Wrinkl I

And sometimes I wake still painfully unaware of why I have.

And then

coldly

or why I do.

It is mornings dark and strange as the night that birth’d them

and sodden pillows

and ticking clocks

and floor’d sheets little hard evidence of the stall’d guerilla attack.

It is memories of a place I have not been

but a place I cannot wipe away with so much sweat or tears were every inch of me crying like a child lost

a ghost weeping  in a market crowded with bodies

but only bodies

faceless, headless ambling with so little a purpose as my isolation cum orphan.

I stir often with regret.

With all of the quiet practiced precision of a warfield coroner.

With all of the diluted ignorance of an uncupp’d moth.

It is genuinely here that I sleep

Shuffling languidly in sunlight and utterly wrested.

Jenny

We hadn't spoken since we lost the war. You could argue that things began to wear away long before the last mortar fell. I would.

My first girlfriend in any capacity had been the neighbour girl next door at the tender age of five. We saw plenty of each other at school, came home together even if we didn't mean to, played outside at common times (the local kids referred to it as 'cess)(just kidding that's a terrible drug and children were not involved in that noise). Being babysat routinely by each other's mothers made for the final nail in the we're-clearly-more-than-just-friends coffin. Not that we had the slightest idea what a relationship was or resembled. But there was a lot of forcibly shared tunafish sandwiches, which I realize contributed heavily to my ongoing dislike of tunafish sandwiches.

I remember the sharing. Of most things. Of TV time, and having to sit through Jem & The Holograms and Carebears in order to get to anything resembling GI Joe or He-Man or things that transformed. But there was something quietly proprietary about sitting through all of that pink and glitter huck because... she wanted me to. And that felt nice I guess. She doesn't do this kinda thing with anybody else. And neither do I. And I don't really care about that part, and that feels kinda nice. We kissed sometimes. Okay often. Like two ducks might kiss. We laid down on top of each other once, which is pretty hot and heavy stuff for two people who had just figured out kissing. I was very surgical, and couldn't have been performed with more sterile precision than if we had been researching lying on top of somebody for science. It took finding out from Kevin that she had kissed him under the stairs at his babysitter's house for me to get my first taste of what you might call mild heartache. I was surprised, and jealous, and as betrayed as somebody could feel at five years of age. Which isn't much, but a sting's a sting. I knew enough to know that whatever it is that we were, we weren't anymore. Was it something I did or said? Yes, and probably both of those things. If I wasn't so busy still being totally confused about life and let myself get distracted by Lego, soccer, and lamborghinis, in that order, I may very well have taken the time to be sad. But there are bikes to learn how to ride and dinosaurs to read about like I was going on safari and Elvis to get into. It was a weird time. And by that I mean it was 1985.

We had sent a man back to the future. There was a new generation of starfleet officers manning the Enterprise. The Pointer Sister where singing about The Neutron Dance and Katrina was walking on Sunshine. I don't think we quite appreciate what was going on while we were growing and developing. There were no rules. I remember walking up to random children and aggresively blurting out "Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin!" just because, and that it was normal and okay. Everything I wanted to do required a helmet. Again, normal. Flaming robot unicorns could have fallen from the sky and the planet would have collectively given itself a well-I-never-thought-the-day-would-come-but-I-can't-help-but-feel-like-we-were-warned look followed by an emphatic shrug. And it might have - there was a hole discovered in the ozone layer. And as far as we knew it was a very plausible flaming unicorn hole. The world had just been subjected to James Cameron's first assault with The Terminator. I remember velcro being a big deal.

Looking at what had happened between me and Jenny was the psychological equivalent of watching the exhaust dissipate from behind a moving car. I knew there wouldn't be any more kissing for a while.

I still had to sit through Jem though.

In all The Years In Her Eyes

And it was all at once the taste of Hell on her lips
And a manner of wine, and blush, and snails, and still too much;
This creature of dreams worn wild
This child in a churchyard of Autumnal bliss
I can still feel her tears through her wedding-white veil
And still all the near to love looks in her eyes
Always this burning of flowers on film
Yet still the sound of her footfall through cold hallway stairs;
This ghost of a life we had known to our heirs
That featherine slip of your breath unto theirs
And oft how I wish that your steam-engin'd stare
Had fell short of my perfectly-still glass of inertly swill'd well;
And still here I sit, as a beast in quieted waiting
Always how I feel you in breath on my skin
With a heat, and narrow, and rapturous arm 'round my too slinken neck
As our fire winks out
With a wisp into ignorant skies.

Jillayne

Nobody ever drinks to forget. Just like nobody ever sleeps to remember.

