thoughtsafterdark

[thoughtsafterdark]

Changeling

Years ago

When I fell I love with the shake of a head

The sweep of a fringe across honey eyes

With hard edges and cutting comments

With earnestness and sincerity

Trembling, pouting lips

And everything in between

When the thought of going to bed with strangers unnerved me

I was so in love with the unwavering notion of love

I thought there must be something wrong with me

When I was 13 I had a letterbox of loves, real and imagined, made from long sighs and airy thoughts

and I would take them out, carefully, blow off the dust and cobwebs at birthdays and holidays

Dance with ghouls under the green and red and blue Christmas lights

The hazy mouldy smog of the artificial tree made my throat itch, triggered asthma attacks

A 1970s astigmatic capitalist daydream

Our reflections mirrored on baubles in the dark of Christmas Eve

And I lived there between branches

Polypropylene leaves digging into my skin

And I would whisper in their ears

Exchange love notes by the nativity scene

Who needed friends when I had

Tempero parietal epilepsy

And a rich internal life

(Autism diagnosis pending)

Sometimes I think

Whatever happened to her

To that wild, wide eyed, unsettling little changeling

The one who would watch the washing machine for hours

Hypnotised by the universes trapped in soap bubble films

They warp and change divide and split. Mitose. Evolve. Is this what it is to play god. We are closer to him in those years. Half formed clay golems with chubby, pawing fingers, muddy hair and drooling eyes.

If I were to crawl into his lap

Do you think he would hug me close like my father never did

I remember mornings

On the way to school

Stomach in knots

I remember French toast smothered in buttery creaminess. Bottled sunshine. Red berries popping on my tongue. Bursts of blood red flesh against retainers. An autumnal afternoon wrapped in a nauseous morning haze. Palms drenched in sweat.

I remember mud and dirt on knees, under fingernails. The feel of butterfly wing powder on my fingers.  Digging through mud, playing with ants. I used to pluck out their legs one by one, and watch as the others tore it apart.

I remember the hypnotic lick of flames against midnight skies, paper towns and cardboard dollhouse burning to ashes in the wind. I used to imagine the screams.

Don't you think fire is so poetic. Some glitch in the matrix. As alive as a dead thing can be. Heat and light, ionised air, a chain reaction that spreads and jumps from one thing to another? Destroys in its wake. The cancer of the dead world, with its own nefarious self replicating agenda. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, heat death made sentient. Saltatory conduction and Conway's game of life (or death)

Do you suppose with enough time it could learn to think? Do you believe if it could it would scream?

She's been locked in her cell for too long. I'm so so tired and the mask is melting.

I used to think I was good at reading people. At empathising. Now I wonder was it just her. Playing with puzzles, matching faces to appropriate responses.

I can feel her waking up, with her wide fae eyes, her long pointed ears. The better to see you with my dear. Better to quirk a head to the side and hear you with my dear. Unhinge her jaw and swallow you whole. Feel my spine crack, bones rearrange, muscles twist. The crunch of food plunging down my throat. My scales contracting around the bolus, accommodating, slithering.

They say hate and love are two sides to the same coin and I am inclined to agree. I thought I knew hate, and then you came. Like a storm that left me desolate and full of rage. I can feel the bitterness and fury sharpening itself in my gut every time I hear your voice. The blade melting, forging. The voice driving me insane. To best you, leave you in the dust. I am so so bone tired.

Sometimes I wonder

If I should love my hourglass body more

There are moments when I envy men

But never as much as now

Nothing drives my dysphoria like

Wanting to gauge out your eyes with my fingers

And fuck your empty eye sockets while you scream

Feel the supraorbital notch against my pelvis

Revel in the wet, garish squelch

I think you've gone braindead but that's alright

That's what my fingers buried in your nape are for

There is blood everywhere, god so much blood.

And here you had us all thinking you couldn't bleed

(Shut up

You all know

If I were a man

Writing about a woman

Pinning her down

Rearranging her insides

You would clap and ooh and ahh

Such a tortured soul, aching for release

Slaps on the back and salutations

"Tell us Stanley! Oh did you know since you were

a fucked up little boy pulling on Pigtails

That your self-indulgent gore pornography would revolutionise the medium of film?")

My momma used to say, clutching at her bloated belly

that she would love any baby

As long as it was happy and healthy

And! As long as it wasn't mentally...deficient. She would laugh then. How could she have a baby like that.

Some say I'm a genius mommy

I was the best in my class

But why do I feel like

I should tell you I'm sorry

I really did try

But mommy I'm so tired

I want to go to sleep

My bones are sick of trying

And the redcaps in the Earth are calling to me

They're so hungry momma

And so am I

I hope you find your real daughter mommy

Hope she has your eyes

I hope you get to love her mommy

Just not the way you loved me

[thoughtsafterdark]

Hospitals and Airports are the closest modernity can come to reaching the Divine

Have you noticed how some places seem immune to time and social conventions. Like airports, those monoliths of now. Harsh lights burning and souls criss-crossing, tongues melting together into a writhing throng of humanity, a steaming cesspit of consciousness. Steeped in camaraderie yet drenched in isolation. The electric blue arrivals sign glares with neon brightness at 3am, a beacon that signals the end of the road.

Here comes a family of 4 on their way home, crossing through automatic doors into the balmy drizzle of a British night, carrying their loot of straw hats and cheap pendants, tan lines and peeling red lobster skin. A girl no older than 5 limps after her parents and older brother. She lugs her bright pink unicorn behind her and hugs the hood of lilac pyjamas close, rubs the sleep out of her eyes whilst her mother shouts at her to hurry. Soon she’ll tuck herself into bed, in the attic of their ordinary red brick London row house, and she’ll watch the sun peak over the trees in the back garden for the first time in her life. It will become a core memory she will think fondly back on for years to come.

By the first class lounge they hurried past, a man in an impeccable suit (Sheep’s wool, the finest money can buy. The grey colour of the Thames on an early morning) paces back and forth restlessly, briefcase in hand, phone in another. Gold amber eyes like a hawk, close cropped black hair and neatly trimmed beard, square pocket matching the deep tan of his shoes (authentic leather). He is barking orders to someone in Arabic, closing deals, building empires. A bloodied napkin he used to stop a nosebleed earlier falls out of his pocket and winks up at the scaffolding exposed ceiling, high and arching like the dome of a cathedral. He’ll make the sale, then visit the airport bathroom again before hailing a cab to the closest 5 star. In the morning, the maid who took the job to send money to her ailing mother in the Philippines will find his cold stiff body and scream. She’ll call the police and be taken in for questioning. She never signed up for this.

