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
A Picture Made Of The Absence
Shot through with a hole
Shot up with hot oatmeal
Paste over gaps in me
Unseen injuries
Echoing cavities
I’ve loved each nameless stranger
In some missing life
In some foreign time
And goddamn I miss them
Acutely re-align
In their wake
As if we shared the same path
And as theirs branches make goodbyes
Through followed eyes like dripping glass
Enamoured with a sketch
Enamoured with a void
A negative space portrait
Of this imploded and destroyed
In love with a shadow
In love with a picture made of the absence
The unrequited ache of the devoid
Calm Coded Messages
Stood up too fast again
An aeroplane jutting out of fuel
His figure bows like corrugated card
Against the grain, trying to fold in half
Blood pressure dropped the dial
Tuned half out from the brainwave station
To crackle and emulsify with phantoms in the static
Calm coded messages speak under panic
All he could think
As his volumes haemorrhaged ink
Was how it felt so good
To buckle over where he stood
He realised he’d been in so much pain
Anaesthesia pumped quietly by his now scrambling brain
Neutralising in him
Finally fine to feel weak as the room spins
Catharsis in submissive pose
There isn’t anymore strength that he owes
Terrifying Dreams Of Dysfunctional Routines
Sticky dreams Of blown out bristles Fanning obtuse Becoming useless Worrying of rot Rotting of worry Tombstone teeth Sinking in pink swamp Still asleep Buried beneath Brushing hard Or hardly brushing Chewing up the stick From the rush, the constant sip Spit out something brown Sick up but hold it down Terrifying dreams Of dysfunctional routines Took the father Brushed him clean Used him up And not seen again In fresh sun rise Spittle wind Takes the mint leaves with it To cut copies of them Serve the breath Serve the mass Serve a purpose And then serve the trash A hopeful protogeau In the noble art of withering away
Quit Vision 