all I know is that today I missed you when weren’t there, that I felt your absence in my bones. I felt nervous, I felt ill at ease, I felt that I needed to see you, to touch you to calm myself down. I felt that just standing near you wasn’t close enough. And when you swept by me and didn’t say anything as I sat typing on the computer, pointedly ignoring you after you’d snubbed me earlier, and you stopped for a second only to dip down to kiss my cheek before walking away, I felt like my heart had been shot with a little adrenaline-tipped arrow. And I didn’t want to leave at the end of the day, I didn’t want to let go of your hand. And when I went to bed last night, as water from the tap filled my glass, warmed by the quiet darkness of the kitchen at three am, I felt alone. I felt kind of like I wanted you to be waiting for me. I felt kind of like getting on my bicycle. But I don’t feel like I want you. I don’t want to want you. And I wonder if instead I feel like I need you. Sometimes at least. I feel like our collision is inevitable, like it’s supposed to happen. And it’s strange because I’m not used to it, feeling this quiet desperation to be close to someone...it's not lust, it's just a longing...for what? I don’t understand it, I can’t work it out. Normally by now I’d have run away, slamming the door because my dormant heart refused to awake. But not now, now the smallest brush of your lips on my cheek is enough to leave me a little dazed, a little confused, no longer annoyed, just incredibly…ah. And scared too, scared because I don’t know what to make of your words or your moods or the way you look sometimes or why you’d want me, and because I can’t understand myself, because the way I feel is in a constant state of flux, because the best thing that can come from this might also be the worst thing.

I had my books and my poetry to protect me. Had.

Fuck.

listen.

When I was little I was desperate for a house with a balcony. A decade and a divorce later, as the dark lies across the sky like carbon dust sprinkled over glass, that’s where I find myself. The car park that sleeps below like a dead zebra is lit by the occasional streetlight. The body of tarmac is still and shadowy in the cool night. Cats steal across it from time to time, and from the underground parking lot of the next building, occasional cars curl through and ooze down the road. Tiny flies and dusty winged moths flock to the promising glare of my computer screen, lured to the slow buzzing warmth and light that it emits.

Some things make me so sad I can’t help but cry. Fran always says that I cry at everything. Old men in old suits, with old glasses standing under the neon glare of a supermarket aisle, for example. Wrinkled faces contorted into expressions of confusion, of sadness, of a deep and irrevocable far away-ness. Sad strawberries in a trolly. Eyes in the past, the eyes of someone so utterly isolated within themselves, that they seem to be existing behind a layer of glass. Perhaps a bell jar. God, it kills me to think about.

And then there’s me. I’m a slot machine with symbols that don’t match, no matter how many times you try me. I’m rigged. I’m wired wrong. I’m in love one minute and sick with disgust the next.

‘He was so surprised to wake up and find Teresa squeezing his hand tightly. Lying there looking at her, he could not quite understand what had happened. But as he ran through the previous few hours in his mind, he began to sense an aura of hitherto unknown happiness emanating from them. From that time on they both looked forward to sleeping together. I might even say that the goal of their lovemaking was the sleep that followed it…While they slept, she held him as on the first night, keeping a firm grip on wrist, finger, or ankle… Tomas came to this conclusion: Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation ( a desire that extents to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to only one woman).’
-Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
I've been meaning to look this passage up for weeks after that Jenny Owen Youngs lyric reminded me 'no better way that I can see to spend all the time while you're asleep than holding your hands inside of mine'

Let’s fall asleep together soon. Let’s become tangled in cotton and dreams that glide and skim on the oceans of our minds like fish making their way in the dark hush before dawn. Let me hold your hand, let me keep you close while we lie in the silence, just two more slowed heartbeats in the town held in the palm of a great warm hush, a collective inhale. Let’s breathe the same air; breathe in each other. Molecules of you would tumble through my lungs, finer than dust, and infinitely more potent. The blood in our veins would make its dull aching journey. The pulse in my thumb would throb slowly where it met your hand; they’d grip each other as they hung off the side of the bed; two mountaineers clinging together above a precipice.
It could be this way, we could lie entwined as the pale dawn fades into the sky, filling the room with blue, submerged in the depths of the inescapable new day. As the wires that hold everything in place make the earth groan towards the sun, we could be there, together, quietly sharing this bemusing existence. The first rays that peer over the horizon like tentative deer would illuminate my hair, weaving it through with golden silk. The hum of the summer night would sharpen into the early morning music of birds as they flex their fragile wings, and surf on the breeze of the rising morning. Dew drops would glisten on the soft purple spikes of grass, tears soon to be forgotten by the kiss of the sun. And slowly, as the sun brings colour back into a world hidden in shadow for what seemed like eternity, we could drift, off the edges of the earth of our minds, and fade into reality again.

wow so i have so much to post

i don't like putting it on my tumblr but forgot about this outlet. so this is a poem i wrote on the meeting of sylvia plath and ted hughes. if you don't know about that, google it. it's in the works, still.

two distant stars, though once

separated by infinity, now hurled

with all the power of this earth

against the other. matter and it’s mate

with bared teeth and hungry eyes

and fierce minds and empty hands

created a crescent moon, blood red

that kissed his skin and wept,

sunk deep into his heart and scarred it too,

her milk pulsed into his veins

as she gifted him with love’s wound,

to match her own scars.

galaxies stretched between

but a fading half moon marked him

as hers, his pen drew from his heart

three words: ‘i am here’

(she believed he’d always be)

magnetism bound their paths,

gravity held and fate spun until

their orbits passed once more

and with violent fire eclipsed,

burned so bright it blinded

two scarred stars with light enough

to reflect the other.