At the hospital coffee shop – two streets and half a lifetime away - a 4th year med students sips on a cortado like her life depends on it. Caffeine surges through her veins, bracing her for the day ahead. Unbelievable how exhausting trying to take up as little space as possible can be. She hates the spiel, it’s the same every time. A new dawn, a new face, a new team. The introductions, the smiling, the grovelling, the headache. She’s 5ft flat with bright orange hair, aspirations for Neurosurgery and a bright pink notebook, so why would they take her seriously.

It’s 8:30, and she’s scheduled for 9am clinic, so she has time for a hurried breakfast today. (Eating any earlier makes her gag). Small mercies. The off-red stained scrubs she nicked from the theatre changing rooms cling to her like a second skin preparing to moult. She squirms in them, the comfort undeniable. They make her feel like she belongs. They make her feel like an imposter.

Her table – she comes here so often; she thinks of it as hers - sits right by large windows overlooking the main entrance and staircase. She sees it all from here, her quiet unassuming throne. The doctors and nurses, physios and pharmacists. Rushing rushing, running, stressing. Wishing, hoping, waiting, waiting, waiting. For the shift to end, for the time for bed. For this rotation to change, for the exam to pass. We’ll go on that holiday next month, next year. When money isn’t tight, when things are more settled.  Before they know it they’ve wished their lives away.

Their patients understand, all too well and all too late. The same father with the IV drip and the metal stand comes down here every morning to see his daughters. They run up to him, he holds them close and beams. But his grip is getting weaker, smile is getting thinner. He doesn’t answer when they ask when he’s coming home. It’s funny what we can’t hear when we’re too busy wearing stethoscopes. Next month she (I) will be stationed on the Psych ward. We’ll have to do it all again, but maybe they’ll hear me this time. Maybe it’ll get easier.

Between them all and among them, if you squint and unfocus your eyes during one of those ungodly hours at the Starbacks across from Boots and WHSmith, leaning against a grey white pillar you might see him.

He is the spectre that haunts airport lounges and waiting rooms alike, the handsome stranger with the black snapback and the beats headphones and the khaki shorts. The one who lives out of a rucksack and wears a travel pillow like a crown. With the kind eyes and crows feet, and honey chestnut curls. He is that boy from your high school everyone liked, with a kind word for everyone; the one with a charmers smile and the charisma to bullshit his way through anything. The one who – when pressed for future plans, would laugh and shake his head, looking down bashfully. “I just want to travel for now, see where it takes me. I want to see the world”, he’d say, eyes twinkling with the possibilities. On someone else, the words would likely merit a telling off, they’d be seen as the paper thin excuse to fuck around and get high. But he seemed so genuine, and his teeth were such a dazzling shade of brilliant white when he smiled, even the strictest careers advisers couldn’t resist.

He lives in those moments, the liminal fabric between worlds that’s so hard to put your finger on. Blink and you’ll miss him in the old alleys of Rome, the spark of his cigarette lighter blending amongst the city lights.

You’ll find him among the most remote hiking trails of the Peloponnese, laughing with local shepherds and German tourists alike, sitting on jutting rocky cliffs and admiring the blue Mediterranean below. If you really pay attention, you’ll see his staff isn’t like the others. Something suspiciously like a pair of snake slithers up and down. You could swear you heard them whispering just now, but when you look again it’s just a wooden stick.

He is the patron of us wanderers and travellers, those of us with movement in our blood and restlessness in our hearts. The ones who beget the will of changing winds and shifting tides. The ones who can’t allow themselves to sit still, lest the dust settle and the coffee get cold. The mortifying ordeal of being seen and known. Or the ones that carry a hearth with them, in the bottom of a suitcase, in the heart of a trailer. The ones who move and weave through the Earth not because they are running but because they are coming home. He dances and jokes with the kids amongst campfires, always welcome, always a pleasure. And if he helps them pick the odd lock, swearing solemnly to secrecy, who are we to judge.

His bronze skin smells of cinnamon and nutmeg, vanilla and cedar and a thousand other spices. He reeks of incense and market stalls, moles and freckles tell the story of trading routes and old silk roads, of cotton shawls from Alexandria and silk from Pekking. His fingers and eyes twinkle with the good-natured mischief of petty thieves and sleight-of-hand magicians, tricksters and circus performers. He picks apples from behind ears, presents jewel necklaces to his lovers.

She sees him now, amongst the patients. He helps an old lady up the steps, pulls a balloon out of his back pocket to the delight of a sick child. She locks eyes with him and they nod at one another She has been seen now, and known. Perhaps she’ll find him again one day, if either stop running.

[thoughtsafterdark]

Shoeboxes and Eggshells

When I was younger, carefree and naive.

Watching the raindrops that whipped and bent on the windows on the highway.

And the rolling storm grey clouds gather above

Listening to the radio and nodding off to sleep, eyelids heavy with sand and head foggy with warmth

I thought it was ridiculous how much of music is made up of love songs

Used to think it was impossible for them all to be genuine, how can one person love so much and so many times, falling into all the same traps.

But then I grew into a hopeless romantic.

I fall in love with fragments and shards of people, keep them in an old shoebox amongst pretty rocks from the beach and candy wrappers from fairs long gone. I nip and peck at them all, like a crow catching the glint of something shiny out of the corner of too-intelligent eyes. I collect half smiles and smirks, the curve of a thigh or hip, the swish of a bohemian white skirt on a beach in early June. Pearly laughter, bright and pink, nimble fingers and chocolate eyes. They pass through me like wisps, shadows in the night that leave only whispers in their wake. Imprints that weave and meld together like threads, like brands on my soul.

In August evenings, when the sun is low and the heat of the day evaporates into a balmy night, I like to play Badminton with my sister the way I used to play with him. And as I lunge for points, I listen to the angry, dark music I used to listen to with her, so I could prove that I was just as broken. Now I don't have to pretend anymore. I carry the pain of them all with me everywhere I go. With each one I could swear I lose a piece of myself. Theseus' ship, continuously replenished. But every time I am amazed at the tears I still have left to cry.

Now, sitting here with you in this newfound cocoon of solace I think I finally understand

The trouble with falling out of love and becoming someone else is there's no guarantee the new version of me won't fall for the new version of you.

