Bright, Noisy, Calm

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Bright, Noisy, Calm

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change
noun

the act of becoming different.

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CHANGE OF HEART

The night was everywhere, and I’m still sorry for the blood,
For where it flooded down into, under your nails, or clothes.
But this time I’ll admit, without apology or
The ache; it isn’t, and never will be the same.

The engine that was where I came from, combusts,
The car is on fire, pouring oil from it’s core, there is nobody at the wheel,
Dissect apart what it was, and let it keep me lonely,
Carve old names in all capitals to try and make it mean something.

The favourite cuts don’t leave, but nothing can stop them from
Decaying away. I’m walking like the gash has run dry and bored,
You can’t rely on what you cannot see.
And the crowding of this ambivalence watches, waiting for the next act.

The museum of everything I’ve ever loved gets refurbished, painted red and
Fitted with the good carpets that I would have loved when I was around.
Why would the right time grant what you want?
If this isn’t the time of my life, then when is?

So the memory won’t be loved any less, you know who I am, and for why;
I am only, and always half of the leaver
I remember the sweat soaking through guilt,
It will never purify me; I am not afraid of that now.

I’m burning indifferently, the tide, and the timing,
Brutality, and the plasma, from the thieved yet pulsing heart.
Part of me knows I cannot rescind my growth,
I am not a cannibal, but I still cannot eat the grass, I still cannot let it go, I still cannot cross the river as it was, I still cannot believe the name on the cardiograph, and I still cannot be more than so many different waves.

The night isn’t anywhere, but I can feel my heart changing tonight.

//

Tonight’s No Good

Seeing you again, I see how soon a lot of things change,
We sit over coffee, identical cups, one aged and tinted with resolve.
And how we are, with our monstrous needs,
I would let you in on the secret of what you’d be.

I told you I have already begun to forgive myself; with the prayers
Whispered in places secret enough that you will never know.
There is a chasm someplace that knows the name of the blade
With lips red of my end.

And in a different world, somewhere with forest trees that hold on to their leaves,
I show you what troubles me without wringing my hands,
Without my gritted teeth, without my listening just to let it go,
Without my machine that leaks fumes into the conversation.

So I will feel the gravity of losing the way we are,
Finding space to give up the ghost of betraying our nature.
It is painless to want it back, so I will march the dead weight forward,
From places that I enter naively, from which I never return.

But desire is an imprecise vector; I see myself in everyone I let go,
From all of this inside of me, and to you it will only be words.
The touch is violent, at peace and on fire,
You will mistake my gently carried grief for peace.

The conversation we had is ending, the words sliding away and off of me.
You ask me when we will speak again; tonight’s no good, not tomorrow, nor eternity.

//

Vertigo / Sleep

I seem to remember one November the most,
All feedback and angels shining through dimming streetlights,
Met with my eyes lingering on my hands and the walls between mirrors in my house.
It had been a slower end to the year, a kind of death
You feel only on the cusp of meeting something primal, and feared,
Holidays now hallowed and haunted as inertia weakens your balance.
Maybe it’s restlessness in gashing through flashbacks.
As a child you hoarded uprooted grass and embraces in the palms of your hands,
Never acting out, an argument was the end of the world, like it was the last time you were able to shout.

Lethargy took your guilt, monotropy took your vision,
Carved and sculpted around, infected amidst the clay, self-adjusted to what was almost beautiful.
And still, at times, their shows on you, a bruise of a seaside trip,
Splotches of previously unmarked knife-work now bursting open with colour,
Your skin now hid what was vivid and liminal about who you were.

Broken muscle, tearing new movement right off the bone,
Childhood tired, maturity begging to go back home.
To be more than the edge of a change, no history, no pulse,
Entangled particles, forever changing, and dying, at once.

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Pulsar Tourniquet / Onsra

Tonight, I’m looking up at perches on buildings strayed around my walk home,
Worrying my reminiscence grows to be like a prayer.
Entire episodes of time still resemble the shadow dance of
Your transient profiles, etched in a hallowed, vandalised cursive on Manchester train lines.

Yesterday, all this understanding was the want to be
A small part of the universe that was good to you.
So indifference and a wristwatch would force me to swallow my ache,
Channelling that in the next life I won’t feel this way so deeply.