The lines on your face that extend into the night. Into time. Your laugh that ripples and breaks away from your mouth like a flock of startled morningbirds. The way you pull your hair away from your face, drawing open the curtains to the only day that matters.

There is a sunshine in you that permeates night and cloud and the deepest of earnt sleep. The slow and burning away of layer'd dreams like an Autumnal pyre as you stir me from reality and into a waking dream.

There is a spice in your words; exotic and acutely familiar. But strange. Like hand-me-down childhood wares.

You long for peculiar but fascinating things, evidenced by your nocturnal mutterings underbreath. Things I will never give you; things not of this world to give.

You smell of days and nights. Familiar now and still like distant memories I long to revisit. All at once a melange of your youth as mine, and sand, and oranges, and gin, and unscented wax pulled from hidden away drawers. An impossible viscera of vestigial emotion.

You question life in perpetuity. Even in your avowals there is an ever present ring of doubt and wont of resolve.

There are dragons in your eyes and lairs beneath, such secreted scales all gold and green. Your coffers aglow in the absence of light.

Your lobster trapp'd bottle of inside-out ardor and skinned-to-the-bone veil of delicate duress.

And you escape all reason.

Where Love Grows

And so it was how I felt about you
That dark, that mysterious reaching into the night
On the tip of a breath so faint it may bare no life
And I stood at once where we all had been that Summer now done and away
And silent
And radiant
And endlessly my veins pumping histr'y into a Martian sea still too vast to escape
And as often as I would ask where Love goes when it dies
There is only light that flickers and fades and sings of children we will never know
I remember words built of a different tongue, and upon stranger tides than face me now
And somewhere now in time and space and arms not mine to know
There is all the wondrous heat of a dying star spilling life into your sweet and sunken faraway eyes
I will work and climb and pray and eat and dream and find you when we are all stars again
And we alone are the suns that we now bend to
And we have long forgotten such warmth once cast at all

Honesty part I

She's a tired old town, and like an old dog struggling to nap in spite of its master's company, she doesn't take well to strangers, now or ever. She takes even less to strangers wanting a pat.

Traffic is bad. Well, was bad. Traffic implies movement in at least one direction. There's something stalling in considering the swell of industry here so many years ago that managed to turn the only dirt road into town a throbbing artery of steel and ambition. It didn't take long for that one road to become four. The town took less than a year to grow from a hopeful opportunity at the end of a long dusty line into a burgeoning nexus of unchecked proliferation. And it grew. And grew. And grew. Eventually as tall as it was wide. In fact where its landbound borders were halted only by the surrounding canyons and mountains in every eventual direction, the sky presented no such halting limit. To be sure, the very idea of entropy seemed as lofty as each new skyscraper gradually pricking its needle into the impossible blue above. This was real progress. There was as much breath and life and blood coursing through this city as any body organic. An endless hive of ignitious activity and dividing cells spawning bigger and brighter explorations of recombinant youth.

There was little attention to those historically stifling concerns of process, and security, and the paying of the piper when the piper came to town. A select few of us saw it a little earlier than the rest, but still too late for all the good it did us only to watch helplessly as our rapidly expanding universe grew predictably into a tumour, over which most of us became too heartbroken to stay and watch drain away into history again.

But stay some of us did. We watched as she continued to feed on the arrogant dream chasers that poured into town, oblivious to the signs of decay already sweeping out from its wounded heart like a ruinous coagulation of too much too soon. We watched as she fed, but was too tired to chew and too hungry to spit them out. It became exhausting, watching that horrible but elegantly designed extinction of dreams on such a massive scale. And before we knew it, before we could warn the others, it took us too. Our years of youth and promise swept away into the same dust and rock that had birthed us.

And then he came. Just as alone and oblivious and wide-eyed as all the rest. I can say confidently that there was not a single thing different about him than we had seen roll through here a thousand times before all of these last twenty-odd years. Not a single thing. Except for what he had brought with him.

And I don't think even he knew it at the time.

O Fortune

Alone together
We toss and turn
Swimming in the naked and the dead
A million echoes
One by one
Strung together like busted pearls
She forgives me my dreams
In their boundless descent
Of my unspoken whispers and unwoken fete
A ruinous dissolve of ev'ning light
Struck pale in the dying of the night
A sweet sickly warmth
Rapturous in its burnt almond finish
Were I to merely regret
The time I could not keep
The flesh that pulls and strains
At a heart not mine to keep
She is the etch
The imprint in my day
The ghost of all things present
And lost
Wine
And lips
And contours I will never touch
And sleep
Without rest