We're no longer the bright eyed and bushy tailed fools we were two years ago. I'm angrier, rougher around the edges. I care now with a vicious edge that wasn't there before. The sort of kindness born not of softness but pressurised rage.

Your walk is slower, hunched over with responsibility and disappointment.

Yesterday you laid your head against the wall, throat bobbing and you told me you felt like a failed imposter, like you'll never be good enough. I feel for you but will you hate me if I say. That the ghost of the girl I was is glad that carefree boy who killed her is dead now too.

We left their graves in the dirt behind us as we outgrew those bodies.

We're growing up now, and that all feels so silly. A distant dream of who I used to be.

It's different now, but it still scares me. Because I can feel myself falling for you all over again. But it's warmer. Softer. Steadier. Based on an easiness that wasn't there.

I won't do anything this time I know. I can't bear to lose you again. But I'm scared of you leaving me so maybe I'll up and run

I'll just keep these embers stoked and warm, close to my heart to give my strength. Before another day rolls around where we're strangers again

Its easy now. We slot well together. Like well-worn cogs in the machine on this newfound eggshell thin camaraderie. Dependable, reliable. I know it won't last I miss you. I fucking hate you

How does it feel

To exist on so many levels at once

How is it that

You've mastered the superposition state

You're there and you aren't

Always and never

A text away but

Filled with hollow monosyllables and periods

Yes I am a romantic but you are my greatest mistake

 Never before have I fallen into the mouth of the same shark, and convinced myself the bite was that of someone who cared

I would chew off my own right arm to know what you were thinking when you look at me. Do you feel the same pit of squirming worms deep inside, the mix of pain and agony and bittersweet longing of what could have been. It's funny what tricks oxytocin plays on us. Do you know how it feels to cry over something that was never real. Do you wonder why we aren't friends anymore. Or am I so insignificant a fly the thought has never crossed your mind. Just someone you used to talk to, but don’t anymore

I'm sorry the mortifying ordeal of my love was so embarrassing for you, I'm sorry I lied. I wasn't who you thought I was. But in my defence, neither were you. The boy I loved lived only in my dreams. I built him myself, out of desperation and hunger. He was what I needed at the time. I'm sorry he had your face. You were just there, and I was lonely and afraid.

[thoughtsafterdark]

i haven’t changed my bandages in quite a while

you try to cover it with your hands

but i’m getting blood all over you

why do i even feel bad about that

you’re the one who stabbed me in the first place

[thoughtsafterdark]

The Sun's Lover

Sometimes I gaze at myself in the mirror and my mind bends and buckles against warring thoughts and I wonder if I was meant for more.

Sometimes I feel a breeze in the back of my mind

Sparks of errant electricity

A brief glimpse into something other, something hidden

Something on the tip of my tongue and the edge of my olfactory bulb

Colours I can smell, feelings I can hear, thoughts that have no shape or form. Older than my life, than language, than war. Certainties that tease and caress and seduce but leave me dry and gasping like incubi in my sleep.

That leave my tongue sloppy and lazy like tar black molasses squelching between teeth

Thoughts that taste of longer tongues and darker mouths and sharper teeth on a planet circling twin red dwarves, of methane marshes and hexagonal prism eyes that sparkle like blood red rubies

Words slurring together and thoughts hazy as they come back down to a body that feels paper thin and husky like maple seeds in the wind

I think of the wrath that dances just beneath my skin

The bile that churns and rushes to my face, eyes like daggers, lips fixed in a snarl at the slightest insult

I think of my pride, that squirming bag of worms that lights fires in my blood and how it wars with my desperate craving to belong

I watch them from the safety of my window like a xenoanthropologist. How they love and laugh and touch eachother. How they slide against one another like well oiled gears in a way I have never been able to. I think of the eldritch way in which I care, with a gaping maw and drooling lips, with twirling rings of eyes and 6 pairs of wings, with claws that burrow deeper and squeeze tighter the harder they try to leave me.

And I think to myself, girlhood is not so much different to godhood. A self-satisfres ied sadistic existence hiding a crushing singularity of loneliness, topped with pettiness and boredom.

I wish you would come to me in my waking hours and take me away from this place

Steal and hide me away in palaces of sand and moonstone

I can put up a good fight. I’ll run and scream and beg you to stop, make sure to drag out the thrill of the chase. Isn’t that what pretty nymphs are for?

I see my bitterness reflected in the ozone blue of your eyes, the hardness and cruelty shot through with marble strands of gold

Your skin is a thrumming pool of pure power, an atomic bomb bound in sinew and nucleic acids, ready to turn me to a pillar of salt

Your fingers coax the most bittersweet of melodies, leaping and thrumming from string to string like acrobats. They say the best musicians make the instruments sing, but I’ve seen you make lyres moan and weep

I remember the old stories, of girls turned to laurel trees, of wounded pride and donkeys ears. I remember the blood of the Myrmidon spilled outside the walks of Illium. I know you are a wrathful, self-righteous whore, with greedy fingers that leave bruises  in the dips of hips and a silver tongue to match. Your fathers essence is strong in you, stronger even than it is in him. Nuclear fusion and supernovae to his ion and electron arcs. What is a thunderbolt in the face of the sun’s core?

That is how I know you would understand, I know you would thumb at that gaping festering wound inside my heart and bring me corpses instead of flowers. A plague in just the right place, so they can die slowly, in agony. Nuclear wastelands instead of jewellery. And then afterwards you’d smile that chesire cat smile at me, all satisfaction and faux-inoccence, and we’d wear our best skins and most beautiful masks and dance amongst the stars next to the hunter ripped to ribbons by hounds at your sisters command compose ballads, and study the healing arts and crafts but not so well the grey eyed bitch curses me with eight legs and congratulate ourselves on our own brilliance. Spin lies out of ambrosia and nectar and pretend we are good and just, exactly what the mortals deserve

 Fuck me with your fingers with a fierceness you wouldn’t dare use on your precious lyres, piston into me the way the women in my grandmothers village gut fish (rhythmically, ruthlessly, with the sun beating down on leathery skin and the weight of 6 mouths to feed and the memory of your husbands knuckles shattering teeth), reach up into me and wring the neck of my womb like a newly ripe peach, yank it out of me until it lies pulsing and glittering and full of seed, uterine arteries spewing blood. I want to feel you burrowing upwards until I am impaled on your divinity, until you push upwards into my heart and lungs and your hands are peaking up out of my throat. Turn me inside out and wash me clean until my mortality burns away like a chrysalis and I am reborn in your image.

