secret: the feelings we feel when we're not feeling feelings

do not for one second think I am not
collecting, categorising and filing away
each word you say to me.
each second of eye contact sits
in a file
in my heart
for me to feast upon
during extended periods of absence.

do not for one small moment
believe your jokes and slips of the tongue
(see: there; another one)
are not painstakingly checked over
and inspected for tone
do not fool yourself that I do not know
what you're doing, or
what I'm doing
that it goes nowhere
that our truths are different.

do not for one brief instant
allow yourself to entertain the notion
that I am yours. Not any more than
   you are mine, but
somehow you are - your words and looks
and breaths are my private collection
forgotten in 12 months, or never.

poem: black denim

god bless you skinny legged

black denim encased

boys in bands

I imagine you’ve grown your hair long since you were a private school boy

you’ve grown a moustache and you mean it

I’m laughing at your jokes and calling your eyes over

you cannot see me in the crowd through the lights,

but still I’ve made a cosy story for us

let us never speak;

by 24 you’ve read just enough philosophy to be dangerous.

there’s no way I can oversell the fact that

you’re not smiling at me, even through the lights, you’re not smiling for me

and I’m not the one you pursue to take home

girls like me

never girls like me.

god bless you boys in bands and your

skinny black jeans

After the show

I leave suddenly, because

it doesn’t matter how good you look behind a keyboard in those black jeans if you’re a dick.

that’s a lie, because I am powerless before black skinny jeans

the cockiness of youth.

Let us speak, I can teach you something

beyond the music lessons your parents paid for that have you here, fodder for women

as well as girls

as well as me

as well as all of us.

us, we’re 

all scrabbling for 'cool enough’; 

you are unironically wearing a full moustache.

poetry 2017: 8 Jan

it is exhausting to find a place to sit
in my world of one or the other
as though a person can't be
sad but overjoyed
sunburned with a vitamin D deficiency
starving with a full belly.
they forget to balance in the precarious in-between
& they push their forgetting into my hands
expecting me to happily take hold.
I am bored by the broad world
having stumbled into a party uninvited
filled to the brim with people I know.

it's the happiest heartbreak to want both
but to also want neither;
to believe in standing up for your beliefs
while sitting quiet and wordless.
yes - exhausting,
to find a place to sit
in a seatless party
toasting failings; grasping straws
pushing past your handshakes.

secret: some poems, in no particular order (they are backwards)

8/1/2016

we tire of farewells
we are just so tired.
my skin is almost transparent
like the membrane of an egg
beneath it I am raw and animal.
my heart is unbearable
trying to wrap itself in cotton wool
I try to work through grief, like there's an end to this quiet pile.

to drag a worried body with a bruised heart
all 'round town
is a tiring thing.
I tire of farewells
I am just so tired.



12/11/2015

they say it's not just the stars
but the space between them
like how you and me sit side
by side
staring at the fire.
feeling that warm and empty air
between our shoulders
our arms
our legs
our hands
our lips.

they say it's not just the stars
but the space between the stars
(it's the space between me
and where you are).



28/6/2015

wanting
is a long list
& my heart aches while I wait
& you're crafting such beautiful question marks
with sure, warm hands.

there's just open space tonight,
there's just open space.

secret: I wrote all this bloody poetry

I wrote all of this poetry, and some of it I still love:

poem challenge: my skin & i

my skin & i, we
have a love/hate thing going on
because we never get any time apart.

you have to play things out til the end
sometimes you already know
the direction, the arrow
(neon)
but you have to play things out to the end.

your love of music & your culture/nature/nurture
intruiges me
i'm less likely to plead flippancy
i'm hanging by a thread
i want to be as certain of myself
as i was at 21
my convictions the greyest area
parts white and black.

i grasp at poetic
like it's the second coming (or are we up to the third now)
i grasp at words, which once
i flexed like muscles
which lay dormant
dormouse
door man
i keep grasping eagerly
(or, to be honest, in fits of desperation).

poem challenge: i've words

I've words,
I've plenty. You're just a button
I like to push sometimes- you're no less for it, but
I reassure myself that
I
am the pusher of the button, and
Shall not be pushed.

