[Draft Message]

A message I couldn’t bring myself to send to you
would sound something like this:

The suburbs are lonely here with
your silence shutting me out of every open space.
I thought of you today while
I faced the biting cold of the streets and
watched the sun settled into the west.
A stormy sunset kissed the coastline with a tidal wave
of lilac, grey and peach
crashing against the periwinkle evening;
I marvelled at you in your wondrous beauty of
mystery and danger as the storm
retreated to the ocean.
By the blanket of night,
I was left wondering if you were
thinking of me
beneath the same coloured sky.

Phantom Limb

Favourite smile,
you have been missing from my
photographs for the longest time,
I’ll never forget your eyes
lighting up at their sight of me or
the way you fit
just right
into the chaos of my life — our memories
can’t be dusted away with
the cobwebs in my mind.
Notebooks have forgotten your name,
but your face
is committed to an aching memory bank and
the agony of reaching out to an
invisible skeleton frame
can never be erased

Bad Trip

Last night I learned
no matter which drugs
get into my bloodstream
nothing can numb the immense
agony of being empty
after pouring so much of
myself
into other people. I have
been dying so often, diving
into deep ends and going
off the rails;
someone just push me in front of
a train because every hangover
is composed of aching memories
and a desire to black them out

Acquaint

I’ve known you in so many
lives before this one began;
my skin forever remembers the warm
gentle glow of your starlight

Sharing pieces of our
former selves,
reacquainting the
lines on our hands and
stains in our eyes,
tracing our scars back to
the stories that carved
out the souls inside us

I’ve never loved anyone like this:
I just want to plant
my weary bones
next to yours and
watch ourselves grow
to become vibrant and beautiful
once again

Distances

Necking Jack from the same flask:
about as close as our lips will ever
touch anymore,
my auburn-eyed hurricane, you
blew me away with your ability
to always keep me at arm’s length, darling, I’ll
hold you close in my mind for an eternity
longer than you let me
when I was allowed to share your
nicotine-laced oxygen. Maybe love
will always swirl between us but
only at the bottom of bottles
swigged on separate sides of this
suffocating city, spilling forgotten
memories through drunken states
of restless sleep —
you’ll always be too fucking close
and too far away.

Moon

We are measured
by stars and space
where time becomes irrelevant
to the amount of gases
that have filled our heads in the
millenia we have
been separated.

Circling each other, I barely glimpse
your darkest side,
and gravity finds our weakest
parts
to pull our atoms together
until we are matched in
consistency and an
incessant disparity of
distance.

You’re close, but
not quite
burning
in my atmosphere.

Cemeteries

Love once looked like a skeleton
igniting on a public pyre

but lately we have
blurring the lines between
devotion and desire: you are less
like a fire and more like a spreading warmth
like a dark spirit —
I am drunk on your existence and
you have been on a haunt through defective veins to
this forsaken heart and
my darling, I know
our freckles and scars have come from
the same places, and you
are the first thing to stop my hands shaking
when Love has always felt like
slamming doors and headlights pulling away

Now, without a doubt,
Love has found its way and
you are the last grave I want
my soul to be laid

Stomping Ground

I have become a stranger
to the city I grew up in, and
every corner of my hometown
haunts me where we shed our
shadows
but, I have been placing new memories
with fresh faces
against the street signs and park benches,
branding our bodies across the horizon
so that the sunsets no longer call your name
and the world ceases to
hold the absence
of your shape