glimmer

I don't wash my hands afterwards. I go into the living room and ask if I can help make you dinner. I put my fingers around your neck, including the nails of my right hand. The left squeezes into your waist. I inhale the particles of your skin.

The carpet's murky. There's rips and splotches in it. It should have been replaced years ago. The cats have driven their over-grown claws into it over and over again. They've vomited on it. They've birthed hairballs out of their throats on it. One of them's going to die soon and the other one snorts an arrythmically endearing tune.

You bring me a rose with a cockroach on it. The rose is pale pink which is my least favourite colour. The cockroach crawls all over the stained bedsheets, disoriented in a giant desert dune of mink. I watch its feelers recalibrating the space around it like TV antennae.

The sun goes down indigo over the Coromandel Peninsula. Someone screams from the backyard of a house further up the hill. I saw a woman drinking Woodstock at 2pm yesterday. Long weekend in New Zealand. Longer for those who don't hold down a nine to five.

The cat stretches its stiff paws out over me and sniffs at my knuckles. His breath smells like dead horse. My pelvis sinks down into the back of the couch.

Someone asks me how south-east Asia was. I'm dressed like a flapper.

We get stoned on the rockpools. A starfish crawls between the seaweed.

new salt

There's salt in my hair and she says I smell like Weleda. I've come straight from the beach and the ions are clinging to me. I feel my pelvis shifting and I feel my muscles stretching. The room is white. She turns off the lights. 

There's barres all around us but we don't hold back. There's something inside me I hold it back. I don't hold it back. I spill it all out. Everything comes out. My boyfriend pretends to be my counsellor he is my counsellor. He's practically a professional he's my professional. He gets on a plane, I go to the beach. I feel weird being around old friends. My new friends aren't dancers but they make me feel more creative.

I touch my ankle it feels like I might cry. I go to class it feels like I might cry. Because I'm so happy because I've lost so much because it hurts to grow a life. My body remembers breaking. It was five years ago but my body hasn't forgotten. My spine hasn't forgotten trying to hold itself up on a shakey foundation. 

I wonder half-heartedly if the surgeon molested me while I was under anaesthetic he could have done anything. I wonder if there were female doctors in the room I wonder if it's too late to find out. My rational brain tells me it's unlikely he molested me but my heart tells me - he cut me open without my emotional permission while I was vulnerable while I was broken he's the patriarchy a good guy who surfs and is goood looking has a medical degree - and they're practically the same thing. I touch the scar tissue. My boyfriend touches the scar tissue and I want him to keep touching it forever and never take his hands off because he's magic because he's my counsellor it feels so gentle and loving when he touches it the only way I can heal is by letting someone else serve me. 

He gives me a rush. I take it I let him do it. I wonder why sex and my ankle and my shadow side keep coming up in everything I do think feel especially when I'm high I'm high all the time and if I'm not high I'm ecstatic and if I'm not ecstatic I'm melting a slow death into myself into a puddle of fucked up thoughts. I smell like salt there's salt crystals on my face where the ocean evaporated the sun after I swam at the beach. I smell like salt there's salt in my hair I decide to make a show about it. 

beer - bus - bled

quietly fucked up in public
the ultimate serenity
the most private of secrets
more intimate than stewing in love
the furtherest from Earth whilst still
/ anchored in the planet
the deepest adventure into my own
/ capabilities and composition
a subtle "fuck off" and "fuck yes" : to and for the world

sometimes I can see myself / easily an addict
festering furiously, wonderfully, in the corners of my mind
venturing with too much courage into the flight of my veins ---

but I also enjoy my coherency, my health and my innocence
--- so I stick mainly to coffee, and marijuana
(and sometimes adultery, though that's far too close to love)

I want my body to bounce around between higher spaces
I want to unravel in front of people
I want to remind us all that nothing's real

mandala

There's this tiny ache in/side of me
         but it is no longer a Fraid
                 instead, it is
    a want :
it aches for all the things it cannot have
and in doing so, loses sight of the Is
     -- despite insisting on the present, it
drains the battery on my phone, gnawing at perused possibilities
it empties my bank account, hungry to taste every/thing
it throws itself at potential new foes, entities
showering them in giving, gifted, gone... 
                      so that I AM left smaller and also
larger
at the same time

it empties my body
of all its vital pulses
surging my blood down through the veins of my feet,
into the earth
singing my head up into the clouds
               floating on my heart rhythms...

