It leaves me in the dark.

A stressful place where keys are returned, in a gesture much like receiving them: careless, yet heavy.

Where he says nothing but ‘thank you’ in a voice that is too soft after all the harshness that has passed between us, like it is going to be followed by a reconciliatory yet final 'goodbye'. Like he is relieved I have made it so easy for him. I don't stick around to hear it nor do I look at his face, which could reveal so many a thing. I am scared of things that are about to be said and witnessed.

Instead I duck out the door, muttering ‘I don’t know what to say’ in a breathless manner that suggests tears welling in the enclosed spaces of my eyes and as I stagger across the yard I hear the door lock. My breath, that I feel like I have been holding in all day, comes out in a billow of white matter and sounds like desperation. 

I do not know where this leaves us. Boundless, separate. Keyless. In the dark.

Stay golden

How do you know

You don't. 

A softness in her demeanour; lethargic, long muscles and buttery bones create an almost slothlike appearance. Edging along the sides of walls silently, observing everyone else in the room. Playing cards, chatting, drinking sherry from small crystal glasses that clink against their teeth.

She walks along, casually draping her gloved fingers against the wall, studying the patterns of the damp-ridden wallpaper. The shapes unite and break in intervals and she is mesmerised by them and the deep red arrangements that seem to hover in the air.

She looks at him, once, twice but never thrice. He only catches the back of her neck; unruly dark hair coiled up into soft curls, continuing all the way down and disappearing inside her dress. For a brief moment he imagines it released and wavy against the whiteness of a pillow on a bed, like a pool of blood. This makes him shiver in his chair, and he grasps his glass that bit harder and spills the sticky liquid onto his fingers, cursing. It seeps onto the cloth that covers the table and he thinks how it will leave an amber imprint there, forever marking the things he felt that night.

In your bed

In your bed I am filling the spaces between your covers

The bumps in your mattress and the gaps in the poor weave of your sheets

You don’t have to say it

It’s like pins and needles on the back of my neck

It’s like the sound of thunder without lightning

But without lightning there is no thunder

Your eyes are everywhere over me except my face, you cannot look me in the face when you’re not saying it

You don’t say it but my ears hear it and on this Monday I will change

I’ll twist myself around, so far that the image will break and you can follow the trail of shards

Still you don’t say it

And I give a voiceless promise that I will change

This Monday, Tuesday... Next week or next minute

The sky is a pinpricked sphere and I cannot make the difference between shooting stars and their reflections on the windows of buildings

I greet them all with a wish

You don’t say it

But I think I can hear the thunder

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.