Tomorrow, out in the middle of a vast ocean, pools up flickering lights and sparks
Of the bliss that chases after you in the summertime.
It’s just another memory, wisest reasoning would say,
But if this love remembers me, then why should I care if everything else forgets?

Forever, to miss the talking in circles, testing of our patience,
Even with views from an 18th- or 33rd- or 74th-story apartment.
The sucking in my stomach, the tracing initials on your back, the oneness in the most sacred way, the lavenders planted in the place where the emptiness was and (at times) still is, the resonance and scraps of how you’d say the most mundane words, forgetting things I used to think I’d never forget to make room for it, the pulsing of our forever story half-jokingly taped together, and the dark, swallowing singularity, when my electromagnetic field surrounding your heart dissipates into a language I don’t speak, and it will be the reason we will never speak again.

There is still nothing I could ever do,
to feel close enough to you.

//

Reaching

Maybe this is a past life too,
One where I’m tangled in vines and cross-examination,
One where the scent of known perfume withers out into something diaphanous,
One where, after everything, we’re just walking each other home.

Around what’s fact, it’s the end of August, and you’re leaving too,
Even if the cursed half-moon scar tissue, dividing pain with new growth, wants us alive.
The flesh is tender and estranged from true electricity,
The sparks used to know you anywhere, partitioned back down into the environment.

I think the sunlight that is memory left you behind on purpose,
Truly formless, and without a shadow, waiting on me to let what’s waiting go.
But I am drunk on the distance; that is the unclaimed gardens hidden deep in southern lush,
You were the emperor of Babylon.

It’s raining again, the heaviest we’ve had since your weight was on mine,
Crowding me, blinding me to the cold, wing bones pressing back against one another.
The warmer July passes through, heady and different,
Holding onto where my purpose used to lie bled me out, as Christ to carpentry.

But the lust to meet that part of the countryside again is too cold,
And all of my homes are three years away.
Oh, but if you ever were to ask, I never pictured you, suitcase in hand,
You stay, tryingly nebulous, hanging around my memory, laughing, and backdropped to a Dean Blunt record.

Sunlight splashing, windows kept open, snow covers piling, forever eroded,
If this is how it goes, then I will love the ghosts I knew, but not one more time again, will I have the privilege of reaching to you.

//

7 minutes (to heaven)

You said you couldn’t sleep because the wind
Was blowing around your far-too-light and far-too-blue curtains around,
I said to close the window, and you frowned and said it was raining.
You seemed to love the rain but only for its petrichor.
A beautiful deontology in how you picked apart even the worst of weather,
Flawed and harrowingly sleep deprived; still for your morning coffee.
You never quite got it down either, too much sugar, too little heat,
Settling down was never your strong suit, I suppose,
The sweetener was in the moment.
You showed that trip down south stained you like an iodine suntan,
Enough to put you out of place from everyone else,
Enough to have me reminisce for a short time of when we were quiet, terrified and washed-out.
You hung around Cornwall after you left, even as your face was elsewhere,
The waves held a part of you, sea salt slushing like chloroform,
Swimming against the horizon-bending currents, in hopes of finding our shipwreck in tandem.
You liked to linger by my closet before we broke it off,
Still fawning, still watching me with violent-soft lust for a titled placemat and white picket fences.
Holding our 7 minutes, we spent closed and contrasted in there, all the way to heaven.

I found this old photograph of you on the Hubble telescope,
You used to shine so much brighter, you know?
But maybe that’s just me looking for the past.

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Drinking Age

There’s a knife pointed at the gaps of my ribs,
And it comes back at the time of the year it gets cold.
We haven’t spoken in years, but I see it briefly in reflections,
And it wishes me the best, wincing behind its smile.

Almost fantasy, a cave slick with youth and warped synthetic sounds
Every time I look back at you, back at you.
Witchcraft, a crystal something so ephemeral I care only to see
The refractions you splintered off into infinite timelines; our own quantum mortality

Part of me, watching the water from high places,
Part of me knows nothing I could hear could be enough.
You said you wouldn’t kill again, orbiting only like a satellite,
Heat-death held in hand, silenced like a graveyard.

I’ll find you, in blade-dance, another time, I’m sure,
This part of my love for you is called grace.
Never the same, it comes and goes, you say,
And now, just like your sharpness, everything is in its right place.

