Tyre Swing

And I could dent the hardest earth
With my steps weighed down
By her anxious lungs.


Anxious not for me
But for the dissolving of the bitter tablet
On her curious tongue
To numb the pain
Of a broken tyre swing and
The haunting of a shadow who liked to play tricks


I remember a heart full of hope
And the taste of sunshine
Stolen from the Southern hemisphere
And a locket around another’s neck
Where I dared not to cross
Lest I was prepared to give it all up


And I did, for you.

Triangles

A triangle is always going to have slopes. You're either climbing or falling.
Up.
Down.

Up.

It looks so beautiful from the top and you've never had fuller lungs. Don't hold your breath now, that thing beating in your core doesn't know what it's like to fall

down.

Air everywhere except inside you. Lungs folding into paper planes that had a map of her veins and a picture of a smiling sun. The heat you felt beneath your skin, but it was always Winter that far off the ground.

Some corners are sharper than others so I picked you from that tree and slipped you into the pages of my favourite book of poetry, forgetting your colours like to run

away.

But honey, triangles aren't round and now there's punctures in the leather seating. You could patch them up with nests stolen from bushes on fire and feed the

flames.

With old letters written on puzzle pieces. She was the greatest mystery. Floating in tea pots, making sure to miss your cup. You watched them

drown

their sorrows and you swallowed the pills left in her purse.
One white.
Two blue.
All triangular.

They're dying to be brought up.


Keep them
d
o
w
n


A triangle is always going to have slopes.

The Calendar

Last week I could have written the angriest words. My skin felt tighter around my flesh to the point where I thought I might start showing thin over the parts I used to punch at my feelings for you. My body dissolved every feeling of ecstasy I had aligned with our memories. If you had been a blade of grass, I would have pulled you out at the roots and exposed the part of you I had just discovered and wish didn't exist.

On Friday, Sadness joined my Anger. They fought and Anger won after I said bad things about you because my body couldn't release the steam quick enough. I became the water that spits around the bottom of the kettle and starts screaming until you remove the heat from under it. But you're a flame that doesn't like to be put out. So I poured alcohol over my wounds and lost you in the spinning of the room.

On Saturday, Sadness crept in while Anger was still sleeping and quietly held a pillow to its face. Then crawled and sat on my shoulder and sang me songs that had you hidden in the lyrics. I tried to push it away but it followed me around a room full of people and joined my conversations around a table of pretty faces so I drank on behalf of both of us and made sure you were held down at the bottom of my glass.

Yesterday, Sadness called in sick and realised I woke up next to Disappointment. It was there with a purpose, walking behind me, quoting reassurances I had heard from your lips. It had a journal and as it ran its finger down each page, it sang to me all the things you hadn't kept to. It started painting a picture of you and I noticed there were colours I didn't like, ones that had been harder to spot earlier but now stood out so bright that I had to look away. Everywhere I went, those exact colours jumping at me, splashing onto my skin and soaking through my hair. But I lacked the energy to scrub you off and now I wear your disappointments as a permanent reminder of a human condition: That people are selfish.

Today I was surprised to see that I was unaccompanied. Maybe you're putting up less of a struggle for my psyche to throw out. I remember when you would run by 118 times in one day and I'd welcome you back with a smile each time. But now I think of you only in fleeting moments and even then, Disappointment waves from across the street. I can feel you moving away and the spaces between us getting darker. I know that one day the the last light will flicker to its death and we'll be left with nothing. At lease nothing we can see or touch or taste. Like we were both figments of our own imaginations, created to revive our faith in a love we had both watched die. You needed someone to show you that the crying would eventually stop and that your heart could still skip even while it was broken. What is left for me now after I've put all the pieces back together?

Tomorrow I am certain of just one thing, that you will be further from my thoughts as I am further from your heart.

Expiry Date

But I treat my hearts as if it’s a child, “it’s just a scratch, now get back up that tree or else you’ll forever have a fear of climbing.” I’ll misjudge the weight of my uneasy steps on a rooftop or forget how horrible it was to be rolled up in salt water when wave after wave tried to keep me for itself. Every year I’ll still return to the sea to collect shells and feel the water hug me after I had been away so long. As if nothing had ever happened. As if the scar on my leg was a peace offering from the coral reef after I intruded its home with the knocking of my body as the waves unabashedly threw me down.

