i want your flowers like babies want god's love

I will be sad not to spend the fall with you. I drive down these streets, each of which is a memory of you. Roots force their way through the hardened tar, leaves coat my car and like incessant papercuts I am reminded of every memory of you, every memory I had yet to make and now never will. And as I watch the colours fade I will imagine you were there with me, leaning against the white bark of an ancient tree.

I will be sad to spend winter alone. It's as cold as cancer here in those months, and I will be sad not find myself wrapped up in your warmth in the mornings. I will regret that you made me see a season of my life in black and white. I may try thaw your heart by the fire while mine breaks like ice, but when I look outside I will be reminded of the fact that everything is dead.

I will be sad not to start afresh with you. I will be blind to new life, turn my back on the endless potential of new beginnings and I will not notice the new colours surrounding me. I will hate myself every day for wanting your flowers, and every day I will mourn that they are dead.

I will, perchance, fall in love with summer once more. And I will be sad to know it will end the same way. In the battle for love, I will die again. But more tragic than anything else is that it will not be worth dying for.

There is no other you.

i set fire fire to the rain

The arum lilies had gone limp from the cold that had started to settle in. Old people sat on their porches with the dying rays of sunshine accentuating each wrinkled path of their faces with its false promise of warmth. They wrapped themselves in blankets and inhaled the frosted air in measured breaths, waiting for the nothingness to take over.

I called you from upstairs. I shouted. Furiously. Desperately. I called your name and battled the wind that snatched my words away.

‘’I rebuilt the fort!”

I stood at the top of the stairs and called and cried, holding out my hand as you battled your way up.

“Hurry! Grab my hand! Love is coming.”

It loomed behind you, a great cloud threatening to swallow us both. I held out my hand as far as I could, screaming your name as it reached up and tugged at your ankles. You climbed and I reached and we fought so desperately to run away from it.

And finally, we were safe. I had built a fort and we huddled inside, safe from love. We played cards and lit candles, we laughed and we lay together.

But we made no memories. We shared no songs which would someday pierce our very souls with their shrill falseness. We didn’t need to waste paper writing letters which we would later burn. We did not see sights and travel the world together. We did not tell all of our friends about each other and we had no need to someday explain to them that, no, he wasn’t ‘the one’. We did not buy gifts with which we would later pollute the ocean as we flung them into high tide, the waves crashing into our tears. We did not wear each other’s clothes, only to feel naked when they were taken back. We did not set alarm clocks that would remind us of each other every hour of every day after we parted.

We did not part. We stayed, safe from love and the eventual winter it would send to kill us. We stayed side by side, forever apart. And we never had to say goodbye.

we bully clouds now to pass the time away

We never forgot the day we found out that water is not blue. After years of believing we loved the colour of water, it turned out we loved nothing. After centuries of postcard- blue oceans, and the near-black lakes that lulled us into fits of poetry, and waterfalls that thawed us into being romantic, we found out they were lying. As we grew up we grew old and tired, hunched with the realisation that nothing was as beautiful as we thought.

Suddenly everything was a lie. People died, dog-heaven was a dusty dump behind an old windmill and horses never could fly. Our gunned-down heroes never came back to life, adultery wasn’t really a sin and ‘I do’ lasted only as long as it was convenient.

We stood, smoking outside the hospital. And I turned my back but never really walked away, even though we knew something had changed. Your eyes were black and blue and violet as you turned back to me. The tears, of course, were clear. Neither white nor blue, just a ghostly liquid spelling out whatmighthavebeens down your cheek.

I thought I should tell you, I slept with your best friend.

remember when i moved in you?

The words... the words escape me. And it’s like my very breath out of reach. It’s like my breath left with you, left me behind because it was no longer interested in moving through a shell.
It’s like my bones are dried up paintbrushes, trying desperately to move but leaving streaks of useless red all over the earth.
It’s like my thoughts have crumbled into ash. The memories are running away and all I want it to write a book but they are melting from my mouth like dirty water.
It’s like the songs are silent. The songs, once filled with you, are now silent with suffering.
It’s like I’m on drugs. I know something is happening, I know it’s bad and something tells me it might be the wrong choice, but right now it seems like the right one. But I don’t know exactly what is happening. The shapes shift so fast that my life is the hallucination of a rollercoaster.
Remember that night I hallucinated? That night I was alone, and I dreamed up reindeer and composers and big black birds turning into smoke as I gasped them into my lungs?
Remember that night we drove to nowhere and back, and said everything we needed to say?
Remember that night when we were all alone?
Remember all those next mornings?
The words... I cannot write them. And since you left I am simply writing a book about not writing.

i'm not okay, i promise

I never thought I would cry when I first saw you again.
But I did. Unashamedly and without knowing why, I told everyone what our silence was about.
And I cannot stand this deafening silence, nor the sight of you, tearing the tangled sinews and veins ridden with blood red grief right out of me.
I wanted to fall down on my knees and scream at you, and beg whoever was listening for an answer.
Down on my knees on the broken brick road that led me nowhere,
the yellow stains on my finger nails spoke of the bad decisions I blamed on you.
I didn’t even know if it was tears or rain, but my knees were weak with walking, even when you held my hand.

So here we stand, miles apart. But I can smell your breath on me all the time,
And the cigarettes all taste like you.
Here we stand, between one end and whatever happens next.
Here we stand, not knowing how to step forward, wanting to fall backwards and float away into nothingness.
But maybe I would rather feel pain than to feel nothing at all, because to me the opposite of love was never hate, but indifference.
I stood in the rain and watched you leave under that wholly unromantic half moon, and I remembered everything.
I am yellow. I am branded a coward in my own eyes.
A streetcar named me Liar.

you can only take what you can carry

To me, you were the rainy days I loved so much.

To me, you were the weather that mirrored my insides.

To me, you were ten seconds older than what had just gone wrong.

To me, you were mere minutes of laughter that hurt my cheeks for days to come.

To me, you were a butterfly pulse next to mine.

To me, you were crooked teeth and a dusty moonlit mile.

Whether I was mountains or clouds, to me you were the endless road leading there.

To me, you were not right, nor wrong.

To me, you are blue and red.

i don't remember you looking any better

The glass shards of my thoughts flitted across my mind’s sky like broken blackbirds. I was dreaming about that dream. That dream I could feel happening as you pushed me against a wall and forced my desires wide open.

And then I lay, writhing, in front of those double doors. I wrote you my best lines each night, and never once stopped listening to you, even when I was dying. I was dying of the pain of wanting to speak, to scream, to push my mouth over yours so you would just shut up.

And now, on this double-digit day that belongs only to you, I remain locked in our dream. I am dancing in the rain with my dreamer. There is a red dress, and there is music. And somewhere in all of the confusion there is a maybe.