it's like post-show depression
without the show

it's like saying goodbye to a lover
knowing when you next see them,
it'll be different

legs

oh, I know
                   that flush
               that glint,
           that close-by sit
     those footsteps down the
                                              hallway,
that gently euphoric
                                  emergence from the shower

that suppressed
       flutter through normality

the waking up late, warm in the cold
that soft melting in the eyes
that lovely crash of
                                juxtapositions
oh, yes
             I know it

that (after) separation
that trip to the laundry
I've held it;
                  I've hung out
               someone else's
                                             bed sheets

That beautiful quiet, that
              shared omission

that piercing stillness --
I've also held it

that
        space alone, afterwards

that fumble with the light/s on
that listening for the timing
that 7am escape trick, I've also
                                                  done it.

I've spent Mondays making sticky pancakes
and Sundays watching
                                      bad films
just to hold some skin afterwards
                                                       - trust me, it's
                     worth the weight.

I can't help but indulge in your
                                                   present-nostalgia

I can't help but want

to re-live, to unfold
my parallel past

a poem that shouldn't be written but I'm writing it anyway, in what I'd like to think is a moment of bold honesty, but probably is more like embarrassing stupidity

i.

I want to fuck you
like the dirty fucking whore
I once was
/ still am, but
not practising, like a bad catholic who's
skipping church

I want to
open my mouth
wider over yours, and take giant gulps of you
run my tongue along your teeth
and smash my jaw on your edges

and even though I get off
every time with you, without fail, and even
almost always
more than once, I just...

feel complacent in my climax
coz it's just so
goddamn easy

I want the performance back.

I want to dress up in thigh-high socks
and short skirts
and still be wearing them
when you come inside me
(my top off,
but in my bra)

I want to find you in a gutter at 4am
and lick drugs from your sticky palms
I want to wake up on your floor
with broken wine bottles everywhere
and stains in the carpet
that aren't from the wine

I want to smell myself on you
when I walk back into your room
after pissing in the morning
and walking back through your lounge
your conventionally good-looking flatmate
half glaring, half gawking

I want you to smack me across my face
I want you to dig your nails into my spine
I want you to chuck me around your living room and break a
very expensive heirloom

and tell your girlfriend all about it

and write poems about it

I want things that grate entirely
with my actual
ideologies

I want the sordid satisfaction
of you thinking I'm something I'm not
and knowing you can't comprehend
human duality

(or you know it entirely, and
that's why
you're here)

I want the pleasure of having power
over giving you an alter-ego
like, fuck yes this same
binge drinking, cock-sucking slut
also votes green, shuts down the patriarchy and
recycles correctly

and sure you can take me home
if you buy me a vegan burger first
coz I'm a dirty little hippy
with zero dollars to her name
but you're gonna buy me breakfast -
not because you're the male
but because you fucking owe me,
because you already want to see me again
and it's only
the morning after

and I'll answer your 10pm texts
coz it feels like summer,
and we all want that

I'll walk through the park at night for you
I'll risk my life to open my legs
I'll play the right song
and postpone sleep

just to feel in control
just to feel like the mad seductress
just to bear the weight of your form
and hear the aliveness of your breath

and conquer
and know
and decipher
one by one


ii.

here's what I don't want to do:

I don't want to go back to your windowless apartment
I don't want to hold your soft, spineless back
I don't want to pretend I'm enjoying it
I don't want you to shove yourself inside of me
I don't want to eat your fucking pumpkin seeds
you sad excuse for a vegetarian
I don't want to
go fucking slowly
I don't want to be fucked the way you want to fuck me
I don't want to wear a short skirt because you told me to,
I want to wear it because I fucking want to wear it
I don't want you to tell me to be quiet
I don't want you to be such an ugly, pathetic excuse for a man
I don't want you to
have me

I don't want to cry on your bed afterwards
and try to politely, kindly
explain why i feel revolted,
disgusted,
sick to my stomach
in a way i can't even comprehend, yet
and tell you sweet little lies
about not being attracted to you
when really the truth is

you fucking shoved yourself inside of me
after I literally said no
what the fuck was that ?
what the fuck was that

the time I stepped outside of myself
the time I played the game but no longer for the game's sake
the time I put myself in danger
the only time i wish i hadn't


iii.

