CHCH FOUR

Every ad I see for The National’s new album twists my arm to level me with May 2010. Forcing the face of an animal into what it did wrong, what it continues to do wrong. I said YOU and you were someone that was with ME and I dragged my fingers through your hair the same way you dragged out your vowel sounds. I would like to live through the bus rides home from the airport everyday listening to Afraid Of Everyone, I would like to live through those nights making late-night coffees for late-night flights and late-night faces with better places to go than I ever did. Again. I would like to live through these sad place-cards for my life again. 

(I still don’t have the drugs to sort it out)

The autumn here is bold and bitter, my breath has a body to it. I spill a mess of synonyms for my chilled features. And I got sick, I stayed up late eating jalapenos to aid my sinuses but it just left my mouth feeling as fevered as the rest of me. There is a lot of me to feel fevered. I push my face against the glass of my borrowed-bedroom window and marvel at the stain my cheek leaves. I was littler once, I left a smaller mark once. 

I vividly remember climbing beneath hopeless duvets with you, clambering at your little body, finding warm places to rest wind-bitten fingertips on. It doesn’t matter so much that you didn’t write it down, like me, that you don’t remember anything. Autumn in Wellington feels so full of prospects, every year, for me, because of you. The smell of the city reminds me of Central Park, your bent knees, my crooked heart. 

(Your voice is swallowing my soul)

Small Things I Said With You In Mind (They Make No Sense At All) Pt 3

I watched a documentary about celibate boys and girls and their parents said this thing like: Every lover you have keeps a part of you and when you meet the person that will be your mate you will not have a whole of you left to give them. And I thought of all the pieces that you must have of me and how when I come to see you, if you will give them back or if you will taunt me with them, flare them out like playing cards only to quickly tuck them under each arm. 
That would be fair, all of these pieces, they will probably look like you anyway.

I didn’t even notice they were gone.

My mother told me that I lit up in your presence and she said
You’re In Love Aren’t You?
And she was happy that I wasn’t dating that girl anymore, and I never even told her that I went to leave a bar once, angry, on New Years, you grabbed my wrists at the door while the girl you were hitting on left and you said
You Are My Best Friend.
And I said Yes.

We used to sleep on bare mattresses when we had forgotten to put our sheets outside and every one of yours had small uneven holes where you had let lit cigarettes fall unnoticed and I loved them, these imperfect circles, they were us and we were great, jumping up with pale bent knees, scanning beneath our feet for where the smoke was coming from.

When you left I cried without really acknowledging it and you kept coming back to hug me because you wanted to make it better but you were only making it worse and never have I ever wished more for a clear and windless day, so that your plane didn’t crash and I wouldn’t have to hear about it at work where everyone would look at me and wouldn’t know what to do.
Because I loved you, then.

These Parts Are Lost

I stole blackcurrant jam from your fridge and ate spoonfuls of it over the sink trying not to scream as it ran down my wrists because I hated you and I had armfuls of this hate for you that I couldn’t put down, not anywhere, and I so desperately wanted to sit on my bedroom floor and smoke lonely cigarettes but you had cared for me and urged me to quit and so I had. And I wasn’t that person anymore, I wasn’t that seventeen-year-old with winged eye-makeup and a mirror tacked to my front-door, checking myself with every new intruder. 

And it was pointless, I never did like what I saw.

Tonight, at my Father’s house, my Step-Mother left a book for me, their little-literary, The Skinny Louie Book. And it’s one of those that always comes back to you, somehow, though you never take the time to recognise it, you always put it down. In truth I have a copy in my bookshelf, and here it is again. The neighbours have their dinner so late, I thought they should have this book, they can drag it around with them. For no reason at all.

I felt the need to say something, to document how I am feeling about something and somebody else but I only had two lines and they are not enough so I typed all of this out so maybe you won’t read it to here, where I will say:

You are my nothing.
You are the no-one I come home to.

Oh, Playboy Youth

You: All of my unreturned library books. I will forever pay for forgetting.

It frightens me, the knowledge I will be reminiscent for this past year of unemployment. Like, the freedom to sit and eat an apple in the park, the worst element of any day, only the weather. Walking home from the gym at ten-thirty pm to stand, flushed and glassy, at the fridge to eat a fig, decadence; sinless. It doesn’t matter if sleep grips me at twelve or three am because eight hours will come no matter what paltry plans I have made.  I will justify it, maybe, two or three years on- But you were bereaved ____! You didn’t want to party! You just wanted to eat fruit on a bench or smoke a cigarette while the rest of the world, quite literally, walked past. All of their farm-animal footwear, humans in hooves.  
It does seem, at those times, the rest of the world has indeed passed you by in the space of half an hour and six almonds. Like, everybody else got up and on with their lives and I dropped something on the way out, on my hands and knees, searching the cracks and the corners.  
So, I’ll be reminiscent, but also still covered from the filth of the floor, still missing what I’ve lost. And with no time to sit outside for a while, let the wind brush the dust off.
Mum and Dad, oh so pleased, with me; tracing my fingers over my features as the ‘real world’ twists them, maybe gently, or not so. Unrecognisable, and wrinkled. 
I should have done more with this year, I know.

I don’t know if you have picked this up, I put forward a lot of shit for you to pick through most days, but my family is vastly important to me. Sometimes I think about them dying, so I’ll appreciate them more (maybe). I don’t cry or anything. 
It’s a shame we’re somewhat conditioned to be so comfortable around the people we love as to treat them like shit.

