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
Banquet Hall
Today I woke up somewhere new. It was the first time in a decade… And then my brain whispered me a correction. No buddy, you’ve been so wrapped up in yourself (and not that side of yourself, the other, laser-focused side) that you’re getting me seasick. If it’s been a decade on the futon, then look closely at the lack of nibbling button-dents in your cocooned caterpillar of a spine? And also, why do you get a sick feeling of timeline’s splitting in your peripheral perception like pulled apart grilled-cheese? Because, newsflash butterbean, it’s been two weeks. That feeling in your stomach isn’t slapping with you, it’s lurching against your impulse on its own organic memory. It was only two sprinkled pinches of sleepy eye crust since you slept back and forth so fast each night between pre and post horizon housing that you felt like you were running a bleep test along to your morning alarms. Bed, bed, futon, bed, futon, futon, parent’s spare room, friends couch, futon, bed, bed, futon, we’re moving out so the bed isn’t here any more so I guess floor, futon, futon, futon, floor, futon, floor, floor, friend’s floor, futon, etc. How did you so completely wash that feeling out of your saturated brain? And now you’ve remembered this, buddy, there’s a whole trashed banquet hall that you said you’d clean, only to vanish after just sweeping the floor. The red wine has only soaked deeper into the carpets, and you’ve only noticed it now after you started, but those champagne flutes you caved in as furious projectiles against the wall have turned into a fine sharp mist of broken glass frosting over everything. Pleased to have you back.
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.
Four Pillows
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.
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
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 