My ascension is a spectacle that leaves many breathless and many more blinded. “I am the goddess of lost potential” I whisper into the crook of your neck “of promises unkept and grudges nursed. Of doorways and bridges and the space between atoms. Of longing and regret and moments lost.” And then you’d smile that ridiculous smile of yours, like you’d seen me like this always, glowing and thrumming with possibility – and this confirmation is somewhat amusing.

“Pithanotita” you’ll declare against the shell of my neck and the rightness of it reverberates deep deep down, beyond the skeletons of cells that no longer exist and multi corded DNA strands, as if you have struck my very resonant frequency and my de Broglie wavelength sings with the joy of being seen. Not a name but a constant, a universal truth. Phoebus I’ll counter, and I won’t bother using a mouth, though the smirk will be implied. Possibility and Poetry need no lips to speak to one another, we are two sides of the same coin. You’ll laugh out loud then, delighted at my audacity. Only your mother calls you by her mothers name. And I can pretend just for a moment that we might last. The first of our kind to have eternity.  That we won’t end up tearing each other to pieces. The sun and his unlikely lover, regret.

[thoughtsafterdark]

Veni, Vidi, Vici

She exists, breathes, quirks her neck to the side, thinks, breathes. Breathes. Breathes. Soft air escaping baby pink lips like a moan, floating away and away. Her breaths are the kind you dream of. The deep contended sighs that carry you to sleep on a soft bed, toes burrowing into cold sheets. The peach haze memory of flaring nostrils in the backseat of your parents car on a late night trip when you were 3, the sound of rain pattering on the roof. The weight of your mother's arms around you as she carried you to bed. The comforting voice of your father in the next room.

And I think to myself, oh to be dead. To slash at my jugulars and pour myself all over her. To bathe her and tarnish her, pale white gooseflesh turned red and sticky, thighs matted together. To lie dying and festering at her feet, to rot and fill the grove with heat as her tears water my grave. To feed the nightcaps and worms until my nitrates become sweet nitrogen and at last she can breathe me in too. To be on the inside of her chest, rising and falling like the rolling tide. Pillowy and graceful like that of a swan. To mark her and paint in her a tapestry of indecency. An insult to the virgin goddesses she reminds me of. To love is to destroy. To collapse a wave function. We cannot see without touching, touch without seeing. Our hungry hungry eyes grow teeth.

She sits against windowsills, legs tucked underneath her, making notes, sipping coffee. I take her in before she notices me and the cold glass silence around her breaks. She is so gloriously mundane it exerts a kind of regal stillness. Her hair is chocolate brown, tinged with bronze. Like salted caramel on my tongue. Like straw spun to gold by cursed princesses in tales of old. She ties it into an effortlessly messy bun, stray strands framing her face, she is running late but is still put together. She is organised chaos. She is that girl. The one we all wanted to be, with the alarm and the watch and the bag and the car, the sports captain who eats pizza over the sink by the window. The one men want and we are meant to hate. She is voyeurism made flesh. She exists to be seen, a walking wet dream.

What kind of monster am I, who loves like a man. The way Orpheus loved Eurydice. Faithless and desperate.

She is steely moonlight across a grey green plain. Tendons and muscles gleaming, lithe and strong and leaping. Teeming with ichor. Amber eyes burning with resolve. Leather bow and quiver hitched over a shoulder as she glides across creaks, crouches in the underbrush. Nimble as a doe, fierce as a lioness. The huntress with the unforgiving gaze and the unwavering arrows. The one who skewers men and whispers to wildlife amongst the pines. Who nurses a tender and loyal heart. Artemis the eternal maiden, voice of the wilderness and protector of the young.

As I sit here on another grey drizzling morning in the hum of traffic I wonder if you remember. The sound of splashing water and girlish laughter, tangled limbs in freshwater lakes, honey sweet kisses like freshly pressed olive oil and figs. The crunch of red earth between toes and the hard rock cliffs at Ephesus, the glittering aquamarine of the Aegean below as we run and chase and hunt and spar until the copper tang burns our lungs.

I look at you now as you drive and I know that I would clutch at your putrid corpse and tell it stories of my pain, until my mother and comrades dragged you from me until I dragged your murderer three times around his own city until his father begged me for mercy until they mixed our ashes and laid us to rest on the hill.

Do you see it with the clarity I do? Our story already written? I know how this will end, as it has a thousand times before. But I wait for you every morning anyway, on the curb we've agreed on. I get into the car, I watch you drive. And every day I lose a little more of myself to the thing we will become .

[thoughtsafterdark]

Stigmata

The world is quiet. So quiet. The silence deafens, bends backs, breaks minds. It holds its breath, waiting, biding its time. Still and poised yet tense, every pebble and grain of sand prepared to strike. Like a big cat stalking its prey, shoulders rolling so smoothly as it inches closer and closer. Like oil sliding off the skin of the water. Those moments when it crouches and becomes one with the Savanah. When the golden light of the setting sun sets the land aflame and blades of grass blend with raised heckles until they are one and the same.

It waits for you, for your conception and birth. Molecules aligning, cells dividing, flowers blooming. The water of your mother’s womb is surprisingly thin given the precious life it cushions. It is expelled from your lungs like a sacrament, like a fountain that once erupted from a desert rock millennia ago. Strong lungs as befit a firstborn son. Your first cries pierce the air and shatter the stillness into a million shimmering fragments. The diamonds spill across the inky blackness. A burst of colour from the Lord’s brush, arcing across the sky. Another promise, another new beginning. Yet Gods are foolish, lonely creatures. Their promises ring hollow and false to our suffering ears. The whips crack and our skin splits, oozes all the same. Where was God when my brothers withered and died, the cries ripped from their throats going unanswered?

And yet tell me why as I gaze upon you now, I am compelled to fall to my knees? As if every fibre of my being yearns to bow, to yield - as if your voice bursts from somewhere deep in my squirming gut and heart and not your lips?

Tell me why I itch to bury myself in the crook where your thigh meets groin and inhale the musk there as if your scent holds the Eye of the Needle, as if the grooves of your skin map Heaven’s Kingdom. Would you let me cry tears of rapture at your coming and wash your feet with them and my tongue?

