Christmas

The silence after was heavy with
the smell of clementines,
a souvenir left over
from the mornings joviality
and a cloying reminder of what had,
by now,
past;
like ants we sat in lines
as the air settled
and found its place back to where it started
and I knew then
that we all got lonely sometimes,
in spite of pleas to the contrary.

Angela Lansbury

It was almost as though
she were there again,
the room around her disappearing,
his voice melting like rice paper
on her tongue. 
Her mind danced back
to a life she had lived in lights,
one that now shone in her eyes,
and her mouth spoke the
words from her past,
a memory she had forgotten.

Christmas Party

He sipped through two glasses of wine
and poured one more as holiday music played
from the room next door
and filled the empty air with sugary sweet cheer.
He closed his eyes,
took a breath
and thought back to this morning,
before it all.
It hadn't snowed yet this year
and the bare streets outside the window
made his bones cold.

From the inside he looked

Because he hadn't always felt
fully real
he clung like wildlife to the arm of his friend
as they walked towards people;
and hoped her touch
would transmit all she had learned
from years spent taking chances.
He himself had been waiting a while
to become completely adult
and worried suddenly that it had
happened some time long before,
back when there was
so much more time.

26

I woke up
with the grey light of December
squeezing through cracks in the blind,
thinking back at when I used to take photographs
and how keen I had been once
that they be a lasting reminder
I had mattered.
I could give away all of my money
and really disappear, I think next,
recede into a Winter
that feels so much bigger
when you're in its middle.
I blow out the candles in my head
and imagine the billowing smoke
spelling out the year
above our dining room table.
Lost but still looking.

Girl on a bridge

He had pulled her out
from a past he had known once
and dusted off what they were
until it gleamed and shone
and lit up a life
that had grown small.
He sometimes held her hand now;
as if holding it tight
would keep him from being lost
again
he thought.

Julianne

The table was almost as big as the room
as we sat,
her in blue,
me in something I do not remember,
against white walls that stopped
all of a sudden
and before they really should have.
Her words like a hand beneath my chin;
I silently thanked goodness for her
and greedily took all that I could
like a boy uncertain
of when he would eat again.

Sharing you with memories (all or nothing)

I remember a video tape
I watched over and over,
him crying in a room filled
with Superman souvenirs,
California streaked through his hair.
He had seemed so much older then,
his first broken heart
leaving scars clear across his face;

I thought he knew everything.

I would haved followed him anywhere
had he asked.

It was an effortless sort of love which led them to evening, illustrated

Friends and dinner

It was in the stony grey of winter
and the cold that bit at their skin
when those who once
saw the world together
stood in one place,
tired from days forcing themselves forward,
tides turning near by.

Each whispering to fill the space.

All unsure if they'd ever be sure;
All certain of a shared history
that grew more vivid
as they grew alongside it.
The anchor
to which their ropes were tied.

Cheese

It was hard to think clearly
after all of the cheese;
and even walking
had become an issue,
as he stumbled towards
the crackers
to spread a wedge of brie
onto a wheat thin.

Train

It struck him as odd,
as the train sped through green,
that it had done so
a thousand times before,
and that the journey went on,
without him,
unchanged.

When the lights go out

He followed the car
yesterday
(and the one before)
down the same gravel road
where the man in the navy coat
and hat that didn't fit
seemed to live.
Each morning had mixed together
like paint
until one was nothing more
than another.
Paris seemed an age ago.

There is a limit to what I would do (and other possible non-truths)

If you ran from us
I would chase you for a while,
I thought
and then said out loud
to the space between here
and the television,
all the while knowing
I would only run so far
and then would probably stop
for milkshake
in some road side cafe.

A shadow

Without meaning to
I made the sound you make
when you eat something you love,
a cartoon hmmph
that conjures up
cartoon gorillas
eating
cartoon prey.
You are nowhere to be seen
but it feels like you're
everywhere.

Aftermath

I heard your voice
long after we had finished speaking
it bled
like wine in water
until the room was filled
with heavy air
outside my window
the moon clung like a smudge
to morning sky

Starting from now

It wasn't until he was stood
at the bottom of a great hill
that he saw that
what it symbolised
was even greater,
took a pen
from his inside pocket
and wrote the time on his hand
in thick, black scrawl.
A birth of sorts.