It really would be beautiful for you to have been my friend,
But real poetry waits; it waits until the end.

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Alexandria, Spring

This kind of art is meant to go up in flames, like a falling Alexandria,
Darkening the pages of the street signs lying adjacent to your new place.
But change extinguishes, with a head cocked back to the ceiling, looking for the clouds parting in apnoea.
It can’t rain all the time, and one day I’ll be leaving.

I always wondered why birds choose to fly in the same place when they could fly anywhere,
Only to realise, I still have everywhere to go.
I’ve been practising the art of stillness on a moving train, faster than the clouds in the air,
Just because there’s no way I’d rather wait than know.

You can see how the fire loved me, and the burns I’ve met,
In how we spend our days justifying inaction on the cusp of previous endeavours.
The feeling’s been gone for a while, but I still sway when I’m on my own,
Holding on to the past, the future, and the nevers.

Feeling the ache in Saharan dunes and Irish skies,
The blaze takes your voice; the cold stays your eyes.
But what was, is outside of the geometry of repetition; and decay,
Another life I’ve lived, another love that’s pulled away.

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Mars, 2010

In rise of memory, drifting amidst these lifeless things,
Like a chase-cam rolling
With the current pushed and pulled and paced out of view.
In that world, the sun would rise twice:
A smile to a star, watching you like a movie scene,
Romanticising what little youth interlocked my fingers.
I was made from bamboo, and the sweets kept
In the top drawer next to my grandmother’s washing machine,
The years taking that property from her,
And she kept dandelions in her garden to help me grow.
Cold and metallic grew the morning, time chased
At a pace I couldn’t manage to watch the fireflies with,
I started wishing it was easier; at least the music’s good.
Now the time is wasted, spiralling, sinking, rising,
Slighting with this, violent system,
And I used to be a prince of a little kingdom off the whereabouts of normalcy
What’s it to me to worry about something as tiny as the sky’s sun?
But I only see the crown on the clock nowadays
Waking a light sleeper from the warmth of early spring,
Vicarious, ethereal puppy love from all the souls in my amygdala.

So, today I will blame the beasts,
For the time that has been taken from me.

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Blind Spots / To Remain

You can go back to that old, rugged, half-witted, never-quite-enough town you lived in as a kid,
But nobody will be there, not a house cat, or a mother, or a classmate with a new name
Held concealed and in prevention to a confident growth.
But not you; you are the one that remains.

Maybe the bus colours changed, the wild and barking dogs
On your pathway home, their youth no longer having something to say.
A darkness grew around the corner shop and back alley diversions,
Yet light generates from your growth, for you are the one that remains.

New biomes feast on your childhood bedside table,
Fuel for procedurally generated city skylines and that same feeling,
That glorious feeling, of always feeling so direly out of place.
Though hanged in my closet, you are the one that remains.

You’re a message in a bottle, futurebound forever, changing everything you touch,
While your beauty will forever be found in never having a place to really call home.
And suddenly, I will want to disappear from here too.
But it’s funny; since not so long ago, all I have wanted was to be seen.

Forever a conclusion, to everyone,
And through it all, you are the one that remains.

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Now I See The Light

You learn, in youth and expiration,
After your lamp oil dries a time or two too many,
A bleak stare at the favourite residential streetlamp,
A throat slick from laughter and substances calcifying
Around the grey matter hanging onto that one scent you’d die to not lose.
That the forgetting is so long, and so spent, and here you are
Hating/hoping there’ll be some parts of what happened to you that will never go away.

There will always be that Christmas at your grandparents' house
When the cold air stayed outside, mouth ripe as the wine shared around the table.
But at the slightest hint of time’s abandonment, you outdid it,
Sparks on pavement where you shot past,
Back to a future that you hope (in softness) never really lasts.

I was seconds away from everything I ever wanted
Caged behind irreparable choice,
Looking after yourself in times that didn’t mean to be cruel but didn’t try to be kind,
Still waiting on that holiday seafoam to make breathing clear once more.
You’ll be walking home sometimes, wherever you are,
And some part of you will want to try again, to sit alone again, to stop,

And somewhere inside, you’ll be furious, and in fright,
But what are these forever-impressions, if not ourselves looking for the light.

//

change
noun

the act of becoming different.

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