TAXI
The blue flashing lights that paused our homecoming were almost picture-perfect.
January’s teeth around the evening, a cold set smile cast on a drunken Friday night,
Letting the glass glitter a winking apology; you didn’t really mean it.
We sighed and left the warmth of a meter-lit haven,
Slipping off the cracked leather seats – silence
Blaring orange and yellow.
Maybe red would be more appropriate, I thought,
A diversion for feet and thoughts let our skin fire the tiny hours with goose bumps,
Fiddled minds stealthily contemplating the sounds of danger – not our business.
Unfamiliar houses blocked us from the scene
Bricked up and sealed off, I whistled
A tuneless repetition and your feet tapped united rhythms on the tarmac
The trees so far above our heads. Or were they churches?
We didn’t hear the screaming,
Only coloured tape to spark imagination under a mellow streetlight.
Stinging feet brought is home, blood fizzing back to our fingers, we divided and left
Me alone, to lie awake and wonder, wait
For sixty-mile-an-hour dreams to reach my head.
Revaluing the House
Footsteps squeak an unfamiliar Northern accent
In the hallway where you once called out
‘Hello!’ that long awaited shout.
Wallpaper peels the corners of the days
Drawn out, voices where half a life was spent.
I poise and wait for papers pens, clipboards
To tread away the distance and spaces in between
Your leaving and your coming back. Unseen
Heads stoop to cross my space
Of newer dreams, burning orange to lose or to afford.
Muffle backwards, where you started.
Forget the daily jobs, the cries, the cups of tea,
The stains on the carpet, pictures cradle memory
Of wet days in winter rain –
But things will never be like that again.
Today I feel like my brain is just a big empty cloud…
Last Night I Had This Weird Dream…
I dreamt about you last
Night, bruises on my skin
Pressed up hard against the bathroom basin
With tiles fading fast beneath our feet
I reached for your blood in a shadow of sleep.
When I Wake
When I wake
I am alone in seconds that swallow themselves whole,
Gulping down their night-time neverland.
A blinking second hand slows, confusing
The minutes to a flash of light,
Memories of a dark room.
When I wake
Shapes lump and spin in shadow,
Photographs and picture frames that spill
Yesterday into my air-tight hours.
I hold a thought of you close,
A needle in a haystack.
When I wake
My own hands are around my wrists,
Arms cool in a rhythm of lamplight.
Electricity whines away the hum
Of an empty room,
Delicately pressed against the earth.
When I wake
Dreams break themselves beneath surface,
Catching the cold bellied quiet, below
The drone of shipping forecast and sheets.
Sleep leaving me in a mess of a fabric,
A feather-lined fairytale.
When I wake
Fingers can only push away at future, tickling
Pages of a book across your spine.
The clock on the wall echoes names that will fall
Into the velvet shade of the nights
We leave so far behind.
JUMP
That day the sky fell open.
You screamed your bliss to the roof, expanding
The splintering heat,
White hot, blistering across the horizon.
You clasped the sticky satellite, an aching hum
Crystallizing the air in your face.
The hours clicked a singing silence,
We saw your toes quiver, eyes tremble across the skyline.
Our faces flashed, throwing spheres to your quivering burden,
Fingers ablaze to reach the ground.
That day burnt you into the sky.
And we were left alone, heavy heat settling
Your cries on our shoulders,
The stinging air pressing deep in our mouths,
Shuffling through the thick day,
And gently melting into the ground