I wonder if such a wonton display of devotion would anger you, frighten you. Would you toss me away in disgust, smash my face into the ground? Break my nose against rock and let me feel the warm flood of blood flow backwards down my throat, let me savour the salt and iron as I swallow devoutly. Tell me why I have never felt so alive as when your holy wrath rains down upon me like fire, like the destruction of Sodom.

I watch you now, standing proud against that same setting sun, gazing across the expanse of your new kingdom. Here as it dips low upon the dunes and the sand lashes at us. Its rays frame raven curls and fracture all around you, as if afraid to touch you and be seduced. A halo that revers yet fears you. It hardens your features as if you were hewn from granite Your jaw tightens against the onslaught, sharp enough to fell armies. Your eyes become the harsh ringing of blade against blade. Gone is the boy with the easy smile tugging at the corner of a mouth, crow’s feet wrinkling eyes. In his place is the cold pyre of divine righteousness. The commander of earth and sky, made to wield sound and air itself. I think of the icons of old, the waxy mournful faces of saints and note what a pale imitation they must be, if they had even a third of your weight.

You are a black hole - all-consuming, inescapable, inevitable - and we are all trapped in your orbit, edging ever closer to the Event Horizon that will surely destroy us. But tell me if our path is so doomed why my heart leaps at the prospect of pledging my death to you? What finer gift is there but that of my last breath, freely given?

In your face I see rivers of blood and the thrum of charging men. I hear the chants of our forefathers and the long line of prophets that came before, accumulating across the centuries into the tapestry that is your flesh.

Yet as you lie here beside me, the darkness kept at bay by the stubborn flame of a lone candle, your face serene with sleep and your sweat acrid and sharp in my nose - I see just a man plagued by a crown of thorns. I think of my hands, bathing in the blood of innocents in your name. Your name, a mantra, a hymn that ignites us all with awe and hunger. I wonder if knowing deep down you are just a man makes me more or less the fool.

Then your eyes open, lashes fluttering, and I see the light burning there and I know messiahs are not born but made in the hearth of a home, in the fierceness of a loyal heart and the beating lifeblood of a people starved of hope. I care not if you bleed red or ichor, I know only that I will follow you into hell itself, until we burn to ash and we become whispers, legends. Until we are nothing but dust floating across the dunes, the wind that stokes the flames of a thousand more rebellions.

[thoughtsafterdark]

Jagged Edges

I have loved the dark many a time

What is there not to love in the dark

Where we can cleave ourselves of expectation

Where the blackness soothes the fire in our minds and the weariness in our hearts

It is something of a hobby of mine

To love a broken thing

To scratch and tinker at its edges, feel the roughness scrape at callouses

To give it new life and hope

Oh it is easy to love the dark

But never before has it felt like gazing into a shattered mirror

And flaying my skin from the bone

Never before have I loved

Not the cold heart of darkness

But the supernova of heat and life that came before it

I fall before you on my knees

As one kneels before the whalefall of a dying God

I love the corpse of who you were

And the ghost of who I was

Never before has it felt

Like the bittersweet agony of coming home

And finding it was never there

[thoughtsafterdark]

Fallen Angels

I can sense, rather than hear, the rain pelting hard outside. Can nearly taste its sour, bitter edge. It clangs dully against whining metal, the reverberations worming through my skull, a steady mewl clawing and nesting deep into the folds of my mind. It sinks its hooks in deep, settles there like a festering bruise. Like I lay at the heart of some great, mechanical beast.

The rain falls harder, wind groaning and moaning, walls protesting. In between lashings I see snapshots of you. Like a dream, a sliver of another life, another time. They bloom, warm and pink and familiar, tinged with an ungraspable sense of belonging. Like I have known you always, like knowing you was inevitable, like I will live another thousand lifetimes and in each you will be the same anchor, unflinching. The same mirror to my own pain.

I know you, I think, as you unfold in my mind’s eye. Head cocked to one side, arrogant smirk playing at the corner of a mouth, honey-chestnut curls carelessly brushing a shoulder. All easy charm and lazy confidence draped against a doorframe. All the skin-deep bluster of a broken heart that bleeds too quick, cares too much and cuts too deep. Meant to dazzle and blind and awe, to hide the acrid tang of fear at your core. Fear of failure, of loss. Of disappointment. Of not being enough. I wonder how hard you fight to keep it locked away, if you’d let me see it all. Wonder if your flesh would yield to my teeth easily, like the blushing skin of a crisp apple on a chilly autumn day.

I feel you, I say to myself as I imagine you working. Drenched in oil, muttering under your breath. Mind and hands buzzing with unreleased tension, with too many ideas. Tinkering away at gears and coils, deft fingers adjusting and readjusting, eyebrows scrunched in such a pure and unguarded display of frustration it leaves me breathless and pulls at my chest. And then I imagine you looking up at me, that smile splitting your face in half. So wide your eyes light up and your bronze skin threatens to tear. So earnest and passionate and brimming with untold promise. Dazzling in its brilliance, bright and hot like twin suns in some far off galaxy.

I see you, I think again as you haunt me in my dreams. All quick lipped teases and glittering eyes, brimming with playful challenge yet coiled with something deeper. Something dark, and oily and liquid hot that snakes its way deep into the space and time between us. A thirst, so visceral and fierce it leaves me quaking. For more, for power, for validation. A fury that simmers and broils and scorches, that threatens to devour cities and leave rivers of blood and anguish in its wake. A rage so unbridled it shakes its fist at God, spits in the mouth of his whore of a mother. A boot stamping on all their faces, forever. All those who wronged us, who looked down upon us. I look into your eyes and I know together we could be unstoppable. A prince of darkness and his onyx blade, forged in the depths of hell and destined to find one another. Harbingers of death, usherers of a new age where our names will echo down till the end of time. New gods in a freshly yoked world made in our image.  I tear my gaze away, shaking my head, trying to banish the thought. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth, yet I still yearn for it.  

I ache for you, I whisper to the void, thinking if I just think hard enough, burn hot enough, the quantum web separating us will melt away and I’ll be able to fall into your arms. Cradle your cheek in my hand, tease at the sweat-slicked curls and the achingly familiar scar on your brow. And you’ll look at me with those hazel eyes, sea-foam green and churning, and know me too. And it will be as if we had always been. Souls curling against each other, minds intertwining. Ying and yang, black and white swirling together and spinning like a set of die. Only time will tell which way the stones will fall. If I shall coax you back out to the light or else stand by your side in the sweet dark.

