Conceal
“Broadcast me a joyful noise, unto the times, Lord…” – R.E.M. , Bad Day They forgot to colour in the sky, once again, today. Like the computer simulation’s running overtime; blueskies.exe has encountered a fatal error and all that’s left is the blank page of white. Look up and you could be anywhere, anyone, anyhow Look up and you’re horribly, wildly, devastatingly free. Look up and cease to remember, into the endless nothing. I had a recurring dream about a day the sky would look like this. You and I would lie on the ground beneath grey tower-block skies All the tiny, invisible harpoons of the world dragging us this way and that Lying there, on the cold, hard earth, not saying a word. This is where I’m met late at night stumbling home with too-heavy too-much shopping and I take the shortcut, the way I don’t really know, and I’m encountered by knife-wielding, slavering, desperate, guttural, crackhead love: mugs me and steals my alone, and this is how I thought it would be, silent. The clouds hide us from the stars and the knowledge of the vast expanse of space the thousands of light-years between the way things are and could be and they allow us the morphine fantasy that we are a drawing in the middle of the page and not a shivering-confused blob that lives nowhere-in-particular, for nothing but itself. hallow
dreamt, on a cold night in June that your house was dressed up for a death and I was in it, looking, longing for you. all the doors were shut there was a darkness, that has never quite left me, the smell of damp wood, acid of paintstripper on your window frame. there were people in the garden in the mud, I did not know them, they simply looked back at me turned around, then carried on the silence, and the drinking, wearing veils so I could not see their expressions. I walked up the stairs up to the attic, which led out, to an open sky. Okay Ultra
When you go to sleep, I go to work. I slip myself into a suit and slide 800 milligrams into their coffees, then watch their bathroom-tiled existences turn marble and too illuminated. My government is inside me, my motives classified It’s you that I’m writing about; even from me. But I can’t conceal myself from you the only double agent forever. One day when I finally break my cover is the citizen who wants freedom you’ll see the tattoos underneath my skin, you’ll see without wanting to see the shadows that I was an instrument all along, which break the light in the gap and I too was being played. at the bottom of the door. My life with you is a two-way mirror; I’ve watched you kiss my reflection a hundred times. Every day I hear my name said in so many ways that your screams when we make love move nothing in me. Screams are just more cups of tea to me, or cups of boiling water. |
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