Daylights after,
the cold lights were easier to touch
than the remnants
of seas on your bodies.

Swallowing the watery air.
Remembering days of swaying current
and ocean breeze.

These studio lights
are harsh.

I judge you.

White Bright;
Tracing the contours of Earth,
Birth,

remnants of sky and star before you
let a reaching hand
impale you,
press you down to paper pen ink
preserve you.

In sheafs of forgotten words
and ambivalent prose.

Beneath breath you are
pale, placid;
cracks sealed into your
Venus smile.

Statue sweetheart, singing soft
in your plaster heart.

Spiderspun into snapshots I reach
webs tangling into your touch thought theft
of another moment.

Meld into you
into me.

Quietly, while you slept,
I took a chisel
cracked open your chest
reached into the ribcage

and plucked out a dream.

Sweetie, I swear -

ii.

I could have promised you.

December mornings and the rainblotted sun

spreading white like the hospital lights. 

Glare.

This world’s bleeding, sweetheart.

Caught up in the afterbirth of weak promises and bandages.

iii.

Today I held your hand.

Fluttering;

With its own heartbeat

pressed against my palm.

I think I called your name then,

softly.

But if you heard me calling

you didn’t reply.

iv. 

I like your paper touch. 

Delicate,

Origami Sweetheart. 

Day after day I fold cranes,

dreaming of wings folded

beneath the canvas of your back. 

v.

Mornings after,

I watch your eyes.

Butterfly blink.

There is only so much I can do,

awaiting your flight;

Watching your iris

welcome the darkness.

vi.

The afternoons linger by the door.

I find myself

folding up your shirtsleeves

to write poetry on your arm.

The nurses do not question my requests for ethanol.

The words just melt away.

vii.

The sunlight paints patterns on your skin.

Look, a cat.

A bumbling bear.

Squint now.

That could be a bird.

Dancing portraits.

In silence,

the search is so much

harder.

Ah, see.

There’s a heart.

viii.

Waiting became so much easier

after I stopped believing.

Disappearing was like breath.

In, out.

Remember,

forget.

ix.

The evening I left it had just stopped raining.

The roofs lapped at the weeping air,

trailed lines of moisture down the windows.

7 pm.

The taxi driver said how do you do and I looked at him,

said I’m fine, sir.

I’m fine. 

As I was yours
and you mine
in earnest
in dance,
footstep four five six
down the borders of a
dream.
Quietly,
forgetting another
morning.

Because you hurt me
and I let me be hurt.
I wanted to hold your hand forever
and press it to my chest
where you could count the rhythm
of my feeling.
The heart twisting into motion
intricate feel and
touch.

Blink.

You, you were the minute
that touched my shoulder,
the thirty-second voice against my ear,
and the milli-nano-micro smile.
The kiss that bloomed from your lips
Brief, fleeting, refusing to be

Grasped.

enticing the astronaut

with silence. I was caught

in the bubbled air and Nasa suits,

breathing weightlessness, zero gravity.

There. My heart against my chest, beating

out molecules of feeling, baubles and murmurs

ricocheting off galaxies, atmosphere stratosphere

troposphere, falling against you in sunlight,

mirroring it the way you do at midnight,

blooming your soft white smile amidst

constellations. Quietly, trailing the

starlight across you, memories

of you before your heart

became stone.

  Pull me in as
a moth to a
flame.

as the world slipped into the sombre.

Petal words bloomed as snow,
seeped into the autumn contours of your flower palm
like dew; bluish delicate, reverie.

Remembering the earth.

She breathes, gentle,
cast into shadows of the subconscious
dreaming days of blue skies, saffron;
mornings of sunflowers and fields of stars.