I want them to enact my nostalgia

I imagine them sneaking across the hallway
at unholy hours of the night
mis-matched lovemakers
sharing rooms within a shared home
existing between the spaces of the house's other inhabitants

I imagine them indulging in the easy tension of holding a secret in the kitchen
the morning ritual of opening the fridge
and boiling the jug
the sterile intimacy
the stoic lust of taboo
the heroic triumph of doing the forbidden thing

sometimes the only way to appreciate someone you don't get along with
is to put yourself inside of them,
let them wear your skin
and shower together afterwards

eve

We're lying under
the vast stars of pre-historia,
our eyes see the colours of Christmas,
backs arched against impossibly-held rocks,
precariously heaved into each other
like consoling lovers.

We imagine aliens might have passed through these
enigmatic landscapes
-- or at the very least, dinosaurs...

a Very Yellow Lights darts right --
"Look, Tom, a shoot-- ... a satellite...," I say.
(My Christmas eyes must have deceived me.)

But it hovers a while, then
comes to a stand still.

My Christmas eyes deceived me. Now it's
stopped, completely.
"Oh, it's static," I suggest.
"Just a Very Yellow Star."

A very yellow star.

We imagine xeno-scandinavians
landing from expansive avian pursuits,
we uncover possibilities for beaming telepathic calls
into space; we let our consciousnesses leap
from mountain peak to mountain peak,
following the soft pad-prints of Hanuman.

The Very Yellow Star
starts across the sky
impossibly swiftly
it flares into a
Large Yellow Sun, a
nod to the yellows and twinkling golds
of the wrists below it.
It disappears instantaneously
into a hidden black hole --
it's
Gone.

My Christmas eyes blink, my heart
swells with the same fiery yellow light
and won't shrink, won't
follow the disappearance
but stays loud and thinking in my chest

"That was a U.F.O.!" says I, stupidly
stating the uneasy, alluring, impossible obvious.

We sit a while in silence
taking in the expanse around us
then make our way back to the house.

south

The houses here are nestled into the base of the mountains, like tiny pups sleeping, curled into their mothers' soft bellies. The snow shines ultra-violet against the rose morning sky and it's easy to understand why these giants were personified by the land's tangata whenua. They are indeed alive, carrying the wisdom of an old kaumātua and the stillness of a person who speaks only when of utmost necessity.

The cold is different here - it's exhilarating, flushing your face with the crisp foreshadowing of afternoon sunshine. It's the kind of perfect air that makes you want to thrust your torso through the open window, forget your mortality and spiral around icy corners just to feel your blood accelerate in lieu of barista-made coffee.

We arrived in the dusk; Now we're leaving at dawn. Last night we turned off all the lights to let the fullmoon-lit snow flood us with its generous ambience in our tiny two by three cabin, inflated by the ski season and allowed by our desire to escape, if only for a few days.

Here, I realise the things that really matter are:
people
being
feeling
releasing.

wading

This is the second time I've waded naked into these waters. The first in broad daylight, a baptismal ritual. The first cleansing from love, the second falling into. With, and alone - in oppositions of literal and figurative.

The first; dragging him in with me to escape the shift of the years, but very much in my own orchestrated realm. I am so good at that. I instigated, I decided, I enacted, I fulfilled, I regurgitated it back out. I watched him squirm in the hours that followed, coy around the campfire, gauche as his parents anchored ashore the next day. Messages unanswered, him being too young to understand the notion of play - especially from my female end.

And this time, by my own proximity and with joined heads. I have confessed my secret to those with me but in terms that bear no weight for them. They only know forevers, ongoings. The water holds my gushing heart; my body feels lithe with love. It speaks to me throughout the night, crashing: "I know, I know."

I'm glad it knows.

A pod of dolphins swim past us, mum is squealing with feigned delight - this is the perfect story to impart in weeks to come. I'm quiet with love, much in the way that I was when I became awash with bloodflood in the carpark of 2013. Where I sewed myself together and picked him and I apart. A mistake to be repeated.

You've the same triangles as those three, but you know the geometry of yours. And for that, I already love you.

puddled

In the shower. Red hair sits hatched over my wrists, the strands like opened veins. Draped perfectly to demonstrate my anatomy, or at least as imagined; an indication of where my head would like to be: swimming swirling down the drain with the water dirtied by my skin. So much of me has slid down the drain in my lifetime. You could probably produce a life-sized sculpture from the parts of my body that have evaded me - my hair, my eyelashes, my skin flakes, pimple pus. My saliva into others' mouths.

