I want Fantasy
I’m in a black-purple mood tonight. My head is a beetle’s back, a monochrome night. Bonelight, moonlight. You can try and follow, but the cats have business of their own, and I follow around corners.
My shadow creep-claws the way.
My eyes are restless as my feet, it’s not something I wonder at too much. Intro to outro, extro to invert and back again. Keep the streets for me.
I was an introvert raised by extroverts. An endless parade of parties and sorority-like gags, dinners and hiding behind floor-length curtains with my nose in a book. Hiding with the cats, down by the mud-gullies and creeks, wading and climbing trees, while they sipped tea and talked Nothing.
Lonely child, now come with me
Into the wood, the dark to find
The light shall fail within your eyes;
The sweep of love is only lies.
I did not fall, nor did I stare
But found the path that we all know
Now tremble, Time, for all is fair
In love and lust, and bonelight glow.
…My darling, the story has yet begun to take hold.
Abide with me, in
Peace (something like it)
Through the mirror, the cracks
Of time, the broken watch
The sentry fallen asleep
His round not yet done, but Time
Is an angular thief
And we are but stickmen in his gaze
A puppet, a clown, a fool
A black rose, blue
A thought, turned to you
A mental shroud, an illness tau(gh)t
With what must be, with all, without.
Come. Walk. With. Me.
No one to point the finger
It’s just you and me, and the rain.
As it once was, before our shared time spun away in toxic-beauty droplets. No more the red kites counted, the hikes through all weathers, our faces burned bronze with time spent alone and together and apart.
It was only one hour ago, it was all so different then. Five years and counting nothing, because that put it to a timeline, a calendar – an End Game. We were younger then, stupid with the world and lust and red wine. We found ourselves in the face of shared life, on and offline, down rail line, up streets fine; lost ourselves in over-priced shopping and London roads and rain-filled afternoons quietly asleep, dreaming of a time we’d be published and famous and aloof and awake and over the hill. Never married. Never childbirth. Never divergence, of thoughts and things that mattered … until they ceased to matter. Until I couldn’t hold your eye. Until you couldn’t keep my feet still.
I grieve for you. You live in me.
The future is a blue rose, full of mystery, the unobtainable and the longing, the shared ice and anecdotes and memories frozen in a place none can follow. We’ll be buried as best friends and confidantes, but my soul will wander, as ever it did in our waking dream of real life. No one would riot for less.
You kiss my mouth.
Hell is here.
You were my All, and thought and dream and time, until none of these seemed apart or a part of myself. Until this year broke us. Until our shared time faded out in mosquito bites of cash flow and supermarket runs and broken hearts and shattered trust. Did I dream this belief, or did I believe this dream?
Grieve for us both, world, and move on. That’s the way of things; when friends become lovers, and back again. We drank to ourselves then, as now, as ever.
Distance doesn’t count for anything, unless it’s in the heart. Our hills have been climbed, our storms outrun. The Beacon will always be there, waiting. The Downs will probably call us back someday. We’ll pass the barrows of your forefathers, and laugh at the times we fell down rabbit holes and mistook sanitation for cigars and fell asleep with our mouths catching flies. And recall those old-gold afternoons by the wretched train station, when I listened for the Mini’s whine, and the sounds of a weekend-life just beginning. No, distance meant nothing. We surpassed it.
But when together, we couldn’t overcome distance of the heart, the wandering mind. So it goes. Five years, to me, is a long time … a relationship’s lifetime. Not one memory regrettable; even the hard times were bittersweet pills. We learned ourselves in the face of the world, and each other; though we chose our own times to look away. Now it’s mine, and it’s for good, and somehow that’s OK. Friends part with tears and a smile, not mouths of hate.
I’ll send you North, you’ll keep me here.
I love without capacity. You love without remorse. Somehow, it worked; and through the nightmares and flashbacks and illness, the silent rage and writer’s block and doubts of fidelity, from that first daft kareoke night (when we cried together from laughing) to running for the train, to Evenstar and swords and bad emails and Love Will Tear Us Apart, in the pub that’s since burned to the ground and lies as an ashen stub of its former glory… we part as friends.
There’ll always be the Downs, the barrows and the red kites.
Rain is Coming
That’s how it feels.
I can’t get enough of Sam Baker’s new album, “Say Grace.” It has the spreading wings of autumn that I live beneath these days. Not sure if I’m huddled here to keep out of the rain, or if they’re suffocating me. Such a dark place to be, but warm and safe. I’m numbing myself from the inside out, to deflect whatever else comes about this year. Wont’t be caught by surprise Again.
There are some things that can be guarded against, where others slip out of our control. I can throw myself back into writing the novel, get into that mindset of twisted fairytales and thickly clustered brambles; the nightly runs to the quarry under a bone-blood moon, and blue roses growing on the graves of those loved ones who leave behind living souls in torment. Blue roses speak for eternity, keep that desolate feeling of the Only One, alive… Blessing and curse, high on thorns and strung up in blood, in a gorgeous sky.
