Notes From A Famine

Lost in sleep, charting
streams consciousness forgot, she
speaks in poetry.

She raises sleepshot
eyes to find a guide – listens
to the sound of skies.

This is where the seeds
of dreams are sown – where muses
grow and feed on stars,

night air arias.
Sleep is hunger, says the Moon,
hung high and rung white.

* * *

Insomnia, again. Gah.
So tired and depressed right now. It was only to be expected, but still. I've had enough. :/

.

First time writing haikus. How did I do?

Reconstructing (De)Construction

I'm only sleeptalking,
speaking fractured poetry -

This is how it feels, I decide,
to be fixed - no longer
building night on the inside,
but succumbing to fantastical de-
constructions, marvelling at the map
of binary constellations written
under my skin. To feel no fear
staring wide-eyed at the sun,
at old letters of rejection or
even my reflection. Knowing
she's near; understanding she's un-
done.

This is how it feels to be whole:
to watch my breath thin
and bend the glass geometry
of these bottled skies eastward
to collect the sunrise. To memorise
the way the light builds and breaks,
and to love every lost second,
each heartache.

And this is how it feels, I realise,
to sit and cry for days,
when you can only sleep
for seconds, minutes. Defiance:
knowing the weight of the world
is heavy as god, but
beautiful as her insides.

* * *

One day, I'll feel this. All of it.

Liar, Liar

If l'appel du vide
is the urge to drown
all sense of self - to split
and accumulate bruises -
then to fabricate fables, to
forge fictions as I do
is nothing more than
poor impulse control.

I do not mean to confuse
or abuse the truth. My lies
are like thalidomide -
junkyard art shoved into being,
or the shards of
gasping hearts breaking
out of code. Making mundane myths
a la mort, a la mode; I'm caught

in distortion, pretty as drugs.
Junkie; addict. Liar, liar,
I require a fix of fiction -
the lies I tell and spin to sell.
(Some tears, a loose tooth,
the unravellings of truth.
The sum of myself out of
all that's left to give).

* * *

I'm attempting to come to terms with my own constructedness. The amount I lie – entirely pointless lies, mostly – is getting out of hand. Most of the time I don't even realise I'm doing it, it's only a while later that I'm like 'Hang on... That wasn't true. Why the hell did I even bother saying that?'
It's compulsive – like the want to throw myself under every car that drives past, the urge to fit myself into the smallest corner of my room or the sudden need to smash my wrists against something.

I don't have a clue what's going on anymore. :/

Make Like A Train, Take Tracks

This is escape
(or so we'd like to believe) –
taking the train through nowhere
and reaching now here. We'd hoped
for such a scape of waste
land, where the sun gutters
from the sky, and our footprints measure
not distance, but scope. Where, other
than the echoes of electric exoskeletons,
hoarse codes from broken throats,
the world is mute. Colourless.

When I talk of a landscape,
I speak of this silence:
this space, this time,
and how it means forever.
An emotion bled-out,
compressed -
under snow,
under duress.

* * *

I wrote the majority of this on the train back to uni after one of the most surreal weekends ever. Whilst feeling all insubstantial and disembodied and unreal, we passed through a mini snowstorm. You could just see the pylons looming out of the white like the imprints of skeletons on fossils.

There's nothing like nowhere to get you back in the here and now.

Terra Firma

This is an allegory; I
am not what I seem
and yet this means something.
Re-read, and you might realise
the abstraction behind my eyes -
a break like toothache
I shook to bake. Instant magic.

I talk good, you eat glass -
we do crosswords behind our backs:
each clue cryptic, a crypt.
This fable is a whole world
under the kitchen table,
curled like a cat or a cardigan
or a knife.

Life, distilled: a cold brew.
That’s what I offer you.


Across this mirror,
this terra firma,
I’ll throw my reflection
towards the light -
hoping that someday,
it might mean something
to me, too.

* * *

Hello, self. I've a story for you.
It ain't gonna be pretty, but it could be the truth, if you'll take it, if you'll make it your own.
Are you sitting comfortably?

Then I'll begin.