I recall your forearms; their huge, vertical carvings that wield memories of your best friend running two kilometers to the beach to find you in fully-fledged panic. I had only just met you both and had no idea how to help. I probably couldn't have done anything to help. I sat at home bewildered. I tried to cry and couldn't.

Eighteen months ago I walked into Levin town, and thought how easy it would be to become part of the train. I could press myself into the steel and leave traces of me on the tracks, leaving no trace. I didn't feel like a person. I didn't feel like myself. I wasn't myself. I was the insides of you, a part of your organs and their revolting chaos - subject to your self-abuse and adopting it myself. As if I hadn't already swallowed enough into my own lungs.

Sometimes when I'm driving, I think of setting my route to chance. Especially on the motorway. But I worry I'd only sit again, this time forever, and that would be worse. I'm not sure if that idea floats around my head because you suggested it when I was sixteen. Before I had my licence, I berated you for it. And now I am it.

When I'm in high places, I feel like I could jump off them and my body would never touch the ground. I told you this on Friday night as we leaned off the building without barriers. I think there's a term for this feeling but I can't remember it.

One time, I said out loud that suicide is something everyone must have thought about at some stage. Not necessarily seriously wanted, but considered the possibility of. You said it had never crossed your mind. I felt like someone had prised my eyelids wide apart with their fingernails.

dreaming of sleep

All the bodies that were ever present on this earth are still here on this earth. Body-less bones sit strewn across the land, underneath its skin; or are pelted into dust and carried whistling along desert air.

The only bodies not still here on earth are some belonging to astronauts. But mostly, the earth is a vast gravesite. It absorbs the bodies living here, continually; it feeds on them and then feeds them back to us. We are sustaining ourselves via long-distance cannibalism.

All the bodies that ever existed are still here.

When I die, I will join them - all those bodies held captive by our God mother earth. One of them will be me. Maybe it will be soon. I feel my flesh weary enough to become voluntarily battered. The lumps of me are gravitating towards the outside edges of me, trying to escape each other. My body doesn't even want to hold itself together, or to hold me inside of itself any longer. It's too exhausting. All of me wants to lie down alongside the world's many billion other skeletons. It would be so easy to lie still and reset a while, rest a while, rest white.

All the world's bodies are lullabying me to sleep. They mouth wordless words gently into my eyes, lips curled around my sockets, a few hours into each day. I begin living and then I am tired, and they are so courteous beckoning me to sleep. They are the earth's hosts, recruiting permanent guests. Most people don't have ears, but I've spoken their language since I was eleven. I hear their invite. I'm ready to lie down.

trip #8

All the things that have manifested are

ugly. (but they are beautiful at the same time). 

And they are not so different
from what I know of myself
in the light. 

I'm the same but with a new opened channel

to articulate it all, or rather:

the mode by which I output

becomes unlimited,

  ideas are free to flow, just as they need.

even here, now in this morning-after writing.

That's why wrath for self and/other 

were made from June, 

though I'd intended something different -

because I had opened.

and fortunately I stayed opened long enough
to pray the pretty pictures of my head

onto the others' bodies

and they danced the dance that was made in me,

they told everyone that which I couldn't speak,

not for lack of ability or words,

but for fear.

That tiny 'Fraid which resides in me,

she underpins everything -

she's still hanging around. 

stile

Unexpectedly, you walked into my ungodly nightmare. You lurched me from the haunted table at which I was sitting - an abrupt upheaval back into 4am Earth. You gripped me at the shoulders and said, urgently, "Get out now."

I woke with true anxiety. Cast in the moon's sheets, I tried to stay conscious. I kept slipping back to that dangerous place, numerous times, each time being startled alive again by your warning. I felt straddled between two worlds.

I gripped rocks into my body. I shone some artificial light into my cornea because I've heard that tells your brain to stay awake. It was 4am and it was dark. I thought, 'The sun will rise in two hours. That's a long time to stay awake.' No-one was home. I remembered when I was young and some unknown sight was shaking my bed from its end. I spoke into the darkness: "You're not welcome here. You do not have permission to be here. Please leave, now."

I think it left. Not for good. But away.

You also left.

