Colour Story

The day the colour came I found
The difference between here and there.
I found the place we’d met
And all the moments spent.

In the grey-grey we didn’t touch
Distance would prevail and we would fail
To fill the gaps.

Then the sun rose in shades
That blazed across my eyes
And bled to the corners of the sky.
It was the first I’d seen
And the ink was spilt and spilt
Till the world weighed with it.
Like blotting-paper drinking stains.

When the grey-grey was all consumed,
You and I stood where we first met –
Now dripping in colour.
Even the dirt beneath our feet was brilliant.
The colour led to the kiss
And my lips were red
In the place we met.

We got sick with it and
Wanted to die.
We got drunk on it and
Attempted to fly.
We swam in it
And sung with it
And Painting finally made sense
And we forgot what grey-grey was
And we made whole cities with rainbow houses.
We lived in it and
Fucked in it
And died in it.
We buried the dead in techni-colour coffins
Under grass no longer grey and grey.

Then the sun set and you kissed me
Again.
In the saturated dark
Now so rich and thick with it.
Time spun to infinity
In a multitude of shades.
But then it ended.

And the sun rose grey.
You stepped away and
It filled the space between.
And my lips were grey.
My lips were grey.
And that was the end of the brilliant,
Bold and heaving.
The colour was too much
And too brief for grieving.
So again we failed to touch
And you again were leaving.
As the sun set grey and grey.

Returning

Yesterday, I went back to the house I grew up in.
It was silent and cold.
The walls were caving and the windows craving light.
Dusty shrapnel spattered as I picked my way
Across the hall.
I'd torn the ivy from the kitchen window to get in.
The glass had cracked, unsupported.
And scattered over the mildewed sill.
And inward into the sink.
Crumbling debris and needles littered the floor.
And the air craved life,
And the air craved life.

The rooms once had names and hosted moments,
Before time slowed with the boarding of ways in.
Before ivy gloved the house from sun.
I found the cellar door open,
And poised,
And waiting,
And ready for light.
The stairs vanished too quickly into Unseen.
Memory collided with instinct then.
They joined forces -
Both running the same way.
Out.
Get out.
Get out.
I'd heard it before.
The door
Quivered.
The glass on the sill had cut my hands as I scrambled
In.
The warm crimson dripped to the floor
In tick-tock drops of wet on chocking dry,
Creating craters.
The shivering whisper hushed again;
Get out.
Get out.
And everything went wrong.
Everything went wrong.
Something had grown in the time I'd bee gone.
It had been left unchecked for too long.
Like disease in old trees,
Like rumors that lead to foul deeds.
And I ran.
And I ran.
The edges catching my hands
Again.
I left the air to crave
And the cellar door calling for life.
I left the house I grew up in yesterday,
Regretting the blood on the floor
As too much to leave behind.

Proximity

It’s about changes in space and lengthening time.

It’s about doors that fail to open and mis-directed signs.

It’s pine cones in pockets just to fill the void.

Taking breaks around the building, just to check the noise.

It’s about altering affectations in the hope of better ways

But failing at the first and leaving overplayed.

It’s when the exit sign flickers, and reflects below the rake

When I’m sat with long exposures and documenting tape.

It’s about sweeping circular routes for pointless cups of tea.

About a secret on a post-it I’d rather no one see.

It’s closeness in the first place and distance in the last.

Nothings that turn to episodes and slip into the dark.

It’s about rushing and not stopping until it’s too far late

And the marble stairs are empty because I failed to wait.

Corn Doll

Girl in black, boy in blue.
She Felt and he never knew.

There was such a lot she said,
Thinking talking would turn it into sense.

But words only made a corn doll.
And a fool.

You Could Change Space, I Could Not

If I inhabit your space

And paste myself over the walls, like dust and glue,

Would you come home?

As I unravel the bandages,

That hold the most important parts together,

Could you please turn away?

I don’t want you to see this.

I don’t think anyone should see this.

The words can come like modern mantras,

Propelling me through the wasted day.

But they don’t consult with the actions.

Separate script and mime.

I am sorry.

Tell me it has all been worth the mess and it will stop.

I am sorry

That I couldn’t do it better than this.

End Song

This is not your story and I am not your friend,
We can construct meanings from traced etchings
Or we could just pretend.
I won’t tell you of heroes that never fell to fault.
I won’t weave a yarn from frayed endings,
All I have is circling salt.
Perhaps I’ll sit inside it and look out at the sands,
And you can sit beside me,
Whilst I unmake our plans.
Don’t think that we were lovers, we weren’t even known.
I think i need to see the edge,
Where swan’s songs chime alone.
You could watch me as I set out; you could turn away and hear
My cry as I let it out,
That fills my distance to the pier.
Before tide, sweep smudged circles; now mixed with sanded dust.
Reform them to make your fortune,
Whilst my riches wear to rust.
Oh, but this is not yours or even mine,
This is just a moment,
Beats of inevitable rhyme.
So don’t think this is for or of you,
You are a shadow on a shore.
You are not and cannot
Reach me anymore.

