I'm up in the woods

Yesterday we walked in the woods and the smell of birch, the orange peeling bark of pines like strips of grease proof paper and dead grey trunks still erect, plunged into me and made me breathe in.

The moist, cold earth loose underneath our searching footfalls...
The compost of autumns past and forgotten, the tiny purplish blueberry shrubbery and the lichen and the golden sun on the tree tops...

A smell so sweet and fragrant I wish I could have bottled it.

In these parts the woods are still wild, even though there are well-trodden paths crisscrossing it made by animals and later followed by humans. There is not a sound in there, just our feet on the ground carefully avoiding the gnarly, bare roots springing up from the soil unanimously trying to trip us.

The parallel sun sifts through the leafy vegetation creating luminous mirages across the pathway. Finally we pass into the chilly shade of blue pines and feel alone like lost children.

Here is where you kiss me, with the stillness of the landscape in my ears and the shadows growing beyond my closed eyelids. I am imagining the trees looking over us, towering above our lilliputian heads, and there is a murmur rising from somewhere within.

Then we walk back, with our faces burning, tripping on all those roots now in our fervor as the murmur grows louder.

And when we finally reach the fringes of the forest, now freshly grown and green and light, never to return again, the sound lifts

And I knew you would never be mine.

Me and room service honey

I love my room.

I have loved you in three countries

On a single continent

For two years and eleven months

We have celebrated three of my birthdays and two of yours

I have spent the Christmas with your family

You have spend the summer with mine

I have taken you with me everywhere

Watched you naked, clothed, in your boxer shorts

Clean, unwashed, unshaven and shaved

I’ve been with you when you’ve cried, with your back toward me on the bed and your head against the pillow

And when you were in love with me you’d take off your glasses to kiss me because it was the only way to get close enough

I have taken you with me everywhere

And the smell of you which I am bound to forget

In a city full of artificial scents; shampoos, conditioners, deodorants, perfumes, detergents and powders, lotions and creams, you smelt to me like a human being

My thoughts are muddled with images of you

The milky fuzz of your lower lip

Imagining the sound of touching your face makes my skin ache

I have taken you with me everywhere