When I woke with the sun, all the details had dripped out of me. Or maybe, the moon had siphoned them out as it lowered itself past the horizon. I had a shell of where I'd been sitting at the base of my skull but not much more. Though I could see your face, gripping mine with its sight and feeding its words into my ears.

future nostalgia

The full moon reminds me of howling through your sheets. It's draped over me like the train of some ornate, luxurious dress - and indeed I did luxuriate in the moonlight of you: Intermittent intensity bearing a metallic cobalt hue. I liked our brevity; the pocketedness of our meetings. Little capsules of time that had space to breathe between them, whilst all-encompassing in and of themselves.

The moon bled a soft burgundy warning over your face. Dampening the blue. A last waning, I somehow knew. You were beautiful enough for me to be content with your brief appearance.

There's a little part of you still residing in me. I'm sure. It smells like summer at the fading end of summer. It looks like persistent winter tan lines ridiculous enough to be churned into "cute". It loiters in the park, marvelling at the chlorella earth and azure sky. It has the face of Anakiwa in a record-cold August. It grabs onto youth with innocuously venomous fingertips and taps itself against the floorboards of basement buildings. It anticipates a future of rushing lungs and twisted heartbeats; that December rain-earth smell and nights with the covers kicked off.

I wish my whole life could be made of these moments. I'd be satisfied without continuity. I'd have the constant of change to hold me down, to ground me into the ground, to anchor the weight of stability into me.

cricket

I drove you home because you disgusted me. I couldn't handle the thought of waking up with your pale, wiry body in my bed. In my bed.

I felt annoyed that you didn't want the lamp light on. Your kissing me on the balcony was horrifically cliche, boring, impatient. Your hand on my knee within five minutes of meeting me was infuriatingly boring and impatient, and your impatience to get home at an ungodly hour made me feel cheated of my desire to revel in my intoxication. You stole everything I love about fleeting trysts: the conversation, the departure from sanity, the meeting of bodies. I resented you for it, so I insisted on driving you home. You insisted on feeble excuses.

Your maleness seemed pathetic to me. I flinched not with vulnerability but with voracious anger when you reached between my legs as we walked home, because you were uninvited. How dare you. And still, I let you loom over me. I sincerely believed that once we undressed, it would be fine. That like others, our bodies would match even if our heads didn't. I was unable to fathom that anyone - anything - could be as grotesque and dissatisfying as you were. As always, I overestimate people. I couldn't help but laugh feeling your wrist's poorly-suffocated retraction, as your hand crept under my long, lissom hair and stumbled over the shaved undercut. I imagine you are the sort of person who would have resented the hairs over my pubic bone but imagined some fantasy to combat them in your mind.

"God, how long has it been since you had sex?" I asked, as you breathed your disgusting air all over the space in front of me.

"Two weeks," he said.

"Shit, and I thought I was bad at three..."

He raised his voice. "TWO, I said!"

"Yeah, exactly.. and I thought I was behaving desperately," said I.

Eight always defaults to humiliating people when she finds herself in a situation she doesn't want to take responsibility for. I had a choice. I made the wrong one. Then I rectified it best I could.

I drove you home because you disgusted me. I'd rather sleep alone than alongside self-involved, invasive hunger.

post-meditated

When I open my eyes afterwards, the world is washed in a metallic cyan. I'm that sleepy kind of alert which you feel after sharing skin with another person. I can hear the world with immense clarity: the silence of empty space amongst the gentle wave-like crash of cars, the creaking of swings holding small bodies in the playground next door. The surface of me is breath-held still against the bright white air. Blood and atoms are rushing through my insides. I am an Arctic stillness with a powerful undercurrent. I am potential and possibility. I am with only myself, and myself is embedded in the world. 

return to paradise

It's 5.45am on a Saturday and someone's trying to jump off Bond St. Bridge. It's for real this time, not because we wrote it into the script. He's not even drunk. He's almost smiling. Welcome home to Auckland.

The airport shuttle drives past and I think, surely the iron-blue uniforms inching towards him are only encouraging his defiant, almost laughing fingers to gently lift themselves from the condensation-soaked handrail. Reaching towards the transient car bonnets conveyor-belting along the dewy tar seal lanes below.

There is no depression in New Zealand, ladies and gentlemen.

A tourist sitting in front of me marks the sign of the cross over their own body, as though they themselves are the one destined for great things. Their partner points out any slightly interesting sight  - houses, parks (there's no Skytower here) - to distract them both from a weighted first impression of Aotearoa's grey slump of dawn sunshine.

like me, please

"Of course you're beautiful," I tell him. "You're sixteen and you're drunk."

He shifts his chin higher, hearing sarcasm despite my subordinate sincerity.

