once when i was younger
i danced with a busker at the markets
he was singing 'Accidentally in Love'
and i never saw him again
but sometimes i dream about him
because i think that's the most in love i've ever been
and when i hear the song
i think of my perfect stranger
and i smile
Hold my hand. My thumb, my pinkie, my index, ring and middle fingers. My palm. My knuckles. The 29 major and minor bones, 29 major joints, 123 ligaments, 34 muscles, 48 nerves and 30 arteries.
Hold my hand,( because I'm not afraid). Because I'm brave enough for you. Because I'm ready to love you, to be loved by you. I'm so strange and fragile and blistered by myself, so weathered and disorganised and inert.
And you're such a fighter, you're so believable and real and solid, (you're a fact). You exist and it shocks me sometimes, it fixes me sometimes that you're possible. I was put together the wrong way but I don't feel tangled with you, I
You're made of dust motes and bitterness and bad dye jobs and you're sitting alone with your sadness muffled by a cup of chamomile. One of your shoelaces is double knotted and one isn't. Your bag isn't zipped up the whole way. You've strewn 20 cent pieces across the table like exclamation marks and soon you'll go home and cry because nobody knows you.
You're followed by a haze of cigarette smoke and animal rights, Bob Marley headband and pasty skin. It's obvious that you bite your nails and that your mother cuts your hair, you walk like your knees hurt and you talk like you believe in conspiracy theories. You'll go home and put your fist thr
Oh! It's there again; you've taken it out again. Did you realise?
You're going to tear it. The third line is already indecipherable because you've folded and unfolded it so many times. It's just a comfort thing now, you memorised the words on the second reading.
It's not like you can see it anymore, anyway. Sure there's words, but you've forgotten the language. What use is that? An article you used to be able to understand. Curly little lines that are just markings and ink and machines, you've sucked the voice right out of it. Even when you did get it they were only words, just a gabbering young journalist with little to no grasp on anyone'
She's looking through herself again; in the mirror. There's folds and creases and lines and a general softening of angles and rioting of liver spots but she's still there. In the jawbone, in the eyes. In the parting of her hair, now so frail and so sucked of colour, so rickety and so weak. But still there.
She waits with watery eyes, blue but no longer bright, sunken and submerged in skin now spongy and pruney and riddled with a plethora of imperfections she so cringed away from. Her bones ached, creaked, felt like splintered wood. She barricaded her flesh with seas of goosefeather doonas, quilted rugs and clothing that smelt and itched like
It's one of those days; the sky hasn't realised it's half past six yet and the world remains dark under the cloud cover, ever threatening of rain but never quite delivering. Sun can't pierce the winter chill, lying thick over the world like skin on cold soup. Sickness is compulsory, tissues become a currency, Panadol is whined and cried over like tomorrow's lottery numbers. I didn't do my maths homework.
To forsake the warmth of my bed for the sub-zero of the tiles seems an appalling betrayal to my skin, which revolts in the form of gooseflesh, a nonsensical rising of hair persuaded to dissipate only by the mug of addict black tea consumed g
So I left the house, I guess. Being in a room with her made me want to roll my shoulders too much, like I had bad posture or something. I don't know. Her house was way too middle-class, she has plastic pot plants and a ceiling fan with five blades. Ridiculous woman. The only thing we have in common was sharing the same womb.
I have no idea where I am, it's London but not snazzy London with signs and cabs and everything. This is flower-box London, where everyone reads home journal and goes to the hairdresser and smells like pears. The women all spend disproportionate amounts of time playing canasta, I mean everyone plays canasta. You could be