I’m so tired inside, and at the same time very much awake. Dark times at work, darker days, as the year dials down. This is the time of the suicide. Precursor to a festive season when lights strangle the thoughts of those in no mood to celebrate.
The wind is keening outside, and my soul echoes it today. It’ll pass, like it always does.
I don’t mean to be rude. To be cold, savage, bitter and sweet all at once. It’s my panhandle winter, come early. It’s how I’m made, what I turn into, and the beautiful brutality of it is, I can’t even say it’s something I like or control.
A warm heart, a warm house, not a wind-burned prairie farmhouse; good whisky, and the smile of a friend.
It’s not self-pity, so much as self-rage. A low burning, sullen thing inside, not wanting to become bitter as the wind outside. It’s about seeing my now-ex partner of five years disappear off my horizon for months on end, maybe years, given what our lifestyles are like. It keens through me like that once-was blade. We don’t realize what we have until it’s gone. The love left a while back, but he’s a constant presence in my life; a ready pair of arms for an embrace after a poxy day at work, like today. He’s kindness, effortless, despite my shitty attitude; and a grey complacency I always promised myself I wouldn’t fall into.
Promises are mundane things, especially made to the self.
He’s torn my soul ragged in his own way, especially at the start. We didn’t know each other until 18 months had passed and we’d begun living together, and then … It’s the presence in the room, the ready humour, the consistency. It’s becoming accustomed to these things, after years of being alone, out of preference and necessity and isolation.
It’s trying to concentrate, and hearing every tic, every breath, every thought. It’s finding ways to become angry for no reason, irritable. It’s hating yourself, and him, and the world, for not putting things in the right order that you once thought they should fall into. Marriage was never on the cards, nor kids… And I find myself looking into the new-coin faces of the latter these days, and knowing a bullet hole in my chest where none existed before. What might have been, for what could still be, if I got my shit together and my body didn’t clap out on me too soon.
No. I’m a writer, not a mother. A traveler, not caught in the reins of any one place for long; not trapped in the eyes and heart of another, who might just make these things so much more appealing, and hold me still, and know the nightmares that keep me awake and in need of the night to walk in, the rum to drown in.
No one needs that kind of shit, on either side.
So says my head. My heart begs to differ.
I’m a girl and child and woman and ex-lover and friend, a writer and a daemon and so much more besides. Such a feeling of Self these days, it frightens the hell out of me. So much more aware. So wryly ironic with it, laughing in my own face, cutting my lip with these teeth. Hating the changed figure, while embracing it as something novel, independent; the final evolution of my body, perhaps to keep it alive a bit longer than was expected.
Hating distance more than anything in my life, except perhaps my reactions to it. Silence. Changing moods with leaves. Whoever heard of a writer without words, without meaning, because it got lost en route around fear of Self?
Well. Just about everyone. Get over yourself, girl.
Letting go is easier than clinging on tight.
So my head tells me.
My heart begs to differ.
The year will end. We’ll sing Auld Lang Syne, and dance on the rocking tables to Fairytale of New York, and things will be put right over a midnight whisky. And I’ll find a peace in turning my face to the new year, the new raw wind that chafes off the old skin, sets my eyes watering to clear them of old dreams. I look forward to new beginnings in the same way that picking up a new pen and setting it to a fresh page, is cauterizing.
In the meantime, I abide, and listen, and huddle up with my back to that acorn-bitter wind, and love my friends and miss the ones gone, and find ways to keep warm. And watch the horizon, because you just never know.
Oh this is passing, is all that she said.
Going Far
When distance measures in a smile
A frozen word, a nowhere child
A message gone astray in time
When no one knew that you were mine
The world can’t seem to let us go
It strives to force the public face
And we, the players that we are
Can’t help but rise towards the chase
I wander still beneath your stars
I’m somewhere near, but going far
And nothing beats the hardest here
Than love inside a name, and fear
The in-between and where-without
Is living life inside a lie
And nothing stands a chance in time
Without the fear and love inside.
Borrowed and Blue
This poem is a play on the marriage rhyme “Four Somethings”, thought to bring luck to a bride if she were to wear the following artifacts. It also works as a ward against infertility caused by the Evil Eye.
“Something old,
Something new,
Something borrowed,
Something blue”
It has a direct link to my novel, “End of the Line,” in which a missing girl’s diary turns up more than the dark fairytales she left behind.
No One secret can stay buried forever, and a nightmare may play on a loop for as long as the secret lives.
Something broken
Something true
Something no one
Wore for you
Somehow fallen
By the way
Thriving on
The tide of day
Rising shadows
Falling sun
Through the wild
We twist and run
Thickly cluster
Bramble snare
Tried and trapped
With wire and hair
Flowing hem
And bloody thigh
Blue the moon
Within your eye
Black to white
As red to grey
Silent in
Your heart the grave
Morning swallow
Thick and cold
Torn the hand
You long to hold
Smallest face
And blindest eye
Blue the moon
The Rose, the Lie.
celenagaia 