The way through

Where is                                  here I am        

gone home without you

when I would rocket from the world

out of an ocean so impossibly asleep                                     

is the rain your final call

because I am wondering what this was for

           

why you ever loved me

why you do not anymore

there is no witness here

only ghosts of words that nudged into breath 

the shape of a fool      shivering and wet       

your blanket thrown over the bed one cold night too late

 my eyes, heavy with dreams 

but you—                  

very much awake

how I welcomed the chance to be wrong

to never ask why you had to leave

why you had to come at all

was it to drift away from this eroding shore

or was it

                                    not wanting to be sorry

not wanting to be felt sorry for 

one last secret for memory to keep

Now our half-truths ship out

under cover of a cloud-filled sky

the sun you once spoke of

never any friend of mine

                                   

can you feel it rain

can you?          

Exposed

Because I am uncovered here

praying for the snow that cannot fall

Secrets

           When I went to bed that night I was still a bit unsettled.  I always needed ages to get over a confrontation, even the type that most people would classify as only a mild misunderstanding.  I lay awake for what felt like hours, but just when I thought I would never sleep suddenly I was standing in an enormous elevator.  Confused I looked around me.  That was when I saw it.

            A dragon.  A big red dragon.

            He was watching me through narrowed, yellow eyes.  He seemed dangerous in a quiet sort of way, although he said, in a perfectly polite voice, “Hello.”

            “...Hello.”

I tried to smile, but that only made him eye me with yet more suspicion, so I stopped.  “Um, are we going somewhere?” I asked him.

            “No.  At least, not yet.”

            “But we might?”

            The dragon clearly didn’t want to answer this question.  I therefore tried a different tack.  “I don’t understand why I’m here,” I said.

            “Because I wanted to know something,” the dragon replied.  He gave me a speculative look.  “Do you know who I am?”

            “No.”

            “Hmmmn,” he said. 

“Aren’t you going to tell me?”

“No.”

“Okay,” I answered, relieved for some reason.  “But what is it you want to know?”

            “Everything.  Right now, however, I’ll settle for your secrets.”

            “I don’t have any—at least, I don’t think I do.  Other than the boring kind, I mean.”

            Amused now, the dragon told me, “That’s where you’re wrong.  Your secrets are the type I find most interesting.”

            “Why?” I demanded.  “Because,” the dragon said, “they aren’t the kind you keep from others—they are the kind you keep from yourself.”

           “And what are those, exactly?”

            “That you don’t love them.”

            “Don’t love who?”

            The dragon shook his giant, scaly head.  “You’ll have to answer that question for yourself.  But when you do, remember this: love is a gift.  Not a right.”

            “What are you talking about?” I said, only to find myself in a field of flowers.  The dragon had gone.  When I looked up into the sky the sun nearly blinded me.

            In the morning I didn’t remember this dream until I was sat at the kitchen table, having a cup of coffee.  As I tried to figure it out I wondered what on earth had gotten into my psyche.  Whatever it was, I’d hoped my subconscious had worked it through, because I didn’t want to see that dragon again.  Ever.

            

Hope

I can

hold this sky

let the air exhale me instead

Roots

I slipped inside of the

oily puddle today.

Even though I knew it

was there.

The twig you threw was good

enough to save

itself, barely.

Still, it was the strangest thing.

While I was waiting,

suddenly I had this tree.

Not much moves me,

but I had to move for the roots.

They were so big.

It burned inside, I know it.

The petrol had to burn the

branches inside,

had to leave scars that

never turn white.

The explosion would have

horrified you,

had you waited to see.

Oil does that—

it explodes.

And then there is nothing left.

Watching

They found it, separately.  Sometimes one at a time, sometimes in small groups.  They instinctively shied away from each other, accepted without argument that certain hallways would remain locked to them.  What did they want to see each other for, anyway?  They didn’t.  They didn’t, and they wouldn’t.

Once they had all arrived and found themselves their own shadowy corners, the teenage boy appeared.  He went to a courtyard in the middle, surrounded on all sides by brick walls with windows that opened from the inside.  On a white sheet spread out on the concrete ground he very deliberately started placing red plastic drinking straws.  No one watched him and he paid attention to no one else.

Over time the straws began to form an intricate pattern.  Those hiding in the brick building did not want to look at it, and when they did, they pretended not to understand.  Was it a formula, they asked?  The kind you needed to be a math genius to understand, perhaps?  They were not math geniuses, so they would never understand it.  Satisfied, they slid away from the windows. 

But the group of pirate boys living in the trees overhead did not leave.  They watched from the tree house they built high in the branches.  They knew what the red straws on the white sheet meant.  They knew it was a key.  A key to a map that would lead everyone in the building to the one place no one wanted to go. 

No one, that is, but them.

Another kind of death

There once was a girl.  The saddest girl in the world, because she kept believing.  She thought she was so clever and strong.  She thought she was different.  She thought all of the red lines would lead to one circle that would form a barrier around her forever.  But the red lines didn’t.  They just lead to more red lines.  She can no longer remember the red line she started from.  When she tries to walk backwards nothing looks familiar—all she can see is what is in front of her.  

The boy laying down the red straws does not help her.  He pays no attention to anything other than the red straws, and to placing them on the large, white sheet spread across the middle of the open market.  No one cares about him being there and he doesn’t care about them.  He does not see the girl standing in the middle of all of the red straws, trying to remember where she came from.  Soon there are so many straws leading in so many different directions that she loses hope.  She does not understand the pattern.  Only the boy does.  But to him it is a math puzzle and you either understand it or you don’t.  He is a sort of genius.  He is the one who keeps us all wandering down different lines, so that we never meet.  

We must never meet.  We must never speak to each other.  The boy’s job is to keep us all walking on the same sheet, but never at the same place together.   We must always remain lost and alone.  It is a math puzzle.  There is a solution but the boy genius will never open his mouth.  He talks with the red straws.  They tell his story for him.  And it is a beautiful story, in its own way.  A beautiful story of loneliness and loss and of being lost until all wandering ends.