You know what a collection of apes is called? A shrewdness. A shrewdness of apes. Also, a busyness of ferrets. A murder of crows. A clowder of cats. A sloth of bears. 
A collection of humans has no name. 
Most of us hunt in packs though. 

Victual Absence

And it’s possible you have one billion fleeting memories like winged insects that scatter throughout the divides in your mind, clogging every sanity you have collected inside with that thrum of wings. Her fingers, her smell or the curve of her back. The thought that not a single one of those fluttering things was in any way associated with me used to curl my limbs as if maybe if I got small enough, I could reside somewhere underneath the blooming sky of glittered bodies. If I could make myself seem needless and unimposing, maybe you would gather me for your collection. 
But at some point I garnered evidence towards the possibility of my own brilliant confectionary-coloured mindset. All my memories are fair game. And possibly all of yours just cause you pain.

After watching the glow-worms somebody kissed me on the path I had just taken a piss on and I remember thinking: You Can’t Really Build On That. 
I am looking forward to Saturday only feebly. Like if I could wave away the weekend, I probably would. Twenty-one, huh. Sounds even younger than twenty, sort-of. If I wasn’t so tired all the time these small milestones would perhaps appear huge and terrific. In reality I have literally been thinking about how I could get out of going to my own party. It’s shared, it wouldn’t be that hard I’m sure. It’s the realisation that thoughts like this hold the reins on what otherwise might be a beautiful existence. That makes me sick. 
All of my wasted time was not wasted. All of the time I did not waste reminds me of everybody patronising in my life. 
I was always so jealous of people with that zeal for every day like the world was ending tomorrow but now I think they don’t take anything too seriously. I don’t know. It’s more than possible I’m in an extremely good place with all the fortune in the world right now.

The Moon During The Day

It’s possible this has already been said here. Packing is uncomfortable and time consuming. I keep on stopping to wander through old workbooks. 

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Americano Evenings (I Can’t Sleep Anymore)

The suburbs are inherently good. I am OK. I really don’t like the folks at the cafes I used to frequent. The spaces are brilliant, the atmosphere slits its wrists.

You with Casanova callouses to your everyday and every thought of mine is you.
Your wounds even, flare and evoke. Yes, the callouses. 
Cupids cuts.
But my body’s wintry words are bleeding.
I am all that is ugly to you.

I’d come over but I think I passed out on the way.
I wouldn’t have erased the message or number but then you were dramatic in my bed again (in my head, again).
Sympathy never was around and neither am I.  

Because I was trying to put all of my firsts in my mouth, absorb them and then forget them. It doesn’t work like that though. Rarely anything reacts the way I think it will.

It’s an expression I use sometimes, ‘not that it matters’. I see how that applies to most everything I do or pertain to. 

Do you stay drunk enough to cancel out the arsenic of apple seeds? Do you laugh crass and bitter to bulk up against the surrounding shambles of pretentious and cruel youth? Or do you just read books in bed and fall asleep with the light on, covers twisted like mottled clouds against your mouth.

Doing It Again

Looking out for everything unclaimed by your clavicles and follicles and lips and hips and eyes is arduous. Two cars passed with your name mingled into their registration plate digits. I laughed heroic. I cringed somewhere watertight inside. The girl with the carmine locks, the former, she truckles to your memory. It’s disappointing, it aches, too. In a place I am blind to.

Grating fresh beets, palms streaked and ruddy, lost my appetite again.

But these are two different people, not to be confused with each other. Both are holding candles, there is no one better than the other.

I miss to the point of flushed features and a brief relapse into seclusion. I want someone to tell me I look pretty brushing my teeth. Or I don’t, I want to keep my eyes on the ground.

I don’t think there can be any more private pain than that of this year, for me. It all seemed sarcastic out of my mouth. That’s what made it so easy to inhabit.. I couldn’t describe it to the extent of damage it was doing, I couldn’t twist my lips around vowel sounds for emotional agony , so I stayed inside with it, while it pitted me. If you break a bone and it pierces the skin, you can see it, others can view it.. Casts, band-aids, slings, stitches. But there is nothing obvious about grief, there’s no evidence for others to gauge. No excisions from games or social responsibilities. 

If it happens to you, I’m going to be around. Don’t worry. I’m going to be around. 

Handling

‘You two would have had the most beautiful children.’ -My Mother, again. We were three years ago. Assume that now is not the opportune time to describe my tied insides. Like a clipped phrase, my body repeats itself monthly, ignoring the futility. 

Promiscuous are the lines under my eyes. They keep on touching each other and occasionally fucking off for someone else’s face, so it seems. Dozed underneath my alarm this morning, or maybe above, maniacal me in my dreams touching the ceiling. The lines weren’t there at all. Missed a conference call but in all honesty I was feeling too blessed to be waking to light to care. 5am is only comely for sex, the beginnings of travel and the vegetable market. Talking to him about words when I can barely form any of my own is taxing. I like the contrast though. He gets home from work and is rearing to talk rogue and romantic poetry and I’m dressed from the waist up with a smile only for myself in mirror. He wakes up at 9am. It’s summer. Fuck him and his stupid creative works.

But not really. I just feel rather inadequate. 

Bus window boy- I want to know what you are enjoying. I am grey, woke at 12:30am. Endured a conversation maintained only to make me feel small, his smug chin turned up and all I could see was the dirty yellowed folds in his neck and all the loose skin and scars that age had back-handed him with. You though, you appear completely at peace. Go home to caramelise onions on my stove and I keep on pausing to think about somebody I don’t know. 

Falling in love with my knuckles. Skin between them feels like leather. I’m going to go now. 

TN