Blatantly I stretch to bullshit- you don't
Understand the words I've made, and you
Smile your charmed smile, and I
Become something less (read: consumed),
Just a little less than what you can hold in your hand.

I'm embittered, and for tonight the effort of shininess
Displaced by a poet half a world away, for,
If we make feelings just inklings,
Nothing ever shall be done
Nothing shall ever be done.

You fool, you've put a something in the way of a gap
You've chosen wrong
You should not have gone home.

Unless home had been
What you made me. And what have you made of me?

secret: love poem for no-one (nov 24, 2010)

if your arms
are longer than my arms
your reach further
and i am enveloped
where i can do nothing to fight it
(if your arms
are longer than my arms)
then i shall concede defeat
wrapped up by you.

but if my heart
is bigger than your heart
my love larger and warmer
and you are, perhaps, unknowingly
smothered, a claustrophobic envelope
and you are too quiet to fight it
(if my heart
is bigger than your heart)
then i shall concede defeat
and walk away from the warm wrap of
your long long arms.

secret: waiting

to be inspired
to be loved
to get my visa
to fix my bike
to have control
to have money
to start a detox
for the times i'm alone in the house
to just be kissed by a boy for the sake of summer lovin

for you to realize that you want to know me

for my washing to dry
for a break
for time to finish all the books i own
to be brave enough

for my next day off
for my sunburn to become suntan
for pay day.

30pictureschallenge: Day 4

sometimes i'm a crafter of silence
sometimes the only thing i'm making
is my breath
sometimes my heart aches
sometimes my heart is aching.

there's not a colour to paint the night
the white and the black of the moon, maybe
i drive the streets of my hometown past midnight, wondering of
you, and the somewhere between here and there.

my peace,
as i shift through first second third
and i let some strange calm
sink right into the marrow of my bones.

i own myself in the way that
i'm proud of the breaths i've made
i own myself, but
i imagine your hands on my shoulders.

the part i hate is the way
i'm here to be shocked out of my own heart
by a half-second
of electricity in your eyes and my eyes and
my heart.

poem: we

we're a piece of treasure
salvaged and secreted away in this brain of mine
i try to keep us shiny;
we get polished up when there is too much time.

truth be told, we're probably not a treasure
coveted by anyone but me
(less and less; occasionally)

we're a piece of lace
old and unravelled
i know we were beautiful once, i just
have no will to search for the right piece of thread.

instead,
i'll sew us into curtains to shade faces from the sun
in the back of the van where we once slept
i'll use us to pad a pillow on which to lay our heads.
we're a faded patchwork quilt. while we fade,
i fix the patterns in my mind.

we're almost impossibly put together now;
less blood and less heart and more
fodder for a poem and a song and a story of before.

we're petering out, slowing to a stop, and
to be unfair
i hope, for you, that stop is far from town & a long walk to the nearest gas station-

for me, we're going to move me along until i get there
and honestly
i think that there is here.

poem: moving house

I'm packing up my things again

and I have to marvel (nothing else to be done) 

that

3 months after the fact

I'm still finding your shit everywhere.

Still tidying up after you,

even though you left the fucking country.

(happily) This time I'm not crying over your old shoebox.

treasure: one art, by elizabeth bishop

perhaps if losing is an art, then humankind is an artist.

I'll be perfectly honest with you- this poem is one I know from the movie 'In Her Shoes' starring Toni Colette and Cameron Diaz. Seeing as I only ever heard it in the scene when Cameron Diaz' character is learning to read, I have to say I didn't really take the poem in, as such. Possibly partly because I felt weirdly victorious about the fact that I could read, and this hot blonde leggy fictional character couldn't. Yeah, I get my kicks where I can.

I have been thinking quite a lot about this idea, that many things in life are intended to be lost, and that that's ok. It's hard not to get caught up in the fury of having lost something you felt was important, something you assumed you'd have for a long time.

So, poem, I'm not meant to expect or want to hold onto anything forever? Forever is, after all, a very long time, and my hands are only very small and not always strong enough for holding. If you clasp a peach too tightly with your pointy fingers, there will be bruised flesh, and the peach won't be so sweet. If you hold a hand too tight, or a whole person, eventually there's discomfort, and they have to wriggle away from you. It's not cool to be the one who holds on.

