it’s done for me, I owe it to this old place.
Carpooling
We broke up and didn’t know how to tell our friends
And so we show up to their weddings and their birthdays, and we sort of half pretend
That nothing’s fractured, limping through fragile events
Not standing close, not laughing at each other’s jokes
Not being careful they won’t notice
Yet to notice
And the good times roll
Inverse to our wounded pull
Yet to notice
And the car ride home
Is excruciatingly painful
Yet to notice
And I don’t begrudge anyone for
Being caught up in their own lives
Progressing through happiness’ grinder
That chewed me into pieces when I tried
And when we finally found the guts to tell them they weren’t surprised
Said they’d felt something was broken underneath the whole time
We were just…
Yet to notice
The Last Couple Frames
I can’t interrogate finality
Without tripping past it’s edge
The last few arduous rituals
Feel as flickering and spent
In a sentimental flush
I’ll miss anything I had
As I sever weighted tethers
To the beloved past
It’s theatre as you breath
It’s harmonies as you feel
But memory is tragically just fractured animation
While this would be the climax of a play
Or a ringing note on stage
Later, it’s just the last couple of frames
Tiny recoils of the motion
Can’t sum anything up
The crumbling edges of a wider swing
Just don’t define us
If there’s meaning in anything
The last time will suck
But that it does means that it doesn’t matter
You’ve built enough
That the last stone won’t add much
Pleading With Bouncing Dots
You don’t owe me a word
So thanks for them anyway
The hand-me-down sentiments
Donations of borrowed sorrow to say
I’m sorry
That’s all the sorry that I can spare
Enough to split me at the seams
And lay my grateful guts bare
Because the silences
Know it was me who invited them in
To wordlessly bare down
On me barricaded inside my skin
Pleading with bouncing dots
Non-sound of your keys typing
Hopping like karaoke cues
Across nothing to sing
Up on a cocktail stage
Caught in an awkward wait
Through empty side of the slumped duet
That I put us down for before work called and you left
But I don’t know anyone here
And that sometimes sucks
But it always means that I’m free and I’m clear
I can get real sad and not give a fuck
And wail my parts on the trash inside
And just feel hurt best I can
Disintegrating
Pouring possessions into cardboard shells.
A second car on the driveway.
Practical conversation disintegrating into tears.
The hollow art of omitting more than you can say.
I Have A Lot Of Staring To Do Today
I have little to say today.
My thoughts sink off from their posts to dream of napping on the firm brick of sofa upstairs.
Sailing on a large airy carpet, stretched under big windows and high beams.
The traffic noise laps at our commercial shore in waves of loud ugly whispers.
High tide in a noxious machinery sea.
Wrestle my slippery self all day in cancelled out strength.
The boring tasks aren’t as demanding as hopping the mental fences around them.
I’m a corporate slug.
A loaf of slow mucusy administrative muscle.
Today’s paperwork is delivered inside individual halos of table salt.
Inaccessible, but visible for a quick dull taunt.
Can’t tell if it bothers me.
Of course, enough to try and tell.
But clearly not enough to actually tell.
So whatever, another unseasoned leaf please…
...And maybe some more functionless coffee too,
I have a lot of staring to do today.
Fortune Cookie
I eat fortune cookies whole
Swallow the wisdom
Upset the diners left demanding answers
I just won’t give 'em
I wish I was dumber
I wanna know less
I’d drop out and fuck off
If I could do it all again
Is it just me or are houses godawful?
I’ll live under rocks
And I won’t paint the walls or hang up no tasteful prints
I’m an un-fixer-up
I wish I was dumber
I wanna know less
I’d drop out and fuck off
If I could do it all again
And I know where the big hardware store is in town
But I'll never go back there
Unless it’s to cave my fucking skull after five or so beers
Tryna boardslide the handrail
And I say this from the bottom of my stomach
I’ve eaten more destiny's than I'd care to admit
Quit Vision 