I am bathed in the memories of a thousand winter nights
when the cold lay dead beneath our feet in snowless slumber.Do you ever long for my frost steeled lips to again open?
Your dreams are a purgatory. Do not try to live in their bitter expiation
my darling,
destroyed as you are.For this frozenness can be broken by ash and tears.
Draw a child’s heart in the lilliputian escapades of cold breath
that creep from the gap between your teeth.
You never buried me.
Girl, let your worries go.
Send them off like doves on a wedding day
and in return
receive hope.
Don’t hurt yourself. Find the sunlight
and when it’s raining
remember that sooner or later,
there’ll be an arc of colours
illuminating the grey
You’re too innocent
to be wrecked
too beautiful
to waste away.
Girl, let your worries go
and catch a moonbeam in your hand
don’t spend your life
with only your tears for company.
I love you this much. Can you see? I’m stretching my arms like a worn rubber band from east to west.
You probably haven’t noticed. I know, you are busy checking the time or practising melodic minors. I know.
You are too busy, I know. But I love you.
This is a random jumble of ‘The Garden of Proserpine’, ‘Drunk’ and ‘Lego House’ by Ed Sheeran, street conversations and other random snippets. Oh, and also a tiny bit of Gotye, and some Elvish. I can’t make sense of it myself.
A piece I wrote in class; we were given the starter “it was black”. I guess I kind of exploded with this.
This February fourteenth
my mum does not have a valentine.She has no one to give her a dozen red roses,
let alone one
instead she sits at the table with a coffee and the cat
browsing the jobs section of the paper
and twirling three wedding rings about her fingers.Her Red Door perfume is running out.
Just yesterday morning I saw her holding it up to the light
as if you could trap a soul in a bottle and
my dad’s was sparkling in that oneThis Valentine’s Day.
My mum is neither single nor taken-She goes to sleep on one side of the bed
(with fists curled around the silence)
and saves the other
for someone long gone.
(Anyone want to help me out with a title?)
I can never imagine myself being heartbroken. First, my heart would have to be someone else’s, something for them to break. I don’t know how I would go about giving someone my heart. Would it hurt? How could I trust them with something so precious?
How could I become part of someone else; give myself over to them; when I am not even fully my own?
When I finally opened my eyes into what you might call ‘consciousness,’ I realised three things. One, that I was not upright, not in the slightest; I was in fact dangling from a set of monkey bars. Two, there was some sort of sweet music coming from nowhere, the stuff of candy shops, that I would find grossly plastic had I been in any other mindset. And three, that facing me and also upside down was a dreadlocked, somewhat handsome middle aged man with a bandanna and a gun.
There were many things out of place, but the biggest was that I was perfectly content.
I didn’t know what to make of this obscure happening, but I seemed to be in a state of blissful ignorance. Although I had a sudden urge to know…
“Captain Jack Sparrow, not in the least at your service, miss. The ‘captain’ bit is vitally important, don’t forget that. I did have a ship, but I seem to have misplaced her. Beautiful thing, too. Can’t say I miss her, even though I should. I’m a pirate. And you?”
There was a part of me that felt as though I should know this ‘pirate’ from something. I didn’t have an encyclopaedia on hand which left me rather vulnerable as to the knowledge of anything, really, but I decided to introduce myself to avoid this self-proclaimed captain’s gun. “Er, Kate. Um… fourteen, possibly. Nothing much important. I’ve read the dictionary twice. I have a cat.”
Jack Sparrow looked at me as if I was under the influence of something that people in the back of my art class did. Maybe I was. “Captain,” he muttered. Great. He could read my mind, too.
“So, this cat of yours,” Captain Jack slurred as he swung his legs off the bars and landed noiselessly on a blanket of woodchips, “is he one of those coffee stained types?”
“Hmmm…” I murmured while curling myself around the playground equipment and flipping down onto the ground. “I suppose you could reckon it so.” I didn’t know what was coming out of my mouth but wasn’t worried, not even about the possibility of having lost half my brain cells from the inhalation of that sweet, sweet smoke. “Smells a bit of coffee, too. Maybe some got spilt on him when he was a kitten. Maybe it’s a birth defect. Why do you ask?”
“Because, darling,” he walked right up to me, “you’ll see everything much clearer,” he prised my glasses off my nose, “if you listen to me.” I blinked twice, but nothing was blurry. Instead, the sky was pink, the grass blue, and I was on cloud nine, dreaming, with a pirate for company.
when I was eight
I watched my parents walk away from each other
and neither one of them held out a hand for me.
I found my own way home
if that’s what you can call a place you don’t know.
my dad tried to prise his ring off his finger
but it wouldn’t give
so they were stuck together
with gold but without
a heart.
I want to sing for this world
but my voice is trapped somewhere deep
inside, buried under slackened heartstrings
longing for the key to be found for the lock
on the cage that it’s in.
