Nonsense.

What remarkable coexistence we have here, in the canvas city. Hazily begging for dreams, we trudge through forgotten alcoves, nurture crevices, wallow in cracked and tarnished pavements. These ephemeral moments seem to last longer, they linger and carelessly float, adoringly wrapping themselves around us like the breezes of the Seine. Berets and butterfly cups, The Eagle screams out to be heard. We poured out cryptic messages before our elders. Naïve rackingly of wheels on the cobblestone, the air of romance long evaded, stolen by these flashes, ravenous for independence. Tourists trudge and capture, stiff in the heat. Drinking catastrophes, they squabble and lay down cards. His tortured pond-like eyes were met for the first time, in the bagagerie.

                                                                       *******

Stricken in the churchyard, ingesting nonsense jazz. Fed by this establishment, blasphemy, ridden with cruel, shrieking lies. Corrupt institution, leeching, thieving , applauding ignorance. Slots for your wealth, pour in your heart. Below us they lie, sulking, for there were no angels in the underground. Skeletons abashed, under the tubercular sky. Limbs trudge back unwittingly, rotting. Dainty pallid skin awakes, cloaked in calamity. How shackled, tedious, coexistence has become, steadily striking to the beat of defeat. Always chasing the bittersweet, daughters remind me of Sundays. Sunday morning with my mother and a pallid egg. Flies feed on the residue. 

Constance.

I always think that she is mad,

She is mad and hatefully so,

Mad to make up all these demons,

Mad to sit them on their pedestals.

I've often watched her late at night,

As she babbled hastily,

Slaving away with ragged tools,

Applauding the autocracy.

Crumpled pamphlets framed, displayed,

Beginning "unfortunately"

Unfortunately you give a damn,

Unfortunately you are mad.

Father Prozac, Mother Valium,

Fill us up with omega three,

All that's precious in the Thames,

That demoniac degree.

Tessa.

You are my new project,

I will steal away your fears, trip them up, disembody them. You must say no and be naked always, you must look on and do not wander,

Quintessentially British, you wither and block, perhaps this full size mirror will make us thinner.

Pleated eyes float away, virginal fingers shuddering away from what is not ours to see, ours to touch, ours to love.

Forcefully upright, always on guard, pins prickling, tickling your awareness.

Painfully ignorant, teach me how to simply be.

Your saccharine breathe hurries and stumbles, rushes away tiptoeing.  Simple pleasures have long evaded you, muttering insanities as they left.

The warmth of courage begins to tremble against your corralled senses, but remember what you have been taught; hot goes to cold - always. 

You sit at the border, perched on a dismantled pedestal, spare dishevelled parts messily dismissed and consigned to oblivion, petrified before the fickle fine lines.

This metabolism has caved, acquiesced, complied.

Time will be cruel, it will spill soon, pounding metronome of faculty,

The hunger lingers, awaiting to be welcomed back with sober arms.

Grudgingly we trudged back to truth, dragged back from ragged paradise.

We'll be forever,

Naked and raw.

The Wayward Stage.

I feel rather ill, sick with nonchalance and dread. Dread at the next love that will hit me, hard and frozen, the eerie chill of emaciation, the fanatical devotion. Tranquility harkens , hardens. Awakes and roars. Trudges back hazily, whispering snippets of silence softly under his breath. Dim-witted and hungry, she flicks, flaunts, evades. Back for more, always. His pointed teeth clatter, polished and carefully tended to, but always partially blackened. She looks up, always up. Never down. Nauseated, bleeding. Beads trickle down, taunting lips and tissues. It tugs hastily at our sleeves, abashed we concede, relinquish. Jealous, but we have forgotten why. It’s a sweet, sweet world my darling, shake your head and never look down.

It is past our bedtime. He lies snoring, somewhere, never doubting the frenzy that enters her mind when swimming through his deep auburn eyes. Somewhat mysterious, somewhat cruel, unfeeling, a façade of nonchalance, grimly enchanting. She stumbles and stutters, unnervingly conscious of every movement, of distance. They sit up with powder discussing this, hammering it into place, a lie like snow.

