Watercolours 40cms or so high.
I remember painting her.
A girl I barely knew and never will now as she is a middle aged woman and the girl is gone to her ways and I… welll…
I wa sso bloody nervous that my hand wouldn’t bloody paint properly and I knocked over the water for the watercolors and she giggled at me and I will remember her smile for the rest of my life.
Alice. Well, babe, wherever you are. Thanks for staying still. Yeah.
I wrote this next poem-thing after the life-painting session, railing at myself and the world for making me shy and for making me fail and for making her anything but in my arms.
If I remember rightly, it didn’t help.
A staring cry (song for Alice,)
Hard clay and salt, a cloudwall or a ground shudder.
Ions into charged air, thrashed flowers and chewed fingers,
blood on the corner of your mouth.
A topiary of flesh, vents of skin and
bouquets of lips pressed to mine.
Deep furrowed and rendered stone over a dull baleful,
challengeless and soporific stare.
Cold metal against my cheek in my ears and falling from my mouth.
Turn your face from mine again, close your wet dying eyes and
tilt your arching jaw at the sun.
Tread softly, tread sweetly step lightly with picking care
shoulders hunched and knuckles white.
Pink tongue flicking between white eating bones and pushed through a staring cry.
Hold my hand again like it’s truth, small and comfortless, pale and ugly and fragile.
Half-lit and only what it is after all.
Pinch my palm and let’s run and run and maybe scream, turning our heads
with our teeth chattering in the wind in the night.
Flayed open like a romantic on a stretcher; pull the lights from my eyes they are
crossed out with bright red chalk.
Miss a few pages and find me a space on the paneling,
arms crossed against the small of my back,
nails tight and fierce in the morning sun.
Words spread out around me scratched deep
and hard into the floor written puckered testimony punctured and called.
Pushed and held against the sky like a bad coin.
Seven lines misspelled and annealed, annotated and confessed.
Sealed and heated like that, like us, spoken and contracted.
Like us, always leaving.
Thick with motion.
Slow with deliberation.
Loud like a pane of shaking glass.
Home now, go home my sweet born liar,
A final glance at the corner swelled up inside
Changed accelerated ameliorated and broken.
Placed and turned once more;
Flecked with hardness and foam
Inappropriate like a sharpened twitch
Collected and acquiesced
Like us
Tired and halting,
Clenched finger-prints over wet glass
and just one more FUCKING STEP
Wheeled and rattled and stabbed with a finger in the chest.
Chosen for it with a weave of threads
Exquisite and miniature,
Flush with their own heat
Heavy and viscous, slow with density
With care
With weight
Like us, exhausted, hesitant.
Breathless and lonely, oh lonely yes
Tricked into empathy betrayed and reaching.
As the light fades
As the game ends
As you close your eyes
Heartsick with it,
A hand hanging over the bedside
The other curled against
Your chest
Like a child.