I've hated letting go of lots of things in my life, and I'm certain I've left some bruises where I clung too tightly, hoping and wishing for a repreive, a change of heart, another chance. I've been the one to escape, sometimes by leaving a whole country, sometimes by leaving silence when someone's demanding answers.

But then I think, loss is what makes us want to create; to create art, to refill our senses with something. To fill that gap left after a loss. I have all the time in the world at the moment. I have plentiful space to fill, lots of time stretching empty. I've been filling it with different things: whole seasons of Californication (because my bad decisions don't look so bad when compared with Duchovny's Hank Moody), letters to my friends all over the world (alternating between sugar-coated and brutally honest, optimistic and heartbroken), whisky (because), situpsandchinupsandsquatsandrowingandsweat (distraction with hidden benefits like fitting back into your pants), and here, this, writing.

I spent a few months struck silent, but I've decided that I do want things in my life that I could lose at any time. How else would there be any words to say? What would I write about?

I'd like to write a bit more about loss; in manner of Elizabeth Bishop, all those little things you lose throughout your life. Maybe I'll get to it; I'll add it to the list of things I want to say.

secret: poems

i'm never sure about putting poems up. i've scribbled some pretty shocking verses lately, and i don't mean the type to inspire gasps and awe. i mean the other kind of shocking.

it's the worst when i don't know what to write. it's how i know i'll be ok, writing of the words. i haven't had many lately- this stint has been the worst and the hardest i've had so far. just so you know.

for a warm up, here's some poetry i posted a few years ago now, when i was in the states for my first american thanksgiving.

and a few love poems from 2010 (i've realised that mostly i write love poems. i can't help it).

a few years ago i decided to take up a poem challenge. i think i'm going to have another crack at it.

wish me luck.

treasure:old stuff: rediscovered.

from july 8, 2009

at least she knows one thing for certain. as she turned down the wrong street in vancouver and had to make her way past a block and a half of dusty greyed street people, she feared for her own safety. at least she has that, for she had feared (another fear) that she was suicidal. not in possession of the will to live, or the care to. she at least has this.

but maybe it is not suicide which appeals so much as disappearing from the world. no boxes to tick, no weight to carry, no plans to make. perhaps suicide is the wrong approach. perhaps an invisibility cloak would do. but to exist (the opposite of non-existence) one inevitably requires money, things, a roof and a bed, and so on. thus things must be done. which brings her/us to the original desire to disappear. what is the answer? more wine? more wine! more wine.


10th august, 2009
it occurs to me
i could just stay here
i could fall in love with
someone who wants me in whistler
someone who offers no boundaries; restrictions a laughable concept.
it just now occurs to me
that feeling stifled
is not on my prerequisites list.
but i might be drunken on eye-contact.
if i love
the things you love, will you love me?

it occurs to me
that i am already unfaithful
i am in love with pitchers of beer and mountains
i think longingly of them, when
i should think of you.


oct 15, 2009
your pockets are filled to the brim with things you have collected absentmindedly while creating order from chaos
you find in there several small treasures and a letter written to a friend, too long ago now to send, but you are slow to discard it
there are, of course, the broken bits, the pieces of treasure that are not what they once were, are a shadow of their former self in fact
your pockets are just too damned full for their own good, and you are struggling with indecision in the face of despair
and you stop a minute and wonder what others, or one particular other, will think of they catch you trying to empty out these silly messy pockets
you need to empty these pockets quietly
on the sly, in order to see what has acutally been in there all this time,
and what it is you are going to have to throw away.


a love song i wrote: one of the only ones i ever finished and still like

place your arm
round my shoulders
be yourself
and then be bolder
i am a step away from you
and i will not repeat myself, that'll do
-you laugh until you feel confused
-you smile until you look amused

stick to scripts
say the words you know
don't forget
take a breath, breathe slow
i am a step away from you
and i will not repeat myself, this will do
-nothing big, just a tangle of legs and arms
-none of any of us will come to any harm

someday soon,
we will surely speak
i can wait a year
but i can't wait a week
now i'm just a step away from you
no words left to repeat, nothing else to do

secret: the magic that happens when you step out of your bubble into someone else's

i've been out of the country the last week. down in the good ol' usa, soaking up the culture, chilling with some awesome folk (some related, some i just wanted to marry) and having my 6-monthly profound realization about myself and my life.

