lazy summer dreaming

swimming in a sea I can't even place on the map my blue shorts wet and slippery your arms slithering off my back and our legs floating in the water tangled like seaweed and beer bottles laced with tangy saltwater drops glistening shining floating off my body and the hairs on my arm rise quivering out of little mountains of goosepimples, "soon there'll be time to get by, after the swimming pool" and we climb out to see the sea isn't real and how our lives are just blobs of sunlight quivering and shivering and fading out of sight but not just for me and for you but everyone beyond and in between and we can't see it won't see it and on and on and on.

you don't know this but I am plagued by sharks I see circling around me brushing past my face and thighs and not seeing me floating past I want my presence validated but their flat noses can't smell me and I'm at the bottom making like a sponge (and sponging?)

then I tell you a secret about how I dream about your smooth dark skin and the glint of your teeth as you smile down at me and it's all just an anthem really
for a seventeen year old
but I still want you
to come to me
on the back
of a turtle
these

Petitio Principii

He ushered me into his room with a perfunctory wave of his hand. I recognized the space carved out for me and curled up, crossing bare feet marked with arrows.

What are those about? They only point in the right direction when my legs are crossed under me; the curved arrow on my heel pointing upwards, inwards, to the centre of my chakra. Sounds corny to you but it works- dilated pupils like his can only follow arrows and signs. And I am left to hide behind the fine mesh of my skin and disappear, thinking of how you helped me with my homework, of the quite afternoons you and I mapped out this cartography-for-dummies of my ungainly body.

I was five when I read about the arched heels of apsaras; a foretaste of the immutable strings binding numbers and beauty. Then I was ten and a fat man in a tube-lit room told me my arch was too deep, told me it made me run slow. He pressed a point near my groin, stroked my upper thigh ‘it will unblock the blood flow to your feet, give you more energy.’ I pushed his hand away; I still run slow. And that’s how they lock apsaras into the eternal ecstasy of heaven.

the lifeless times of who you think you are.

this is one of those times you feel like you are expected to look inside and examine carefully the entrails of the dead man on the sidewalk but his splattered brains don't really tell you all that much. the structure appears to be the same but you still can only assume what you have no way to find out and I hope you feel the way because otherwise you wouldn't be normal

so lets talk about the six eternal minutes that swallowed him up as he was teetering on the fine line between here and there

but that’s all too fanciful a rich mans indulgence

and we are not rich men

so why can I not find this link when you’re alive? your suffering I understand. It reaches out to me I fill myself with stickines of gooey pathos and maternal juices, trickling down my legs and out of my ears weaving into the nihil cosmos, drenched in the incurable romance of our wristcutter-love

I remember an ungainly boy leaning into me as we swapped stories of love and death cutting out a space and linking fingers swimming in exhilarating sorrow in the middle of chest thumping music the same old hazy nightclub but you can’t possibly expect me to be intimate when I am dry

you can't possible expect this man to agree please try and remember how his brain has unfolded at my feet, think of it like an unfurling flower if that is easier to remember

I could even tell you what I saw-

the arc his lithe body carved out in the sky the swift return to the earth the muted explosion and the sound in ears they are ringing with the screech of brakes and the thud

I have shed copious tears over your body and I know you know that

alive I wouldn’t even sit in the heat of your vacated seat

-it is, after all, what my grandmother taught me.

weathering whethers of whether

We opened the door

to see water

gushing steaming rising
Our faces were sprayed
in a cold sparkly haze and the smell of the earth exploding in our nostrils shot into me,
my hair rises, rose
on end like
a 'flower unfurling inside' my cunt
insides contracted nipples hardened: and I stood under the shelter of your green roof and watched my head swimming flying borne into the brown sky

their voices echo from their ends of the world but we are tied together by this smell.

the peacocks

yesterday they were me and I was them
and someone watched me
dance and spin in my white shoes and we were wet
water trickling down our backs and we made up the words
to hide what we lacked and we kissed
in the car reaching frantically in the dark
over the gear box and in deserted houses but now I have forgotten how

before that they were killed by my dog as a wasp stung my ankle and we carried their bodies in the back of our car for three days

but today

today I am with you
and your dog.

the anger; then the other you.

I don’t want to see you any more|the balloonedass and sillynames and
this irritation this nagging pain of not seeing you of wanting to see you of your disapproval
and this and that and every driblet of you that falls and trickles into me
the desultory fucking the sucked away energy the hair the hair everywhere the hair i must hide bottles thrown in the dark my plaintive cry, a cry.

forgive my anger, you are here now and I want to talk about love and birds and fried fish, i want to talk and blow into the hollows of your skin tell me why you are not are here?

in your shadow I see all I have missed, why is it no one can move me like you
I'm free? I'm afraid? sickly obsessed , the voyeur of myself. the hours in new shoes and underwear. the white lace shorts.yes. in your shadow I see my idiocy.

and I still can't remember
the last time I was moved

you make me want to be a better person?

no. you make me want to be you.