In your wide-eyed wake I’ll be walking dark streets, burying my face in flowers. Leaning over fences, nuzzling inscrutable night-colours, my head lolling on its stem like a too-heavy bloom.
Perhaps it isn’t fair to take myself out on other people’s flowers; it is a grey area, etiquette-wise.
Insects multiplying on my page turn confused circles in the blank spaces and lose themselves in a labyrinth of words. They are looking for sweetness in silly places; like Mona they are on a mission to sniff the sun, to suck it up, no one has told them that their instincts are imperfect.
You read me Mona Minim and the Smell of the Sun in bed one afternoon while the rain met an incoming tide. Immersed in soft layers of mauve and grey, swept up in an ant’s imaginary quest, we floated out on a raft of story. The fat-bellied hills sank back on their haunches and creaked with laughter when we came unmoored, as if it served us right to be all at sea. The hills are of a different generation. People say you can learn a lot by watching nature, but I don’t believe it. I feel like nature is watching me-not-learning.
You never had the patience to read in bed: there were always things to do, like the future. I must’ve tied you down, that day, and when the knots pulled tight and the rain came and the tide took us out with it, I tried to fashion sails from sheets of story (sorry Mona, but there was no sun to smell). Those tore and I tried again with bed sheets. But the day held its breath as stubbornly as a child making a point and my makeshift sails failed to capture a breeze.
You raised your eyebrows until they echoed the sceptical line of the hills.
A potted geranium, red of course. Put upon. You’ve gone. Spiritual. Sensible. Stay. I understand. I understand especially that you won’t. Stay then. Perhaps there’s still time to tunnel in elsewhere, perform a subterranean expansion of that endangered habitat otherwise known as our common ground. We are under few illusions. The cut flowers arranged so carefully on your window sill speak volumes. So then. Stay then. Say then, say what this means for us. For me, especially. I’ve never seen you blush but you’re already red, my potted sweetheart: the sun has bleached the instructions you came with, water and position, suits a shady spot, or not, and the photograph of you in full bloom. How we wither or flourish in each other’s microclimate. This is going too far.
You never blush but on bad days your eyes are red. There have been no bad days lately and no good ones either.
Perhaps it isn’t fair to take myself out on other people’s flowers; it is a grey area, etiquette-wise.
Insects multiplying on my page turn confused circles in the blank spaces and lose themselves in a labyrinth of words. They are looking for sweetness in silly places; like Mona they are on a mission to sniff the sun, to suck it up, no one has told them that their instincts are imperfect.
You read me Mona Minim and the Smell of the Sun in bed one afternoon while the rain met an incoming tide. Immersed in soft layers of mauve and grey, swept up in an ant’s imaginary quest, we floated out on a raft of story. The fat-bellied hills sank back on their haunches and creaked with laughter when we came unmoored, as if it served us right to be all at sea. The hills are of a different generation. People say you can learn a lot by watching nature, but I don’t believe it. I feel like nature is watching me-not-learning.
You never had the patience to read in bed: there were always things to do, like the future. I must’ve tied you down, that day, and when the knots pulled tight and the rain came and the tide took us out with it, I tried to fashion sails from sheets of story (sorry Mona, but there was no sun to smell). Those tore and I tried again with bed sheets. But the day held its breath as stubbornly as a child making a point and my makeshift sails failed to capture a breeze.
You raised your eyebrows until they echoed the sceptical line of the hills.
A potted geranium, red of course. Put upon. You’ve gone. Spiritual. Sensible. Stay. I understand. I understand especially that you won’t. Stay then. Perhaps there’s still time to tunnel in elsewhere, perform a subterranean expansion of that endangered habitat otherwise known as our common ground. We are under few illusions. The cut flowers arranged so carefully on your window sill speak volumes. So then. Stay then. Say then, say what this means for us. For me, especially. I’ve never seen you blush but you’re already red, my potted sweetheart: the sun has bleached the instructions you came with, water and position, suits a shady spot, or not, and the photograph of you in full bloom. How we wither or flourish in each other’s microclimate. This is going too far.
You never blush but on bad days your eyes are red. There have been no bad days lately and no good ones either.
You started singing; just like that you leaned forward and hung your head and started singing, improvising a blue and gold mosaic of my shattered meanings. You were immaculate in that moment, you were the deepest surprise, and inhaling your singing stung like hitting a snow-melt river from a height.
I don’t need flowers to be amputated and shrouded in cellophane to know that you love me. You love me, but probably not enough. I know that I can be uncompromising, fingering my pocketful of impossible asks. You know it too but uncompromising isn’t the kind of word you use. Mellifluous. That’s the kind of word nobody uses, but still it comes to me like a mental tic most Saturday nights, as glass shatters on asphalt in the dark.
Walking dark streets: mellifluous, uncompromising. No more sniffing discourteously at the sun, nudging up against other people’s roses. Go home and study the Penguin Compendium of Floriography. Or sit down on a dark park bench with scant regard for personal safety and teach my phone to predict geranium, because that’s the kind of word I need more often.
Thirsty circumstances find me face down in the bellies of flowers, broken-necked, but I do. Sea. Land.
I don’t need flowers to be amputated and shrouded in cellophane to know that you love me. You love me, but probably not enough. I know that I can be uncompromising, fingering my pocketful of impossible asks. You know it too but uncompromising isn’t the kind of word you use. Mellifluous. That’s the kind of word nobody uses, but still it comes to me like a mental tic most Saturday nights, as glass shatters on asphalt in the dark.
Walking dark streets: mellifluous, uncompromising. No more sniffing discourteously at the sun, nudging up against other people’s roses. Go home and study the Penguin Compendium of Floriography. Or sit down on a dark park bench with scant regard for personal safety and teach my phone to predict geranium, because that’s the kind of word I need more often.
Thirsty circumstances find me face down in the bellies of flowers, broken-necked, but I do. Sea. Land.