[thoughtsafterdark]

Golden hour

[thoughtsafterdark]

Voyeur

The fog is thick and all encompassing, condensation clinging to the air and clawing at anything and everything it encounters. It sticks wetly to my face and I can feel the chill deep in the marrow of my bones, snaking it’s way home to my tattered heart.

I can tell when you’re smiling, even when it isn’t at me. Even with your face tilted three quarters of the way away. The muscle on the side of your cheek twitches back far enough to make out. It’s been 4 weeks since you smiled at me properly and I can feel myself going into withdrawal. I can’t decide if I want to laugh at seeing you so happy or cry because of the pang deep inside me that I’m not a part of it. That you can be so carefree and content when we haven’t messaged in 2 weeks. I hate myself for that selfishness. For wanting to be the one to make you look like that. The abyss yawns and grins wider. A Chesire Cat hanging in the sky. Never has madness looked more like an old friend beckoning me home.

 Such a small word, “seen”, in tiny grey letters, almost afraid to make itself known. Almost as if it knows the pain it causes me by being there. I think whoever invented read receipts must have either been a paranoid sociopath or a genius sadist. Most possibly both.

 I wonder what loving you would have been like in 1986, listening to Every Breath You Take on a Walkman with no way of contact beyond short-range radio I only use with the childhood best friend in the house next door. No way of knowing that you don’t care enough to message first. Maybe we’d go on some great coming of age adventure, me and you and this imaginary best friend in the house with the white picket fence and picture-perfect lawn. Maybe we’d see each other around at the local arcade, catching each other’s gaze among the low red flashing lights and dinging of the games, and we’d wander outside to sit on the sidewalk watching cars whiz by and you’d count the blue ones and I’d count the red ones, a bag of popcorn between us and our converse shoes inching ever closer.

 Or maybe we’d have a bonfire at the beach at 3am because we’re both troubled teens and there’s nowhere else remotely rebellious to hang out in this seaside town. In this timeline we’d meet earlier because everyone under the age of 25 knows each other in these parts, banding together in the face of boomer entitlement. I’d be 17 and you’d be 19 and my daddy issues would be so turned on at this slightly scandalous age difference I’d blow you right there, wet sand digging into my knees. They’d flush a deep bruising red the next day and the thought of it would make me moan around you. I’d accidentally bite the inside of my cheek and bubble-gum scented lip-gloss would mix with blood and semen, leaking out of the side of my mouth like an oozing gangrenous wound. I wonder if like that, debauched, eyes blown wide with you going soft in my mouth and your fingers in my hair, I would feel any less empty, if you could fuck my throat so hard the snivelling little girl inside me would shut the fuck up for good.

 In our timeline, you come up at the top of my Instagram followers, right above my 2 best friends when sorted by “Default”. I wander how many hours of me scrolling through your pictures it must have taken for you to get to that spot, and then I decide I’d rather not know. Maybe one day I’ll do the unthinkable and like a post from 2016. About as clear a love confession as any in 2022. We’re all emotionally constipated flesh bags circumnavigating the slippery path of social conventions. That’s the trouble of sticking a pre-frontal cortex on top of a barely developed lizard brain over a measly 100,000 years. Like whacking a lid on top of a boiling pot and being surprised when it bubbles over.

The fog has lifted now and the moisture has metamorphosised into proper rain, pattering outside and coating the glass of my apartment building in dabs of paint, all the colours of the rainbow glinting within endless spherical droplets. Through the dizzying kaleidoscope I see you by chance across the road, my keys stuck in place in the door that just swung shut behind me, frozen in time. You’re heading to the gym at 2pm on a Wednesday, because of course you are, and you’re wearing shorts even though it’s freezing and there’s a pair of black wireless headphones strung across your neck like they’re a part of your sternocleidomastoid. Like those signature animated characters that never change clothes so the colours become a part of them, melting into their skin. Somehow none of these facts about you surprise me, even though I’ve never seen you this way before, like I knew it would happen before it did. Fermat’s last principle made flesh. As if my soul feels the vibrations of yours in a way unbounded by linear time.

I think I get off on it in some ways, this romantic voyeurism of mine. Watching you from the side-lines, across the gaping traffic, an entire universe between my rickety apartment complex and the even ricketier gym you’re going into. The knowledge that I’ve never been inside a gym sinks heavy against my sternum for no discernible reason. The Chesire Cat grin deepens.

 I carry that heaviness inside me wherever I go, clutch and thumb at it when I’m alone at night until it becomes a friend, a reminder that I’m alive and I can feel and I can love and I’m not dead yet, I might want to be but I’m not dead yet, not yet. Like I’m some 21st century version of Holden Caufield. I wonder if it’s really you I’m in love with or the rose-tinted version I’ve created in my head. Then I remember it makes no difference anyway.

I can’t even take solace in the cliched sad songs I used to. I know the shape your fingers make around the chords and the way your whole body moves with the beat and how your feet cross and uncross themselves in perfect time, as if you can’t contain it and the notes will burst out of you if you don’t hit the keys hard enough, fast enough and then I think maybe we’re not so different after all, if I bleed ink and you bleed song it shouldn’t be so hard to talk to you. But I know at heart I’m a coward

So for now, I’ll wait till tomorrow. Till tomorrow when I’ll see you, and my lips will move and I’ll say something funny to keep you at arm’s length and everything will stay unsaid, until this thing in the air between us will grow stagnant and wither and die and take half of me with it.

[thoughtsafterdark]

SPACE

I carry a book of Sudoku puzzles, like a piece of you, in the bottom of my bag. It’s been there for a good few weeks now, getting more and more crumpled, paper curling inwards at the edges. It winks up at me mockingly every time I open the leather straps, accusingly almost. Like it’s asking why I haven’t made use of it yet, why do I choose to torture both it and myself by keeping it there, unused, unloved, unappreciated. A grave amongst crisp packets and old lecture notes, juice boxes and broken pens. But I see it and think of you, smile and tell myself I’ll give it to you if I get the chance. As if it’s only a small favour between friends, meaningless and mundane. As if you couldn’t see the traces of my fingers on the spine like canyons. As if it hadn’t become a shrine to keep the embers of my hope alive. As if my breath won’t cling to the pages and haunt you as you haunt me.

