awkward stitches

the trees could be winters' bare tongue

against a grey unmoving sky

I can hear it 

it's discontent

as if picking a colour oversteps a boundary and offends

with the streetlights on 
its a bruised kind of blue

I can see my lampshade

reflected in the window as if the window 

is a room I'm looking through

I'm looking out

of

me 

and my incandescence

I watch the washing line 

make its own horizon

condensation 

creeping up the glass in the glass between the glass

I wish I couldn't describe

I wish it was impossible

what it means to mean nothing

the page blank the thought unfed

its darker now

not just the lampshade

now the walls the painting

the coat 

hung on the door

infantry

a ladder

a loneliness

a crying newborn

no one listening

just the walls

compelled

reflected through the window

in the window

is the window

Nancy is an Alleyway

Nagasaki

I

asymmetrically

waiting for the weld to hold it was supposed to be a stanza unfiltered language loose hipped and bourbon rich leaning on a wall paint flaking onto its shoulders like rain like old September like Nancy when she cracked her skull against the wall

Sasebo

handing off the baton

the wall sighed and stuck between her teeth it became her even the air vents cackled into the

sweaty breath of Peri Peri Chicken Dreams or DreamZ as the sign said in slow lazy neon tattooing

light into rusty drainpipes moss on their lips

Saga

letting go of gone

dripping the sweat of twenty bathrooms into one small metal square in the ground with half a

peppermint pressed into the grooves she was propaganda she was every corner

Kumamoto

beginning to give

she became it’s bricks and mortar as if she was nothing or a part of everything people died in

alleyways people had always died in alleyways but she became the alleyway she became the trash

can the tarmac the drainpipe the graffiti

Minamata

you

your open hand behind you

the piss the cigarette butt the fox at 4am she was a wasteland watching restaurants close The Slow 

Grasshopper sent their last few diners home

Kagoshima

threading the air
it's infinite axes

minimum wage baristas dragged rubbish outside piling empty barrels into short fat columns building 

their own kind of Acropolis out of draught ale and empty pitchers sound of broken glass spilling on

her thighs as bin bags tore discarding fragments of time

Miyazaki

blind transfer

dark bathroom windows with lucky cats waving their paws like grandfather clocks in abstract

meditation

Nobeoka

keeping the pace

or stuck somehow between movement and thought repetition imploring jagged recitation

Ōita

breaking out

it grew through her toes and what she imagined was her mouth why should her body fit together the

way it had before

Kitakyushu

on the backstretch

now it could build itself it was its own architect her elbows were a fire escape she spilled her fingers

into shadows into light into the dawn

Fukuoka

qualifying distance

alphabets climbed into trash cans into crisp packets into milk carton crud into dirt into the pulse of

everything that is not Nancy and the rain beat against her

of the skyscrapers

tall ships
             comfort
distraction

of the skyscrapers 

doubts 

about vision shift

fault collapses over small print 

dive 

      retune 

deepen

come 

        roaring back 

catch your breath

go to work

                weaken

after all the reasons

close in on the nagging reminder

this still

collision

like bullets

the (here and now)

in her hands 

                 a hard 

fairy tale

eating pixels

husk of a thought
laid slightly at an angle
mirage
of ego exalted
slightly
salty taste
of truth
eating pixels with Alice
licking silhouettes
with dry tongues
heavy with a pulse
that aches into context
this
circuitry of reasons
dog
eat dog perversions
of manifested
ideologies
pedagogues and punditry
the smooth joy
of an empty canyon
shot with perfect light
shadows 
like wild calligraphy
echoing into a vast
absence
of meaning
husk
of a thought
laid slightly at an angle
slightly
salty taste
of truth

is a

gender is
lines

drawn on a map ------in invisible ink  border    less
meaning                    less
______ is  a construct
______ is a muscle 
the shape
of the ache 
you are
(and the whole world refracts you)
stained glass sister 
brother of light 
your body  is 
your body 
no / body 
this is not about anatomy or me 
or me or me 
we are ritual 
consecutive doubt 
we are conundrum 
a thought that uncoils itself 
we are rosaries 
skin 
under my skin 
we are gardens

if

 

if
how the air falls

in the wake of words
how it opens
the sky

flat line horizon
straight 

surfaces stretch 

painting pavements
with tired feet
I itch
the timeline
I am tourniquet
absence continues
down the corridor
the flaw 

           the flaw in the wires
typographic tongues
our matrixes
sub

     siding
this 

     avalanche
                   of maps
this loneliness
flattered

alidade arithmetic
she levels
with room for all our edges
con

tinuous tone
her interval 

of contours

blankness of becoming
aftermath                   and promise
our old clothes
old
giving birth
on the pavement
new language
mono
meridian
theories like stars
I don't                need
to know
categorising the horizon
I lose
my codex leaves
it's absence in the answer

writing on

This is a collaborative piece with Leanne who's words you can find at Elegantly Jaded

 

the first wall we wrote on:

second hand time

the was of you

silk thread black tie

circumstance tailored to dark night

seams of a stitched sunrise

strength of a echo etched

alphabets genuflect

archivists ache in and out in and out

in a celestial library

memory my twisted sister

taunts from A to Z

hallelujah is a hole

no fairytale bucket list or materialists goal

object is subject skin is edge

hell is a precipice

an absence

fledged

 

 

 

the ceiling:

gone is the gone of love

incongruent unity

scalene horizon how we reach

our balance

balanced

latitudinal ballast

rest in the anchor of ground sky so lonely

it cries rust

in this wasteland womb

dripping time

between alcoves and shades of being

mystic mouths in the dust

believing

pupils dilate us into seeing

holy cunts in absolute arcs 

reinventing the sky so lonely

second hand time

 

 

the second wall we wrote on:

un     becoming the hue that killed me

malleable                         parameters

spun in the sinkhole of pith

dissolving boulders loosening shoulders with it's current

open tuning the air the air it's there

sighs sung cries strung along

a nubile vista

the honesty of our bodies

alternating breaths like a piston

ricochet aurora

love's projectile no projection

infinite ache

a heart's gate

incessant

essence

 

 

the mirror:

of my old story

I kiss

her obtuse lips

dialogue angling

for a reaction

 

 

the wall with the painting on it:

alongside the intimacy of ink

gentleman quills duel

jarred by the solemnity

of vowels

suspended in

invisible ink

language accumulates in the edge of risk

corner of the mouth semnatics