The tiny hip coffee shop where they know your name
Sit by waist-height shell-pink windows for the open half of the day
Until at once, you’re outside and you’ve never been in
And you’re living vicariously through pretty women
Flick your eyes, pocket hands, feel the wind blow through you
Unwelcome airs glare to pass bricks under shoes
The word isn’t envy, more mixed and unclear
Knowing this ain’t you and wondering why you’re here
Pressed against unknown humans kneaded into their dough
Inadequate in context stretched vast and shallow
Recognise no features, all mushed into one face
It’s grandiose gaze bore on me is both of our waste
Taught To Shuffle
Camp bed on the bruised skin of the floor
A wound cleaned out for the first time
The undercurrent drafts
Of an invisible mattress
Muscles worn like an ill-fit
Suit from the time-capsule back of the closet
Ready to spill like the dog-eared deck of cards
Taught yourself to shuffle with
Every single one bent in its own way
Mourning This Too
I remember mourning this too. Somewhere I was, that was me. It gets left back there, someplace behind you. The scratched surface of your discarded homes. It’s harder to always see into the clutching winds that carried them away. I’m here on the acre. I dipped my intimidated toe in here at 18, left behind my innocence for it at 19. At 22 I left it behind too. So here I return to find… something. Because now, a few steps beyond this, I mourn something fresh. A wound that tears back even further than any of this. A cut much deeper.
The last Sunday of the summer is this afternoon. I’ve spent the whole of this bright season stressed out of my mind. Pumped full of either urgent adrenaline for things moving too fast, or slow swirling omnipresent conflict and despair. April we decided, May we tried to forget, June we braced, July we broke. August we let go, between flying anxious distractions and demands. And now it’s nearly done. The last month has exhausted me more than any other, maybe because of the accumulation, or maybe because of its own brutal carouselling pains. Whichever it was, it constricted my soul like a snake. I felt crushed, unable to move, to tidy, bandage, heal, cleanse, finish off the basics of bearable life after freshly moving into a house of loose ends. No time to rewind, no time to reflect after the mind warping complexity of emotional broken bones, identity trauma, a haemorrhaging way of life. No time to be alone in space with myself. The only thing I dove into this broken glass pit to retrieve.
At the most hurt point in my life, something came up to carry on my shoulders that I couldn’t refuse. Because it embodied the kind of life I felt I should be living, even if I wasn’t ready to yet. And I wasn’t. And I guess all of that pain I had to shelve… Well it’s been waiting there for me on the other side of all this. It happened so fast and so saturated to the margins that I can’t face them without going back, if only just to figure out where I am. So that’s why I left the awful, busy loneliness of my new apartment, to catch up on mourning the life I just moved from, and to itemise the overwhelming receipts of my emotional debts to myself ever since.
Corn Flour
Waiting in line at the bank.
Money money money.
I’d rather take burritos instead.
It would be nice if my grandfather wrote me a check for burritos on my birthday.
He writes the check because he feels like he should get me something.
But he hasn’t even the slightest clue what I’d want.
I’d like burritos.
I’m not achingly far from the burrito stand, but it’s really not the same.
The check isn’t rolled with salsa or guacamole, but my least favourite sauce.
The vicious, goopy burden of choice.
I don’t want numbers I can fluctuate responsibly.
Make it out of corn flour instead.
I’m not the first or the last to suggest that money is physically worthless.
The only currency my body accepts is calories.
Now those are useful.
I’ve decided I’ll ask my landlord, I bet he’d go for it.
I’ll arrange to have eighteen quesadillas deposited to him on the twenty third of each month.
I’ll stuff my electricity metre with tortilla chips dunked in sour cream.
Maybe I can start getting salaried in rolled tacos? I sure work hard enough.
I’ll ask at my job to see if I can start topping up my pension fund with spicy corn.
I’m thinking I’ll be hungry once I’m old.
Taser Sings The Hits
Music in another dimension.
To follow not to be.
This choir sings like shit.
Every voice is me.
The big room echoes upstairs.
I tase myself over and over.
The muffler comes off.
And the rumble comes in.
Make it damper.
Round it off.
The melody pokes you in the eyes.
And to us the eyes matter.
Look at it.
Not in your mind.
Not some approximation.
Let its weight hold you down.
You aren’t alone in here.
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?
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.
Quit Vision 