We stand at the border, clutching on for dear life. The dread comes and goes, flutters and evaporates, dies and revives, like Jesus Christ, but I didn’t believe in him and I won’t believe you if you say you love me. But only you can take it away.

What a wonderful mess. I thought about it, sitting on a return, names whirling past, plastered with electric colours. The soft ache in my stomach, almost comforting. Fertility seeps through tubes and carefully selected shoes, but he stole yours.

You said you didn’t believe me. You said you feel kind of strange, as if poised between dreams, but you can’t sleep because you’re shaking with adrenaline. You said you love the warmth of my smile and I love the gargoyles that tug excitedly at our sleeves.

It’s a damn shame for greed; it disrupts our serene coexistence, the wretched synchronicity, it ruptures, mutilates, drives after the beat to keep, the beat of the heart. His cruel lips sweeping martyrdom, gazes, exclaims, pulls and tugs. How could we possibly blink? You have whole heartedly led us into turmoil, a friendly reverence. Trepidation of the mind, a tumor of concern and cowardice. We should never speak without salt. A little heartache here and there, beware. But it gave me courage.

You are crimson blood, ethereal, delicate, delicious, The world will pick you apart, one petal at a time. She asked me if she’d ever love again. She said she would die alone. I replied that we all die alone, trapped within our own bodies, we’re born alone, we live alone, we exit the wayward stage alone, we love, wholeheartedly but terrifically alone. She said he’d make her feel less alone and she couldn’t bear it.

I stumbled across a doctor who sang me a song, a song about a sweetheart he’d loved decades and decades ago. He knew the science of love. He said he would live empty, eclipsed by a vast shadow of a child’s love, concocted by chemicals his body had refused to secrete past the age of eighteen. He relentlessly kept the memory alive through cavernous melodies. “Fraud!” I cried, and we wept. In all this chaos, we found safety.

Wasted years on a bum. Embellishing, obsessing, feigning nonchalance. I try to not think of you; it doesn't work. Time warped, transported to my mind set over and over again. It sickens me, the deafening silence of cries and adoration and all other hatred of medicine. You can't leave; I immediately become beset with glooms. It's razor sharp and digs at me at every turn. Everything's together. Perfect in its inequalities, a perfect permeable membrane. If only life diffused from one moment to the next. Instead we stop and start.

I promised her it would be all be alright, I lied. She feigned the rest of her life, drearily lived a morose masquerade, based on a frail, fallacious barricade of deceit. She denied its pervasive memory, stubbornly embedded in the profundity of our minds, incurably ever-present.

He boasted he could say ‘I love you’ in six different languages, he just didn’t know what it meant. She crept into his room one night and showed him. They never spoke again.

Content with dismal walls, white-washed and tarnished, the colour of nausea. Feasting on tricks of the mind. Outside these four walls is Cipher. The desultory film projected, relentlessly repeated, steals each synapse, masquerades.

I make a mockery of your childish flatteries. His scars filled to the brim, overflowing with culture and I feed on the residue, a trauma to be overlooked. Charmed by his poetry and thick accent, I could have loved him wholly. Ignorance bleakens love for her children. A flirt with power, a gullible giggle. But she’ll grow up and become a dictator like the possibilities of a pregnant six seconds.

I gawp at the geometrical patch of blue towering into the room, feel the tar, stubbornly weighing down on our plump, pillowy lungs. I will teach her how to love you, never thinking of us, only of your selfish wishes.

It destroys everything like a Japanese cartoon. Dumbly, I read you backwards. Restless, we’ll lie and be forgotten, this haze as my formaldehyde. Chalky cheekbones, achingly forcing a melancholic smile, an angel tugs at simple pleasures, swallowing inhibition. We scorn the short cut. This is what love tastes like.

Saccharine sweet, bitterly stinging the tongue, stealing away a million delicious kisses - greedily, ravenously. Why do you stay up so late, digesting all the trivialities as they slither through each thread in the carpet, mouth hung open apathetically? Why do you not master my art with a pill, it will shut your midnight eyes. You stay up reciting tenses, you know a million endings, but where to begin?