The Way You Used To Light Up

2011-10-02T13:46:00.001-07:00

So crazy,
I half-forgot about this blog, because it tends to be of use in the more futile periods of my life.
BUT, I arrived back to some lovely comments from some beautiful people, so thank you!
I promise to post soon with something more substantial.
x

2010-09-30T14:56:00.001-07:00

An eighty two year old man lives across the door from me at number six. He keeps a long gun in his garage to shoot rabbits and pheasants…although I’ve never seen enough dead to confirm. At midday he rolls down the road in a little white car with a dusty windscreen and gets his dinner at the old people’s home for fifty pence a day. His wife died a year ago and I never really saw anyone drink a cup of tea with such passion – or sugar. He wears tan trousers with an imperfect crease that tails off around his kneecaps down to swollen ankles and aubergine jumpers that smell of old leaves. We used to feed the hedgehog milk in his back garden, but somewhere along the line, my dungarees got too small. He hands out striped dusters to neighbours with cars and he likes to form petitions. The tree outside his house blew over yesterday in the wind, but the watery gloss to his eye could not be blamed on that.

Four miles away, a widower with seven bottles of Jack Daniels (he forgets, and calls it Jack Russell’s) in his larder at one time, sits down to one bowl of tomato soup and watches the steam rise, become smoke and settle smugly among his sparse greys. He contemplates bread, but sore-legged and old, he passes. He works fourteen hours a day in a rusty van to provide for a family who would love him anyway, but he is not so sure. He still speaks to his wife in the bedroom when it gets dark and the curtains she picked flutter in the night, but she never replies and he cries all night long as ‘Blondie’ blasts in an empty house that rattles with the shatter of glass. The tide is high and he’s holding on. It is easier to love the dead and he throws punches at bigger, younger men on a Saturday night in a futile attempt to die. But they take pity, he falls and it all spins round as he waits for his dice to fall on the third double number. Her picture in his pocket, he does everything she would never want him to do.

Maybe happiness is just half a post-it note tucked in a tan trouser pocket. Maybe happiness is a thought scribbled down in blue biro and meant to be remembered. But sooner or later, distraction prevails, and in the embarrassed fumble for spare change that happiness is shoved in stitching seam of workman’s trousers, with the thought to put it somewhere safe, some other time. Happiness becomes a faded pair of trousers pulled from the washing machine, from which little post-it flakes sprinkle sweetly across orange tiles, swept up in the everyday bemusement of street to sleep…and we forget.

The death of happiness, as with the death of a wife, is the event which results in the pursuit of what was known before. Jack Daniels widower loiters in a life he refused to take advantage of when his wife was alive, wishing she would come back and haunt him like she used to. Screaming becomes passion and arguments are forgotten, and the kindly vacuous man at number six wonders when Doreen’s coming home from the hospital…but she never does. Happiness is a pursuit because it is transient, in the same way love is never fully understood until it has become hate, and flown. Carry old notes forever and fill your pockets with everyday conversations and nights wrapped around one another in front of the television, because happiness never comes back from the hospital, but we pursue its memory forever.

24/09/2010

2010-09-24T16:04:00.000-07:00

I think they knew it wouldn’t work. Too many length-long walks from tip to top of some steep hill and hands that held on too severely, too frequently. To conquer life, you must decieve. Know your terrain and paint dark stripes across your bones to face fears with the eye of someone more inclined to fight than flee. Or fly. They flew, green wings of envy flapping desparately to combat the mindless ebb and flow of knowing you are loved, and wanting to be. And how the tear of fate - and face - decieves. Teeth through the tongue in an attempt to seal old wounds and recreate pain, remember the hate…
wait.
Remove padlocks on gates and enter gardens in which the traits of someone loved become the victim of stoney eyes. Nothing more than a reprise: a statue in an eden, a bitter honeycomb submerged in a honey sweet summer sky.
Rewind, keep in mind those young, bare eyes and two black stains on some sweet boy’s t-shirt. Eighteen pints and a hundred lifeless cigarettes, lain limp in the decay of a first, or only, love. Two cliches, a closet/pipe dream.
Two men grow beneath one tree. They branch together and become the root of a new story. Old versions of same stories mend, and he and she meet nose to nose in a bar…too long after the incident to ever say they’re sorry.
But…they are. Or, perhaps will be. And with a brush of the hand, the raised command to ‘get the drinks in’ and the beat of life rising with the heat of one last night, they finally believe.