The Lady in Blue

“And the clock”, said the Clockmaker, “shall chime the days,
And the bells will ring out to sea.
And the men at arms will fall away
When the wars write their own decrees.
And the Woman in Blue shall sing her last
As her sailor knows not his own sails.
And she’ll pack up her birds in cages shut fast,
And ask again to ring out the bells.
And time will take our freedom away,
As though it were a door made of locks;
Each turn of a key a new minute drawn,
And each cog a tick-followed-tock.”

And the Lady in Blue knew the truth
As soon as the Clockmaker said
That the clock, oh the clock, will render the days,
Will craft the sunrises from lead.

So she took up her birds and descended the stairs
To a chamber below ocean rock.
She plucked all their feathers and cut off her hair,
And set one thousand keys to their locks.
And with all the down and the hair from her head
She carpeted the walls and the floor.
She feathered cell, feathered not bed,
Her sailor turned the keys tight in the door.
And so, the ticking from the Clockmaker’s hands
Resounded across the shores.
But the Lady in Blue, deep beneath the sands,
Could hear none but her birds aching calls.

And so, with no time, no tick-followed-tock,
The Lady in Blue was set free.
Freed from the minutes – made free by the locks,
Keys spread across fathoms of seas.

Some Words

Silver threads
Scissors
Holding on tight
Banisters
Tower
Brass
Half
Light
Top
White birds
Suspension
Toes
Prickling hairs
Just too cold
Buried rivets
Upside
Down
Foundation stones
Feeling cracks
Marble
Eggs
Smashing floors
Height
Decision
Made

The Great and Unsettling Adventures of Little Lizzie Literature: Part One

Once upon a left handed argument, Little Lizzie Literature decided to take her bread and jam upon the southwards side of the Search-lit Sofa Sea. The Times had taken their toll on her paper pulp skin and the roaming light intermittently illuminated the dried up edges round her little written nose.
She munched her meal as the lighthouse span its head, accruing a most circumnavagatory view of the landscape. The jam was strained from the pulp of Pickwick Pears, which grew on the branches of the Dickens trees, found in Library Lagoon. Their flavour particularly full of character and cockney aromas.
The Sofa Sea undulated in a most somnambulant fashion – sending Little Lizzie Literature off to sleep in a beating of a bibliography eyelid, wedged precariously between a recliner and a beanbag. The Sofa Sea was now contributed to by the unfortunately named Stray Fluff Leakages – which had begun to descend from the Extra Stuffing Heights after the Great Rearrangement of the Second Sitting. The Ocean, once pure of all alternative seating plans and renowned for its two and three-seater clarity, was a hotch potch of cushioned intruders. Sofamen sometimes had to wait for days before a catch took hold of their lines and the effect on throw-cushion fish stocks was untenable.
So Little Lizzie Literature slept and ruffled her pages gently in her slumber, unaware of her predicament as she slipped down the back of inaccurately referred to Sofa Sea. Little Lizzie Literature bumped her paper-bodied way downwards until she rested gently on the bottom - atop a layer of biscuit crumb sand (and narrowly avoiding a stubbornly positioned depositation of forgotten-penny choral). She slept there until an uncompromisingly bristled hairbrush crab prickled it’s was across her chest, causing several of her pages to turn.
Little Lizzie Literature had been informed most vociferously by Old Grandma Gallstones that those who fall down the back of the Sofa Sea do not return unaltered by their experiences, if the do in fact return at all. The Maple Syrup Men travelling from the Great Rock Candy Mountain swore blind as a sugar rush that the Weave Witch of Worsted kept her lair company down there. And her lair was not to be reckoned with.
But Little Lizzie Literature was not a fluttery binding of pages. She had a belly full of bread and the hard-back spine of a dictionary. Little Lizzie Literature took a deep goose feather breath and set off into the darkness of the bottom of the Sofa Sea….

Tea Set

“Please do come round for tea” said She to He.
They sat in tiled and painted spaces and considered each other’s faces.
He was the carved frescoes lost heroes.
She, the painted and gilt goddess on the ceiling –
Tempting Fate to a snake-bite bed.
They sipped coloured liquids,
The lightshades of stained glasses above His head.
Their hands brushed over fumblings for silver spoons.
And the clink of bone china made etchings on their soundscape.
They had entire histories described for them upon the walls.
But He paid no heed to prior mishaps in relief.
They sipped until Her finest set was dry.
She swept it to the floor
Where it expanded in a flurry of footprint clouds.
She scooped the settling dust and softly blew it into His eyes.
The tea-set powder burned and stung.
He flung his bones against the marble scenes protruding at his spine.
Smothering moments of woe and war.
Of love and lies picked out in compacted debris.
She pressed in and kissed Him once and twice together.
Cold touches of brittle cartilage
That made his blood run dry -
Like the finished tea upon the floor.
They were swallowed by ceramic.
Light span through tinted glass to illuminate Their stone set faces -
Locked in a kiss of composite shells.
Trapped in calcium compounds.
Wrung out leaves remained upon the terracotta tiles.
Perhaps they spelt the shape of misfortune.
Or desire and loneliness combined.
A ribbon of text inscribed itself about Their heads
A Roman-fonted message to those taking tea unchecked:
"And the Thirsty crushed beneath their weight to stone.
And the china turned to china what was bone. "