Haven't updated in forever so let me just brainstorm something

I remembered that night, conjured it back into my consciousness from where it was buried, beneath the heavy weight of passed days. I remembered the road that stretched before us into the twisting darkness of the countryside, and I remembered that you were crying. I had been crying, also: he'd bit my pretty red heart in two. The night above us was so densely black, barely pockmarked with stars, and the country still and slow, sleeping around us. No cars passed as we walked, a few empty teenagers with blood that tasted of alcohol and the smell of stale smoke in our hair. Between us, chasms divided the earth and threatened to swallow us whole, our feet brushed the edges as we walked. On the brink of life, tired eyed and bursting with pain. He was silent mostly, but he told you to think of the best day of your life to stop you from crying. He hadn't cared about me, and I told the dead night that I hadn't had a 'best day'. No one heard. Only the darkness that stretched around me, submerging me in its depths listened, it swallowed my words and they passed, like tiny bubbles into the unknown.

Minutes, hours, years later, we reached his house and curled ourselves on the floor like children, half grown, suspended between the innocence of youth and the void of adulthood. I was fiercely alone, and beside me, the abyss grew, it's darkness spread, and, as I slept, it began to engulf me, it sucked me into the Real World, gasping for air and searching for light.

this is about what was probably the worst night of my life. or rather, the aftermath of it. ha ha ha

last night.

we laid in the grass in a field outside of town and we didnt mind that it was getting colder or that the grass was a little damp against our backs, because we realised there was so much more to care about than that. we stared up at the sky which stretched across us in a giant dome of black and navy and purple and swirls of grey cloud, scattered with a hundred thousand specs of glowing dust. the moon was huge and so close it looked like we could climb the trees and reach out to it, it lit up the field so we could see eachother perfectly, casting long shadows across the grass. all our bodies were lined up close and warm and we talked and realised how infinite space was, and how we were looking into the past. and we waited and waited in excited expectation for the meteor shower theyd promised us, and we gasped and clapped and screamed when the stars started shooting across the sky. we saw the satellites in orbit, making their slow way across the world, and the planes flying fast up high, flashing red and blue. we pointed out the constellations in patterns above us. and when it was over, we stood up and hugged eachother as we stood in the moonlight, because there was no where on earth we’d rather have been.

Good Morning.

first posted on tumblr a few weeks ago.

Feel the edges of your consciousness slowly ebb into focus. Your breathing picks up as you drift into the waking world; you feel the sun burning red into your closed lids. Your head is full of flickers of words and colours and faces of the dream that you are leaving behind. Your thoughts align themselves and you realise you are awake. You also realise that you are thinking of him. You fire a round of curses at your subconscious for letting him be the first thing you think of when you wake up. Because you know, you KNOW that you are probably the furthest thing from his mind right now. Roll over in the soft white sheets. One is tangled around your ankle. Looks like you had a restless night. Sit up. Slowly. Tucking the hair that hangs across your flushed cheek behind your ear. Your bare legs are covered in imprints, red creases across your skin from the bed sheets. The light that is shining onto you through the smeared window panes is coming from an odd place in the sky. Ah. A glance at the clock tells you it is 5am. You get up anyway. Your hot bare feet leave marks on the floor and then evaporate. The view from your window is lovely, the world is hardly stirring. You open it and lean out, breathing in the breeze which stirs over the light warmth of the day ahead. You can’t help your eyes glance across the street and wash over his apartment building, resting on his window. A shot of adrenaline surges into your heart and creeps through your veins. He is there, like you, leaning out of his window, surveying the early morning city. Your eyes meet. Your heart yearns to reach out across the meters that interrupt you and touch him. You’re wishing for the impossible. He turns away from the window, and a tear rolls down your cheek.

Feel the edges of your consciousness slowly ebb into focus. You groan. Still half wrapped in dreams. You roll over, disorientated, and land on the floor. Awake now for certain. Great, you think. The first time in weeks you manage to get anywhere near a decent night’s sleep and you end up on the floor. You sit up, and without really meaning to, think two thoughts. You wonder what the time is, and if she is awake yet. You groan again, mad at yourself for letting her be the first thing you think of when you wake up. It’s never going to happen. She is too beautiful, too fascinating. You stand up, rubbing the crystals of sleep from your red eyes, as you stare into the rays of light shining through your dirty window. A glance at the clock tells you its 5am. Though the warm, empty bed is tempting, you make your way to the window, curiosity over ruling laziness. You walk to the window, shoving aside piles of dirty clothes with your foot as you go. You open it and lean out into the morning air. The city is stirring with movement, understated and quiet. A few people walk the street below. Taxis take the early morning news reporters to work. A man unlocks his newspaper kiosk. The sun is warm, but the breeze is cool on your skin. If you were home, there would be dew on the grass, you think with a sigh, gazing at the world below you for a few minutes. You’re kidding yourself though, if you thought the reason for coming to the window was to look at the street. Your unwilling eyes wander up the building opposite, and rest on her window. A shot of adrenaline surges into your heart and creeps through your veins. She is standing there, so beautiful it almost hurts, hair ruffled with sleep, face bare. Your eyes meet. You long to climb onto the sill of the window and jump across the meters that separate you, to hold her in your arms. You’re wishing for the impossible. She’s probably wondering why you’re staring at her, thinking you’re some kind of freak, you realise. Your heart tears as you turn away from the window.