The cold/hot
Eyeshutting white/pink
Brooding cliffs pencil horizon
Peopled by lights/edges
Figures/hands
The liquid/vessel winks
And a finger pushes
Wine-stained
Through the shutter light
So the camera shudders a few
Frames
And I want you to push your fingers through my skin like tattoo needles
With the tickling drawing stains on my nerves as much as nails draw blood
With the softness of your contours meshing in mine your pads roving across
This cut surface I fray in distress at your missing meat not between my
Sometimes I hold a pen between my thighs and I press it
I roll it and I touch it on my fingertips to draw hard so the ink leaks
And licking my stains I roll and curl and think I can feel you again
The flesh of you the sticky sweat that slows tenderness I pull you close
Fun of this old flick called Cat People
With holes in it miles wide but it’s alright
Bringing me back to the glamour that is
Stone age man in reams of fabric I can’t
Respect these ghosts though dead before
They hit the turf need something more like
Forget it Jake it’s Chinatown for my kicks
Where the living drip blood and still resist
When their things happened when their life became
Variously more interesting I sat in history class
Swallowing information and throwing up no dates
Things move and there is no single time they happen
I have one year in my life the year I came of age
Left for university left for city left for my own life
The year I died or the year I was born: 2012
Even the year my father died I do not recall I suppress
But one year lives in my mind like a dream unceasing
Another phantom a new child or adult a student
Drunk and high and wide-eyed slings an arm around
Bumbles poetry and philosophy and pisses
My one man menagerie in a dress unfinished
Don’t think I’m that important in this scenario
Unless
Maybe
You think so? Because if you do, I’m like the importantest
But I’ll have humility about it
I’m not the kind
Of person
To write a long ‘poem’ on the subject,
Ya know?
I think I could just be
With you
Or
Like
Occasionally occur in your consciousness
Oh man
That’d be so cool
Yeah I think that’d be really nice
Maybe that’s what love is do you think?
This sometime romantic collision
Of thoughts
Isn’t it the most romantic when it’s basically not real
When it’s like two imaginations kissing and
And neither of them know?
That’s probably very romantic
Like a train
You know
Like a train drifting above the town
Like a roller coaster train
A monorail maybe, just
Flying through the air somewhere
I don’t know, it just does it
Yeah
Or maybe a space rocket that takes you
Through the safe air
To darkness, to being truly alone
To suffocating dead
Or, or it’s like a theatre I guess
Maybe at some weird university
A school but not if you know what I mean
Like all these rich kid shenanigans
Strange rituals
So in the theatre you can barely tell
What’s
What’s performance
Do you see where I’m coming from?
Nah you’re right I think the train is nice
I like sitting on there
Just
Watching the world continue
As it goes by
Could you
Maybe
Could you
Like
Come with me?
Not necessarily on a train but
Trains are nice
I proved that (sort of)
So… so maybe you could?
I like being near you
It’s nice
You seem
To
Like it
Too
Unless you’re lying but you wouldn’t do that
I think
To watch the bright wet flowers like a
Bee I laid my tongue on a petal imagined
The sweet colours I could smell the dew
Gathered round as a fog and nearby a dream
Seeping between the stones my fingers
Of water rushing cold across my thighs
There is iron in the soil and my throat
I found this on a piece of paper. I’d apparently written it, probably 5ish years ago? But who knows.
I, Adrienne
The uniform is important, the raiment,
the drapery, my skirt/ is a way of being,/
my knickers are part of what define me
Even though I look out over a goddess
in(of?) grassy hills and long/for the naked touch
of leaves on my skin, / I lie in forest beds
and notice foxcubs and woodpeckers
Here this ruffled cloth and some unseen band
Make me
In front of them I don’t know or care
much too much
the insolence of skin still becomes poison
As the sun sets over bodies
And my pack panic rises
Our other animals have fur and thicknesses.
Ruminate quietly in fields,
Waiting for death.
We have freedom to fear
and tremble in petticoats.
Side note inscribed nearby: [to kiss without defiling]
caress that betrays
breath
fingers
i am in your mouth
alone
amid the sheets that hold my hands
hiss with the pleasure of an embrace
you stand
in my eyes
in the dark
in the light
and you are gone forever
here in my pulsing
i dream of you
i don’t want the dream
to end except
to feel your eyes on mine again
Shake my spine awake as bristles fall
Gaze slides over the streetlights the lamp
I fell onto dreaming of you and wishing
You would take me again through blood
The smile when you saw my scarred nose
The fear in your eyes the warnings before
I miss sitting on your chest I miss you
Pulling my legs close while I wriggle on
Your fallen angel keep you close to me
Our fallen angel keep me tight to you
The way the heart hurts for what it wants
The way my mouth gets wet to see you
Prayers I say to the night the moon
Its dead gods whisper in my ears that
Thing of ours like my child kicking is still
Breath in my lungs catching your stare
As you fill me and plant me and make me
Trees have it easier they don’t have to go
If I don’t let you in you can’t
Right I mean that’s how that
Works and so what if I’m never
Happy at least I’ll never breathe
A breath knowing you left me and
Find my own air tastes different
Rots the lungs drips out the pores
At least
Though five minutes is worth
The seeping whistle of a puncture
For eternity if with you
Scag 