25/09/2010

2010-09-24T16:03:00.000-07:00

I don’t think you know who you are and I don’t think you are going to the place that I want to be. I don’t know why you keep running to keep up with me when I keep jumping hurdles in fruitless attempts to escape. I don’t know why I write in lines and speak in dirty rhythms when we both know this is real. I don’t know why you keep me here when I remain as insincere as I maintain myself to be. Your feet are muddy and the light is blinding and all the while i’m learning to fall and our heartbeats keep pounding and the sound in me’s drowning you and all the while, and all the while i’m learning. Returning. To myself. To breathe. To be something monogamous with love on my sleeve. To need. Concede with the concessions of life and mind and re-entwine with the pining lust of thought. I taught myself to know that I could be better than you but now i’m standing here in your light and I fight but I know that it’s right to be lost because staring at me is a vision of you, in all the shades of Dorian Gray. This is my way. Lost in ten empty barrels of hate.

And it gets late. It’s raining and the lights go out. It gets cold. We shout.
You win, I leave. New perspective, new sleeve.
I’m green, and the golden lights of tomorrow pass over my jealous hues.

2010-09-12T18:37:00.000-07:00

I am just a bruise.
Bemused,
On the skin of something ugly, bitter and sinful.

2010-09-12T18:03:00.000-07:00

Waste.
Away, one tin can
in someone's filthy ocean.
Take pains,
Killers,
Harsh voices and breath burning.
Screams.
Angry daddy and a grazed glare.
Look up.
Sculpted chin to sky and a grin so wide,
So wide.
You shine.
Take flight, be bright,
Do not lose faith
or waste.
For the sake
of fate,
For waist.
You need more space.

2010-07-11T16:52:00.000-07:00

I wish you could delete me
Because I can't stand wrenching the hair from my head anymore.
Crying anymore.
Closing my eyes in front of the mirror
And hoping to open them inside someone else.

2010-07-11T16:25:00.001-07:00

He had twenty one watches in an asparagus green box by his bed when he died. Some time in between the seventeenth and the twenty seventh of May a sparse head of matted, copper-grey hair hit a familiar yellow pillow stain, and somebody’s grandfather clocked out, as a furrowed brow retracted its lonely crease.
To think that a person can drop in house number three of six adjoining red terraces and not be heard is a thought that confirms human insignificance. It confirms that our clocks do not stop as we do, and that pressing sticky fingers against the hands of those big clocks we admired when we were small does nothing to attune us to their fickle hearts. And that was Danny’s favourite game. Nose against Grandaddy’s clock, as he tippy-toed in his orange socks and breathed uncured dreams against the glass. He didn’t reach the number twelve until he was seventeen years old, and that made him bitter towards its mocking, constant cluck.
Danny’s first watch was a twenty first birthday joke of a gift, beige-strapped and lacking in the love necessary for any fine wrist ornament. Given to him by Mr. Daddy, it was a constant reminder of lost years and the essence of giving too little, two fucks. He carried it around in his left sock for his entire life, deeming it uselessly ugly but sentimentally tactile in times of desperation.
And now, looking down on the image of a dead man who peaked as a balding cliché and forgot to apply deodorant one too many times, he brushed against his ankle bone and drew out the only real sign of that most true, most bitter love any child ever experiences.

2010-07-08T02:03:00.001-07:00

Try hurt, try maim.
We still trespass,
Remain the same
And waste ourselves in other ways.
Shallow displays
And a lack of tenderness privy only
To you.
Watch me burn,
Watch skin disintegrate into ash and
bone pop from flesh and let me win.
Spin plates,
Walk in.
Let me gorge on glass mirrors,
Stand naked in open wounds
And be free.
Free
To shine without the combined pain
Of going it alone,
And sealing too-licked lips.
Let someone in,
Make music
And remember that in every bad act
Is a flake of good intent.
We are fine.
Alive.
And I will scream at the top of withered lungs,
If anyone else claims otherwise.

2010-06-30T15:04:00.001-07:00

Love climbed my ivy
And woke up next to me.

2010-06-29T15:33:00.000-07:00

It feels like summer here,
On the backseat of someone else's
Old idea,
And the trickle of promise leaks
Into wet ears.
And seeps through the seams
Of those unkempt dreams
And lights fires behind bright eyes.

But we are wounded by fear,
And as the sun drops
Wasted worries do not.
We are lost
At the cost of possible genius.
And the frost of cold, cold memory
Creeps up to our window
Sniffs us out,
And glares through the one crack in pulled curtains.

The night's drawn near.
So we creep apart and wait
For the start
Of a dream we won't fulfil.
And we are lost, because hearts
Are not welcome to darts
Of pity and promise and ill.
We spill petty secrets
All over our beds,
And wake up in tomorrow
With two pounding heads.

2010-06-23T16:23:00.000-07:00

It's important to let you know that I will never love you the way I loved one kiss, pressed against a hedge in the rain with a best friend who was never a thing more. I only cried on the ninety nine steps for one person and he could never have been you.

2010-06-23T16:15:00.000-07:00

There's a four letter prick
Inside you
With my name written all over its shaft.