I know the precise shape of the back of your head and the rivers formed by the tendons on the back of your hand. The back of you, that’s what I know best. It’s what I see when you walk away, running, rushing, always moving. Scared if you sit still long enough to be observed you’ll disintegrate. Shrodinger’s twentysomething driving himself insane being everything at once.

I remember back when this feeling first bloomed inside me, a newborn bird softly pecking at the edges of its shell. When your teasing awoke me from that freezing numbness. An old and weary heart, scarred and used and abandoned to gather dust in some forgotten attic closed away so deep I lost the key, reborn at last. 13 and falling in love for the first time all over again. I carried you with me in my pocket everywhere I went, conjured you like an imaginary friend into every scene. *____is typing*, the butterflies squirming, bursting out from me like the last 7 years were a bad nightmare swept away by the crack of dawn and the cock’s crow. Like one brush from painted black fingernails would melt away the scars on my left arm.

I remember the glint of streetlights in your hair, the orange aura reflected softly in puddles of rainwater along the pavement. Those moments, few and precious, where it was me and you and the quiet of the world at quarter to 11. When words hung heavy in the air like grapes on a straining vine and I felt something crack open inside me. When I was carefree and laughing, the truths spilling from my lips like a confession too long caged, my walls finally crumbling. I looked at you then, boyish smirk edged my way, hands and too-long fingers awkwardly tucked into the pockets of your hoodie, and my chest swelled with something like gratitude, something like affection, something I couldn’t put a name to or look too closely at yet, soft and tender and intimate. A small pink rosebud blooming despite the frost in the air. Pure and untouched, before curiosity got the better of me and I  tore it into pieces to dissect. Before your name stung like bile in the back of my throat

Where along the way did we go wrong. Where did I stumble and lose hold of you, too late see you hurtling down the cliff, shrinking away from me moment by moment.

I see you walking around in the edges of my vision and don’t know where to look. Afraid if I look into your eyes, soft and brown like freshly turned earth, you’ll see right through me down to my very core, to the knot of feeling getting stuck in my throat.  Afraid if I try to cross this ravine between us I’ll tumble into the deep black waters below and the monsters will swallow me whole.

Sometimes I lay awake at night and think of you, my phone hanging loosely in my hand; like I’m still pretending I don’t care whether or not your name glimmers through the clinical white light of my phone screen like a ghost. As if here, in the inky blackness of 2am, hovering on the edge of sleep, between life and death and heaven and hell, that ocean I saw between us might disappear by some trick of the light, some trick of my own insecure mind, and I could reach out and trace the counters of your face despite the empty white space of the pillow. A rolling tundra ready to absorb salty hot tears.

Why do I feel like somewhere I took a wrong turn. Like I’m playing the bad ending of this indie game, the dialogue turning darker and stiffer, the artwork rushed and blurred. End screen looming ever closer. Like somewhere through the fabric of spacetime another version of myself runs parallel to this one. Braver and more confident in herself. You always hear the songs written about the great tragic love stories, the ones bursting with drama and intrigue and ending in heartache and bloodshed, torn shirts and broken pearl necklaces on marble floors. But what of the loves that never quite were. Conceived but never carried fully to term. Dandelion seeds lead astray by the wrong gust of wind at the wrong time, landing on dry fallow soil and cut short. Butterfly effects in full swing.

I wish that for a moment I could posses her body, that other me. The one that falls asleep to the rhythmic thump of your heart against her ear like a lullaby, the one who knows the taste of you and the shape of your teeth against her tongue. Just to see if she’s happy or if she still feels alone in your arms. If that space was inevitable one way or another.

[thoughtsafterdark]

Lost

The moors are whispering to each other again. Great unyielding plains as far as the eye can see -rolling and endless in their vastness. They are not what the poets would call beautiful. All hard granite outcroppings and bleeding feet. I can almost feel the crunch of rock in my jaw. Dying yet alive with some ancient intelligence, curious and cruel and well versed in tongues that would drive mortals mad.

The yellowing grasses rub against one another, sighing in the wind as if contemplating some great conundrum, as if they have seen too much and heard too much and now yearn for the end. What better place for a wraith like me.

My soul is at once naïve and old as the cores of the stars themselves. It’s a used and raggedy thing. A bit of fraying cloth rubbed raw with porous stone, wrung out and bleached of colour and left to dry against an unforgiving grey sky. It bruises too fast and feels too much, an overripe peach still yearning to be touched. Bite into me and feel the salt of my tears gush desperately into your throat.

I am sick of life yet in love with living. A ghost wandering the ruins of my childhood, fingers slipping easily into well-worn grooves only to find the comforting warmth gone. I am homesick for a time and place that no longer exists. Sometimes I wonder if it ever really did. If I have ever truly been carefree and smiling or only dreamt of what it might be like. Treacherous, rose-coloured hindsight. Neural connections are fickle things.

I am a Russian doll, hollow and haunted by overlapping layers of my past and future selves. 19 going on 75. They ask us what we want to do when we grow up. I want to unlock the meaning of existence, drink from the chalice of immortality. I want to know and understand and feel it all, feel the worms squirming underfoot and the leaves changing colour and the eldritch terrors lurking in the ocean until my body is a husk and we are all one breathing web. I want to be great and loved and feared, obsessed with achievement and shirking from idleness. I want to do nothing but exist, sipping white wine and smelling sea breezes on a balcony overlooking terraced Mediterranean squares. I want to get drunk on ink in a bookshop that smells of mould, tucked behind a forgotten café on a rainy Oxfordshire day. Maybe if I vibrate at a fast enough frequency I can do it all. Smoothly render myself at a million frames a second. Stretched so thin you could see through me to my hummingbird heart, overflowing with words that get stuck in my throat.

We don’t speak as much as we used to and when we do it isn’t the same. There’s a cold emptiness that hangs between our messages. I miss you even when you’re right here, pressed hard against my chest. You’re still the first one I think about even though I know we’ll never get that easiness back. All the poets write about are tragic lovers burning themselves to ashes with the passion of their lust. No one ever tells you how to nurse a quietly broken heart. How to get over a friend you still have.

[thoughtsafterdark]

Untouched

Twilight settles itself upon the world lazily, bathing blades of grass in hues of honey gold and making rainbows dance in dew drops. The sun dips under the horizon reluctantly, a proud tyrant grasping to keep his throne. His last rays cling to the ground frantically, rushing towards us and stretching our shadows into twisted caricatures. At last the sweet breeze of night brushes past, pregnant with scents of jasmine and honeysuckle, and the sky blooms a plum dark luscious as the bruise I ache to suck into your skin. Capillaries bursting like riverbanks beneath my teeth. Little rivulets and pools coalescing beneath porcelain.

