enterprising transient.

Remember anything,
any context for hollows and freckles
any cover of night, any night. 

It’s a mid-marathon terror dream, sweat and 
salt to prove a point, years of unchallenged thoughts and
an inward-facing altruism, a wave you pass under
alone before washing up awake,
wild.

Remember nothing of the waste,
the pinch of winter flavouring your skin,
the roll of eyes above your shallow grave of nape, of 
neck, where he buries himself,
an earnest monument in 
a silent room.

Any night, any night, any night,
remember any night.

midnight train

Afterwards, the long walk,
rounding the corner home, it was just
me and a small black cat blinking passively,

and it was not enough, and too much,
that autumn ghost in the breeze, itself a wild-willed girl
and I wanted to be driving south, through the
arcing brambles of headlit-caught country turns,
screaming and remembering,
to the ocean, to the ocean, ink rolling over itself, 
a midnight train of bodies, our eyes wet with dawn.

I would throw you to the night, feet first, 
and the night would sleep tamed in your lap as
we lost our way home.

extension

I cannot help but think of you
as extension, as trailing metaphor,

a translation I’ve never mastered but
that plays out, pleasingly,
a fat little word of no consequence.

You make me slightly less still, me,
the stillest of still lifes, a tundra in parallax, the ancient pyramids,
all bones buried silent, ever,
you make me less myself, less these things, more myself,
or something else.
I fold myself at night into the shapes of
easy lovers, I cannot say a thing that bears
fruit aloud, but some somnambulist alchemy
brings my forehead smoother, in memory or
regret, lost at sea or drowned;
there has never been a difference. A heart beats
biologically first.

It occurs softly
there have been a thousand others
though there has never been another.

streetlight coming in branch-shaped gaps, bodies hanging in a bed, two
white, bright pears
two accidents, fighting to be the least wrong.

/////////////

This is a smaller part of a larger poem, these lines about my friend and their ex. It’s maybe the thing I’m happiest with that I’ve ever written, though some of the saddest subject matter.

she got a gun

she got a gun, hairless and in control
holy snows
she speaks his name in place of please, amen, 
no.

she got a gun-shaped tongue, praise jesus for
this one, he got the bullets, 
the bayonet bones 
of bird and branch and boy

at night the trees are silhouettes against the 
silver city, 
the diamond-leather stretch
of a skyline after death

but eyes ahead, eyes ahead.

if a tongue had a spine she got 
the straightest one around, 
she got that righteousness from
praying, 
one single word each night,
hail mary
oh god, count the candles out like coins

she got a gun, she got a gun
a burnt cathedral,
broken tongue.

run

a. 
a catalogue of breaths and watch ticks and straightened rooms
and the fabric of a dress you’ll never wear again
and the lowering of Gabriel when a prophet is in danger,
a billowing black skirt under which we keep kings and plagues,
and the curling of an rrrr under cover of tin-roof rain
and the steady flow of arms wheeling 
forever on the edge
a chameleon overcoat, you’re the colour of the horizon
and if you fell we couldn’t see,
and if we tried you would burn out our eyes

two husks of prophecy
twin caves, almighty black  holes.

 
b.
a glass cathedral, a sweating sea
and the humidity of the harbour that day you didn’t go home straight away
and the exact hue of a storm
and the dead, and the dead
and the dead holding hands
and the smell of a closed house at 3pm, face down, Bob Dylan
singing, 15 and unreal, two years before the fire
and the field where you were born again,
and the field where you buried your love, sang come home to me and
wept, salty, the ocean draining from you
and all of outer space in that single pale chest.

c.
you could never see it coming
except when you could,
and you should run,
and you should have run.  

The thing about a soul mate
who isn’t your lover
is that the larger part of arguing
is over lovers
that fail them.

How ugly you look
when you cry over
someone else’s
unattended heart

but how honest the
loss when
they don’t see
the danger in settling.

I woke last night and thought the scythe moon was a plane stopped in the sky,
blinking through the trees like a lighthouse
a warning of the dangers of
all that space and nowhere to go.

a warm gun.

The ghosts cradle each other, oblivious, too struck
with the night, the distant sun,
a land of invention and the sticky silence of radios turned down,
no signal, a gentle static unbroken, and the agelessness of being ugly,
the safety of it, keeps them warm, warmer together
in the unholiness of spectral love
forever and ever amen
forever and ever amen.

He doesn’t know he’s dead,
he’s still soft to the touch and ready to be undone by love,
a thoroughness to his kindness,
the last words he spoke a warm gun. You can’t see him
anymore, even if you believe, even with a prayer
plumping your lips, even with your tongue a Eucharist, even with
a pure heart beating to death beneath your breast.

Imagine mood rings and native birds, the thin sunlight
of a winter morning by the ocean,
vague shit meant to represent
a wholeness I can’t offer.

Think of the way sound funnels
as you fall asleep, and
the last word you dream
before you wake,

think of the mess I make,

and the bitchy words that pass between us,
amongst buildings hollowed like
rotten teeth, grown from
scrubbed streets,
our hands never touching,

think of the obvious ways to relate:

I’m bad at those. Then think of all the ways to be alone,

the misspent nights
on blacked out roads that
wind through houses casually shuttered like
sun-turned eyes, those roads keep taking us home, though,
conveyer belts, a choicelessness I
guess we’re choosing.

Think of harmless fun with ghosts,
a mansion curled around
the things I love,
your name unspoken
after many years inside, to keep it pure.

Think of the last sound you hear before you wake,

imagine the mess I’d make.

Think of the thing you’re not saying.

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a cartographer
in love with a map
of a country
that never existed
an intricate scroll of names
no human mouth could ever pronounce.

From a husband to a stranger 

Please, your hands are not the shape that fits around
my wrist like
a baby curled against a shoulder 
like midnight fits a clock face

and the awful weight of your face turned 
in to mine
is the comma in a longer phrase where
you speak my name in wonder to the otherwise empty house,
through the silence we were left in
and the whiskey night that sank us both. 

My nan has been gone for three years today, and I just found this portion of a longer poem I’d written closer to the time. It’s not anything, really, I just wanted it on here too.

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