2010-06-23T15:35:00.000-07:00

You're a reminder
Of a thirteen year old flutter.
Butter on the tongue and the slip-slide
Of words gone by.
Relinquished,
To the crush of your hand on my face.
My fingers,
Your waist,
The tiny taste
Of things to come
And things to waste.
Of being so close to another body
That to breathe another rhythm hurts.
So I hold on for just a second,
Give my breath to another body,
And in the second between becoming myself again
And wholly becoming you
I catch your eye.
Are you mine?
And all the oxygen I breathe
Allows us one more wrenched minute of space
In time.

2010-06-22T15:49:00.000-07:00

Ripped me open,
Bled fourty ways.
No mirror saw my reflection
For fourty more days.

2010-06-17T15:31:00.001-07:00

Little Bird.
Oily Wing.
Broken Hope.
Song to Sing.
Oh wriggle off,
Be free,
And fly.
Look back,
With slicken wings,
Goodbye.

2010-05-16T17:43:00.001-07:00

I think I always hoped that you could look at me from the corner of your eye and know I wasn't like you. I would inhale and you never flinched, but there was heartbreak in the way you said my name. There's something about that flame. I wasn't trying to be a poet, but you smoked inside me and forced my lips apart. There's something about that flame. And I walked, I walked for days, I retraced the rain, got clued up and threw that drug away, and came so close to finding you again. Set my house on fire, there's something about that flame. You're sugar-free. I'm absolute and one too many. Set my mouth on fire and teach me how to scream. I think I always knew one day you'd fly away. Remember packs of twenty and a feeling we were something else? There's always something in the pipeline, a rainy day and a harmless wrestle with two boys you know everything about. There's something about that flame. The first and the brightest. The most orange of glows. The one that sets you alight - there's something about that flame. There's something about that flame and you know you had that chance, and you know when you look its way again, that flame will be engulfing some other no-hoper. A caress and a phone call the next day and you're his to own. Burnt of your own accord, you still sneak him between your teeth for a sneaky suck. A nibble. Glee. Too many dreams and he fogged them over, pushed them under, swallowed them whole. There's something about that flame. Something about a twisted glance and an addiction you can't control. I think this tangent is the worst of all. Unjustified. Unquenched by the stench of nicotine. There's something about those frayed ends, the stubbing out of old qualifiers, and the realisation you've been wrong. This time, there's something about you. I think I always hoped you'd look at me out of the corner of your poisonous eyes and tell me you knew you'd made a mistake. Tell me you were sorry, that our mistakes were a hybrid and we could forget it all. But most of all, I Miss The Way You Used To Light Up.

2010-05-16T15:56:00.001-07:00

The corner of this mouth
has turned.

2010-05-10T15:51:00.000-07:00

Well what
Is on the other side
Of truth?
And when the penny drops
The lock
The light maintains
Over copper skin
Flares.
Compares itself
To a mirror image,
An ambition delivered
And a use fulfilled.
From the hand of someone new,
The penny leaps,
Its kick undue,
And all the pretty fifties fall,
Into greedy paws
That know us all.

2010-04-20T05:09:00.000-07:00

I force my key in your hole
Upside down.
You fail to see the funny side.

2010-04-14T05:50:00.000-07:00

What happens, reciever,
If I let you down
With one singular click,
And never pick you up again?

2010-04-11T17:53:00.000-07:00

There are three men in my life, and not one great.
The kind that make you check your own reflection
Just to maintain its existence.
Two of three have pressed against my mouth
And one of three birthed butterflies.
And whilst one could never meet my eye
In hedges,
Two
Keep trying.
And as each of those boys
Have couplets of their own,
This will not be a poem
Or even an admission.
Just a prison,
A prism
Of glass corners
And invisible bars of light,
Holding me up
And back,
Tonight -
Jasmine has the worst kind of butterflies.
And those three yellow flutters
swarm over one small weed,
Envelope it's petals,
Plant flags, and leave.

2010-04-08T15:51:00.000-07:00

Tonight is you,
Your short fuse,
Too much vodka
And thighs submerged in the mud of our back street.
Smoking.
Hot.
The relentless pop of black buttons against shaking skin.

Backs slam against ice walls,
The rip and slip of friendship covets ownership
And the gleam of the taxi light pulls me away.

A press stud in time.
Our moment lined a fabric soiled by marginality
- but not by love.

Think that you're not good enough
And change my mind.
Cry over ten thousand others,
Pour me into test tubes and
Test me.
Refuse me.
Use your alchemy.
And, instead of gold, you will find me.

untitled

2010-04-06T03:03:00.000-07:00

A half-moon crease.
The crook of coat
Between bicep and forearm,
Flexing as you bring your hands
Closer to your chest,
Evading winter's chill.
And the resting place of desperate fingers,
Stealing fear.