I smile at his inebriated grab towards indignation. I  remember being beautiful too, though the peak of mine came around the better parts of 19 and the more jarred parts of 22 - the former when this wrongly-accused pseudo-lover inhabited the room next door, and the latter when the night skies were dancing in spite of my paralysis.

Sixteen's proud of pushing double digits. He thinks he's beyond us. And sure, I was before the starting line at his age. Not that I cared. I was in love with other things: the idea of dancing, paper-thin hymns and words. Though now - contrary to his suggestion - I'm his equal, at least. Knowing is my dancing. Exhaling is about as holy as I get. My poems are spoken in contorted flesh. I don't schedule my trysts as he has to, and I don't need to steal phones for an excuse to run into the darker corners of Aotea Square.

He's got it all back to front. Including my intentions. I don't fuck everyone I share ice cream with. The pseudo-lover shifts along the seat and is accused of doing what we've denied. Sixteen laughs when I suggest it's him who's being looked at. Wrong, of course, but closer to the truth than my own skin.

"Is it because I'm beautiful?" he says smugly.

'Yes,' I say. I'm not taking the piss. "You're sixteen and you're drunk. Of course you're beautiful."

I envy him his tangled little head. I've a vicious wave of nostalgia. And yet I know there are reasons I have chosen to ground my own atoms. Perhaps I have grounded them too much.

So, on Saturday night, I go back. Not very successfully, but I'm there. I encourage others to do the same. Forcefully. I miss the first hour of sleep waiting for the future to repeat itself. Then I miss the first hour of the day recovering from the wine I didn't drink. I manage to steep myself in some short history in the afternoon. I visit the supermarket as per tradition, former lover in hand but not held.

Then I write about it.

September

It's difficult to believe that in the last moments of life before, I arrived home from your bed, shoes in hand, head full of beauty and went for a run. I ran further than I'd ever run (at that time) - right through the Domain, across Grafton Bridge, down K' Road and right back around to my shitty decaying flat that occupied space beneath the Khyber Pass on-ramp. It was as if I was fuelled by charging overnight with you, squeezed into a single bed like my best friend and I used to in high school, when we were smaller and bigger all at once. Comfort in the lack of space.

I really did think that was a beginning - and it was, in some ways. The beginning of the next segment of my highly-categorized life, the one that came limping out of After Graduating and went crawling into "Outward Bound". Feeling hands-first into The Unknown.

Everything anyone ever wanted was felt in that morning. And lost two mornings later. Hopes and dreams. Naivety. Childhood. What do you want to be when you grow up? and Que sera, sera, whatever will be, will be. The future's not ours to see, but I disagree with that. I've the best tint in my glasses. They show me the unseen, the unheard and the unfelt.

Dale

half your life ago

was one-third ago mine

you cross your legs to pack your pipe

rolling your spliff with concentration

you take my clothes off 

outside on the deck

with classical music accidentally 

and a view you photographed earlier

you buy me jellybeans and beers

you say you want to live here

you check in that I love you, 

"eh?" 

You know.

and you Admire me,

very seriously --

you sit legs all tucked up under me

like I've never seen any others,

with me

entangled in me

you save the last chip for me

You stand in line for me.

you hold my hand across the passenger seat

you keep your shoes on 'til the last minute

you let me drive.

you push me off the jetty and

into the lake 

you put your underwear on immediately 

after sex, you go for a walk 

alone

you pour me a glass of orange juice

every time you have one

without asking if I want ...

you talk to me in a 

concerningly compelling French accent, you send me

photographs of yourself with swallows

you talk to me during sex

you touch me in public

-- and refrain from touching me in public

you bring me acid on your 

tongue, while I'm playing 

volleyball with my friends

you do the dishes

you cut my hair

you soap me up

you dry me off

you worry about your hair

you sit a bit too far away from me

to eat your bacon

in the morning

we fall asleep to Deftones

holding hands

/not holding hands but

touching feet

you buy me a silver key and a

rainbow robot

you carve 

slightly incoherent messages

into my notebook

amongst my ambitions

you tell me I've

Changed you. 

I lead you around the supermarket,

semi-blind, half

seeing

I play you music

I tell you things

I wear my hair up !

I omit "I" from your poems until the last moments

I wonder --

and I feel: happy,

about us.

We are now.

We are present.

We are here.

We are love.

We are 

here, now

memories 

in action.