The air is thick with the promise of thunderstorms, sultry and oppressive. I can feel the beginning of rain, the thick fat drops oozing into perfect spheres before splattering and coating our hot cheeks. We’ll lay here for a bit longer, heaving great gulps of dampening soil and ionised mist until we’re dizzy and disorientated and high on pure oxygen, the world spinning like a burned-out film reel around us. Kaleidoscopic delirium.

                        The storm is building now, pelting at the windowpanes like a haze of bullets. Lightning flashes outside, catches on high cheekbones and illuminates the hard marble planes of your face. Paints us in stripes of black and white like we’re tragic figures in some timeless myth, hurtling towards our inevitable doom. You’re gazing out the window contemplatively, that swanlike neck curving and artists fingers clasping together. I can practically hear your synapses firing, watch the secrets of the universe give themselves up and unfold behind the curtain of your flesh.  And as you find the theory of everything in the exact make and arrangement of Perspex fibres, I wish I could disintegrate, leave this body and curl up in a dark corner just off the bustling motorways of your cerebellum. Bathe in your essence until my name is a distant echo forgotten to the sands of time.

You’re all lithe long limbs and sharp angles, starched pressed shirts and tailored trousers. You’re side long half smirks casually thrown over a shoulder, challenge glinting in sea foam eyes. You’re a pre-dawn winter morning, ice crystals caught in too long lashes and tendrils of exhaled air dancing against the inky sky. You’re the crunch of fallen leaves underfoot on a late autumn evening, the crisp bite of cold air stinging in my lungs. A masterpiece of tendon and sinew and muscle and bone, signed in blood. Galatea and Adonis reincarnate, sculpted from clay by the hands of the gods. And I’ve never yearned to destroy something quite so thoroughly. I want to sink into you and tear at soft tissue until I can have your mind too. I want to rip you into ribbons of pain and pleasure until you’re burning alive, a white-hot pillar of flame and liquid heat consuming everything in its path. The righteous sword of the lord unleashing the plagues upon mankind. A fallen angel in it’s true form, blinding in its ethereal beauty and called to worship on my tongue.

 I want to shred every ounce of your precious composure and lucidity, I want you gaping and vulnerable in parts of yourself you’ve shut down for so long you’ve forgotten how to use them. I want you to feel things you never dreamed yourself capable of.

 Just like this - The velvet heat of my mouth wrapped around you, petal soft yet throbbing. Your legs quivering and your back arched and skin flushed from face to chest to naval, flustered and floundering and teetering on the brink of madness. Damp raven curls matted to a milky forehead and beads of sweat gathering on that cupid bow mouth like ripening grapes yearning to be crushed against my lips. The mewls you make are a litany of prayer, a liturgy and mantra of holy perversion. Your desecration is exquisite in its tragedy. Like the library of Alexandria or the sacking of Troy. Walls crumbling to dust around us until you’re nothing but a rambling pool of inarticulate sounds, mouth open on a broken plea, a shell of flesh cracked open and reborn in sin. Unspooling like thread beneath my fingers, spurting at the back of my throat until I can feel you in my stomach. Taste you like I’m dying of thirst. The blood and the body and the unholy eucharist of my salvation. Until you are a brand upon my damned soul and I cannot tell where I end and you begin.

[thoughtsafterdark]

A study in rust and back garden dreams

[thoughtsafterdark]

Broken Storms

I tasted death in her mouth and venom on her tongue

So I gripped her even harder

Felt flecks of ice in her eyes and a tempest in her kiss

And I melted into her flesh

Her touch was a dull ache snaking its way to my core

A scalpel clinically cleaving muscle from bone

So I guided her wrist as she cut through me

And wailed when sinews met sultry air

 Damp breath spewed through blood stained teeth

Her fingers hovered teasingly above pulsing skin

And I relished black talons snagging across my throat

Her name was a prayer tethering me to this Earth

A mantra that tumbled rhythmically from my gullet

Echoing the soft rise and fall of her white chest

 Her hair smelt of thunder and lightening

Charred skin and ionised air

She was a pillar of flame, white hot and blinding

A burning cathedral mocking the laws of men

So I let my steel walls crumble to dust

Breathed pools of sulphur from those scarlet lips

And fell at her feet in worship

 She tells me my tears taste of the desert

Of rock salt, grime and sheer thirst

Reek of desperation and mindless submission

She smiles the praise against flushed cheeks

Across rank sweat and sheets draped in sin

So I sob and writhe uncontrollably

A roaring river to match her inferno

[thoughtsafterdark]

Succubus

If tomorrow I shattered and fell, pieces skimming across dark secrets

Through the thick fog of my broken heart, the damp heat of desperate whispers

Would you gather my jagged edges, and hold me close until you bled?

Drown in that seductive climax, the digging of hard lines into flesh

The intoxicating agony like wildfire and the wetness of crimson liquid

Tearing at old wounds, gnawing and sucking at bone

A mad beast too long caged, ravishing itself from within .

 Would you let me mark you with my teeth and tongue?

Rough and hard and lingering

A whimpering plea, breath ghosting over labyrinthian scars

Soothing away the sharp shards of ice.

 Would you help me swallow the suffocating lump in my treacherous throat?

Forget the dull fever of words left unsaid

Yearnings buried and tears of blood left unshed

Would you bear witness to the raging flames inside me?

The warring instincts, the fierce longing to engulf and devour you

Destroy you as you destroyed me

As this toxic void between us became my most exquisite form of torture.

 Here in the blackness of night you weave through my dreams

Tendrils of smoke and ash scorch the Earth in your wake

A mass of curls, thick as the deepest forest, enshrouds you

Like serpents they slither and hiss, crushing breath out of chapped lips

Your voice teases the soft crook of my neck

Lulling me into that macabre slumber of death

Moaning sacred screams into lovesick ears

And in this lifeless light of fading embers, the smothering heat of my desperate love

The molten steel daggers of your eyes mould into my own

I become those swirling fragments of grey sky above frothing, stormy seas

I drown in those pale frosty lakes, windows into both our souls

And I fall through the shadows, to oblivion’s tender embrace.