A familiar scene.
Our little, broken pieces are aired again.
We flare again.
And all those little pieces blaze
With the renewal of tucked-away wounds.
Head pressed to your ribs,
Compression makes us whole,
For now.

For now, we can be patchwork sails
And sail this boat together.
For now we can laugh over old jokes,
Though we know they aren't so funny.
And with hindsight in sight, we protect one another
From feeling what we know we must not.
And in between the feelings,
We know, that on this short walk between the top and the bottom
of the highstreet that taught us how to be
'Grown Up',
We are perfect. For now.

Knew

2010-04-02T15:56:00.000-07:00

Cigarettes in the grass
Provoke natural twirls of smoke from your finger tips.
Supernatural snakes of sprawling spark
To crawl into young lungs
And herd clouds into hope.
I saw your boy today. Almost wrote 'that', and then did not.
Futile drips of regret, flood someone new,
And I am resigned to someone like you.

And I wish you knew
I make wishes on every hair of his glorious head
For you.
And I wish you knew
I smile with every thought of you.
And I think you knew,
That I always knew
You could never be happy here.

Our field still stands.
New wheat grows over old crime scenes
And we harvest old feelings.
Brought back by a song,
We sing along,
Both belonging to some new stage
In time.

Despite it all,
I always agree,
That despite our fall,
You came back for me.

Borrow Love.

2010-04-02T15:07:00.000-07:00

Bridges
crumbly slowly over loaned feelings.
Borrow time,
Borrow days and expensive hours
Caught up in between things you were supposed to do.
Supposed to be.
I suppose we be whatever we are.
And wherever the lines are drawn
Lie stolen loopholes .
Liaisons between lost luck and that looming license
To lean into skin and become more
Than two big mistakes and a half-eaten promise.
And brick by brick,
Staircase or bridge, we climb as public enemies,
Together, we steal love.

Impossible.

2010-03-24T17:30:00.001-07:00

Too much for one small window,
Time slopes by in a teenage sulk.
Tap, tap, salt-stained stare at your trainee face.
Shagging someone?

-Impossible -

To make you listen.
You never hear.
Here, a flat-palmed slap to the chest,
A brow-beaten tip-toe into pleasantries leads
To make-believe, and the tip-tap-tip of the rain
Leaves me, lonely.
My pillar box dreams drain their dark dispensary,
Like squid ink in a postman's bag.
And you, dark blue, leak through me.

09.02.2010

2010-02-09T07:49:00.000-08:00

We were always over, my sweet.
I loved you to death.
We were hopeless and faithless.
You had nothing left.

Seven years,
Bad luck.
Seven years and a sea-sized penance
Punched a pea-soup puddle into the gut
of seven old boats.
Seven sets of rotting limbs
folding into watercolour fogs.

I am despondence and revenge;
You were my only war.
Take me back to our bed because life is a chore.
And maybe this time
I will just grit my teeth,
Because both of us know, there's no rest without peace.

09.02.2010

2010-02-09T06:44:00.000-08:00

Grains of sand, a rolling finger tip,
Fell to the ground, fall to slip.
When you were gone, we slept

Together.

Wept and through the sound,
The crowd hurt and you were a voice and a hand
And a face touching mine and a hot, sticky breath from neck
To spine.
And intertwined you were a purse, and you dupe me into keeping pennies
In You.

I guess pounds can look after themselves.

We banked all of our love for a rainy day,
it's always sunny now.

26.01.10

2010-01-26T18:37:00.000-08:00

Tears are only worth crying for the right people. You give someone every single available part of your crumbling self, and they can still break away their piece and stumble on. We live in faith and hold on to the stars that seldom fall our way. But, when they do, they burn scarlet in our minds and lead us somewhere better than misery. Life is our biggest, brightest star, and if the sky is the limit, then we should reach out and touch it. And the most important thing of all, is that we remember exactly who we are. Live for love and nothing less, and settle only for the people that make your heart race and your eyes well up with laughter. Those are always the people worth fighting for, the industrial pillars of hope, that stand and fall together. The timbers that love, when lust is gone.
There's something in a dream that reality can never quite achieve. This is about what happens when the dreams are not realised, and we cannot accept our failings. This is about heartache, and the piercing of a bubble so fragile it was destined to burst. It's about the madness we draw from failure, and the hope in sordid miscreation. It's about submersing ourselves so completely in a lie that we believe it to be true, and falling so utterly for the wrong person, that we forget we never really knew how to love at all.
We search too much for what we already have, and happiness flies by on wings we forget to use. We hold our eyes so tightly shut, that we never know we are losing and winning to the tune of every heartbeat. 'Happiness' is the easiest feeling in the world, and the feeling you should fight hardest to keep.