her head hit her shoulder five whole years ago now. god. was it really that long? was she really that daft? the sliding doors passed and now she stands in the middle of a crowd dancing slow and sad the men and the women move in pairs some plain some complex stops her from asking stops her from stroking the cheek of a near stranger backstage and alone like she dreamed he calls her lovely she tells her a story unnecessarily because she was there (she forgot, it happens a lot.) is this what it means to be strong? is this what it is to be wrong? that ship has sailed, consistently pale walking home alone hoping
tonight i said the most formal, the most cosmic goodbye to you staring into the crowd staring through the ceiling i love you i am deeply in love off stage i sit on the stairs i think of you i miss you but i know you're gone you were lost to me in a moment and you never looked back though i lost you twice i am losing you constantly we make less sense the vision is lost and the weight of you shifts it does not disappear, but it moves alongside me like a shadow now joining the others and i drag them along i prop them up on stage i stroke their faces facetious, audacious
feasting listening did you hear me say goodbye this time? sometimes i think but you don't look back
You visit me in random visions. Usually when I’m driving, or idly
staring at my computer at my boss’s kitchen table. Sometimes when I am in that
warm place between sleeping and waking, in the limbo that opens before my eyes do,
filling me with promise before I remember that you are gone, and it was me who
told you to go.
The visions are short, but sharp, and painful. Now that I think about
it, maybe it would be more accurate to call them hallucinations, as the sense
that they overtake is not sight so much as it is touch. I feel your lips on my
neck, your chin resting on my shoulder. I close my eyes and sink into the deep
pink of our bodies together, the rising heat behind your ear, the soft tufts of
your hair. The way my lips fit perfectly in the gentle pouch beneath your eye and
next to your nose.
My brain floods me with sense memories, stumbling around in a panic,
trying to catch remaining pieces of you before they are sucked away into the
void of forgetting.
I wish I could ask you to stop visiting me. Sometimes I would like to
forget.
is this trauma? if i had to guess, i would say well, yes i bit down between us when i realised i will always be ugly, and brave, and angry, and you will always be who were you born to be. that is - when you are standing in a room with The Men you become one of them and everything you said so sweetly to me with soft light on our bodies buzzing feeling soaked in meaning really nothing to you actually nothing to you. because all men become Men eventually you can't trust them
i keep drawing the same cards, in the past is hardship the present is uncertain the future is bright. i guess i'm in the thick of it now asking friends after you i can't contain you i can't contain myself. i want to go out, i want to go home i want to go home, i want to go out my angel sighs beside me what the hell are you doing oh i'm just singing in the car dreaming i'm famous i speak to you with that energy it's just that strong i speak to you often actually i send you all the love i can give wait for it to hit then try to sleep and still, i keep drawing the same cards, in the past is hardship the present is uncertain the future is bright.
exactly two years ago now g told me that grief is like a riding a wave and gradually the space between waves becomes wider but the peaks never become less violent. i feel like a child who's been dumped in the ocean swum too far out and i can't touch the bottom when i see you smiling on my screen or someone i love is meeting you and i just want to see you, too. i don't because i can't i make do with my thought through version of you i'm so desperate for detail, so i trace my fingers slowly from your forehead to your nose and still, hoping for you, i make myself small on one side of the bed.
do i love this ridiculousness? this insanity?
do i love the fever dream of writing wringing you out of my system screaming in the car, sobbing at the show looking up at the ceiling praying no one (and someone) will hear me?
(so i picture my death bed daily
i see you hesitate around the door
i want your palm against my forehead
i want no more time left)
'enough. please.' i whisper to the ocean. she swells i hold my breath
tonight i drove past your old place, and in another dimension i saw myself park out the front. i climbed the stairs on all fours, turned the fan on in your room, i pressed my nose against your window, watching bodies in the kitchen through the skylight. i pressed the pads of my fingers against your forehead, but your face melted underneath them you're just not you, and every day that passes you become less you, in these visions, and i become less me, too this ache is unstoppable. it rears and strikes, at the pub, at a show, and i scream all the way home
i read this week that the cheapest meat you can get
is the heart of the pig, cow or sheep
how badly we treat the heart oh god how i've spat on mine
i think my friends forget i live in the green and wet i crawl back home, on all fours i lean on the cubicle door i sit on the back of the couch looking straight at the roof willing tears to drain back into their sockets and pollute everything inside
"there's nothing wrong with loving something you can't hold in your hand."
-----------
one day we'll smile at each other over coffee
like we did the first time
like we did when our friend pointedly left the room
and eavesdropped
later i crawled into bed beside her
just glowing.
writing that now made me think of the radium girls
who painted numbers on clocks with radium
holding the brush precisely between their lips.
they ingested so much of the chemical
they became anaemic, their bodies rotted
and eventually, dripping with the poison,
they would die.
i heard that one girl
woke up in the middle of the night
and the only light in the room
was the glow from inside her body
the radium infestation in her bones
gently pulsing in the dark.
well, that all sounds spooky and romantic
but that poor woman died a hideous death
and you and i, lucky things, get to keep on living.
one day i'll attribute this writing to some wayward hormone
or the fact i was turned down for dinner by a friend
or that my jobs are making me crazy
or my songs aren't being played on the radio
or some combination of the above,
plus missing you. missing your calls
more so when no one else is calling
but even when i'm laughing
and i wish we'd shared it
well, anyway
what i meant to say
was that one day a coffee will be a pleasure
and we'll walk away feeling sweet and pink
that will be nice, i think
-----------
"...every road is lined with animals that rise from their blood and walk. well the moon won't get a wink of sleep if i stay all night and talk if i stay all night and talk."