i've been writing in my journal a lot. i felt like i might put a little of it out there. i will preface it all by saying i am drinking beer at 11am, and Frightened Rabbit is playing as my soundtrack(y'all need to listen to them, specially 'backwards walk' and 'old old fashioned').

i don't think i've posted poetry before, but i do write a lot of it, so here goes:

23 november:

something about traveling always makes me want to write. i must confess i don't feel as capable of literary eloquence as i used to.

no matter how many times i do the drive between whis and vancouver, it still hurts me a little bit, it's so beautiful. i could wax lyrical about the power of nature and the insignificance of man, there is grandeur in this way of life etc... maybe there would be music playing; orchestras and soundscapes...

truthfully i am a collector of beautiful things and this view is just fucking beautiful.

it makes me think though, of how all things and people have their perfection, and how perfection is just so subjective. makes me realize that hey, even i might have moments of perfection. maybe i should occasionally give myself a break, take a breath and kick back, ignore the impulse to explain and excuse myself for everything i do, say or think.

of course it's pretty easy to be this enlightened with such a view.

nov 25

what i am thankful for:

my health

my arms and legs

my family

the open-endedness of all this

my optimism when it comes to love

my patience

my middle class white heritage giving me the chance to spend time on this self-indulgent bullshit.

the chance to move on from what i've managed to learn. the chance to learn more.

and also, i am thankful for turkey, and microbrewery beers.

nov 26

shouldn't

in a sleepy Oregon town

and decisions days away.

America, all your money looks the same

you fools

(me with my handful of dollar bills)

making shapes out of hands,

my accent stripping me bare

in bars where

i'm a novelty

(i had forgotten how strange i sound)

and to my ears, America,

you are anything but.

jokes landing me in the middle of

accepted and nowhere.

i ache from participating;

soccer, Thanksgiving, movies in bed

with longlost cousinfriend

a kindred spirit; her buttons also undone

and lost altogether

the world pushes us,

we push the world

(and i demand: be. less. demanding.)

i pin on my lost cause label

and wander the town.

shouldn't,

but you're either late or my watch

runs early, in a sleepy Oregon town.

nov26

nothing on me.

you're sugary sweet

my brain has you dead and run over

before i even know how you taste.

so i'll take what i've got

and spread it helplessly across the countless

(pages)

like

hands up helpless, like

the endearingly-put shrug of someone

focused on those other than themselves.

the lesson learned is selfishness

spelled F.U.C.K Y.O.U.

with enthusiasm.

you're drunk and dancing

and the band has a banjo playing

we're all drunk and filled with lies

i'm aiming for clever and sophisticated

even charming

but just barely pulling off wasted

and you're all i ever wanted

so the filler is me learning the waltz,

and

in my memory it's slow motion

and i look happy and beautiful

and yeah

nothing hurts in the morning.

and yeah

nothing that small could ever hurt me.

nov 27, A.M.

the year becomes a little blurry 'round this

point, the purpose and

the step-by-step of progress

smudged and inky, held up as mess

in your little hands.

the people you meet,

and their plans for themselves, in a broader

less, or more sense

the people you've met

and their plans

stack up quickly and quietly

a peaceful and imposing threat towards

your disorganized state-

your own stacks of papers

getting blown about

your careful filing system

emptied of its alphabet.

28 NOV, PM

i'm not made of stone, nor apology

and i might stumble a little

over the words, and the spelling

or the delivery (i cleared my throat, but nothing),

you stand careful and motionless

i stand and

aim just shy of forgiveness

my eyes drawn to yours just that little bit

i'm not made of stone,

and you my friend are a quiet and perfect trifecta

can we be liars together, making a whole

alphabet of exceptions?

if you would say yes

just the once

i would be able, more than able

to quit with the futureless daydreaming

to settle myself, write the novel.