I’ll admire cacti too closely even after hours spent fighting the burn of invisible spears after they tried to warn me that they’d prefer to be left alone and that that’s how it had been for their fathers and their fathers’ fathers. For centuries they had needed no comfort other than the reflection of suns and moons on a desert floor.

But I was born with a curious heart and curious hearts might seem brave but all they really are is scared of the unknown. I could fall from every treetop; I can feel the trickle of regret after trying to open a can with a knife. I could learn my lesson the hard way after stretching my pupils to take in more of the bright lights I can feel moving under my skin. I could feel the cold burns of Loneliness every time I re-invite it back into my bed after finding out you are just the same as everyone else. That all your words had an expiry date and now every thought of you curdles in my stomach. There was no warning, no sourness pinching at my tongue, so I swallowed you whole and now you’re eating a hole right through me.

You make it look so easy. And I was a fool for you.

But darling, I'm easily fooled.

Luckily nothing opens your eyes quite the way disappointment does.

Pink Balloon

And now this brown leather couch has become the symbol for everything I've grown to miss over the last week.

The fact that you're away and how much I miss the way we sat here and laughed and maybe nearly cried even though neither of us would be brave enough to keep eye contact long enough to notice. How I took comfort in your silence because you didn't want to burden me with your troublesome thoughts. How we spoke of each other only in profanities but we both know we mean the world to each other. How I've never felt closer to someone by just sitting in front of the television with a cup of hot chocolate. I love you like a sister and you've become one of my favourite souls to encounter, like a thousand year-old willow who you could get wrapped up in and lost between the different threads of vulnerable, green plaits. I just want you to come home so I don't have to look for you in traces of cigarette ash left in the bottom of our teacups or salt left in the fridge because your life is about playing tricks on yourself. We could play tricks with a magical Moose and rule the kingdoms in our heads because I'm going to be here through it all even though the fridge is screaming at you for letting all its coolness out and I'm screaming at you for never being on time and you're screaming at yourself because you never manage to get your hair quite the way you want it (even though you'll still always be the prettiest girl in the room). So now I sit on this couch and I have the comfort of this blanket, but I miss your pacing around the kitchen and your smoke cuddling up to our bedtime cup of tea.

I'd follow your advice even if it led me to the scariest corners of my frivolous soul and I'd share my shade with you even if part of me got burned. I'd leave the party to put you in bed after the devil offered you candy. And I'd never judge you, not a single moment, not ever.

I love you, faglet.
Come home soon<3

A Letter To My Darling - No.3

It’s like some days you’re there and some days you aren’t. I remember seeing you when I looked outside my window and when I looked again, I realised it was only a cloud. How wonderful it would be to just float above the mess of people on the ground too busy to look up. But I find myself looking up more than looking ahead or behind because the sky doesn’t lie. When it’s angry, you can see its burning troubles showing up in grey. When it’s happy, it reflects what I’d imagine a newly painted nursery to look like after the parents couldn’t express their joy in any other language but colour.

When I think of you I see red. It seems so fitting – the colour of a rose, passion, lips after they’ve given into the hunger of spilling their secrets onto another’s tongue. The colour of caution. But why would we listen to caution when what we want is right in front of us, hiding in a bathroom stall, hands burning to dance on each other’s skin. I would have painted your whole body red that night.

Another cloud, only this one is shaped just like the beauty spot you have on your jaw. I jump up and grab it and for a second I remember what it felt like to have had you and lost you all at once. That’s all there is to us, to everyone, is things and how long we can keep them for before they’re lost or given away or stolen or seeped into the ground the way I spill out my words as if there were no consequences. Sometimes I don’t care for consequences but truthfully, I’m scared stiff of them. I always thought I had the most irrational fears: ghosts, words, that sinking feeling when I realise I’m alone right after having been in company. But the one fear I can’t seem to dub foolish is the one of the day we will realise we have nothing to say to each other. Nothing that has any meaning, just words empty of intention or feeling. Especially since I think and see and write about you with so much feeling.

And sometimes I feel like a passer of time.

And sometimes I wish I could have a straight stream of thought, less confusing for me and for you and I wish I could always make sense so you could read me easily. But I’d stay awake all night reading to you while you dreamed of things I wish I could see. Then write about them in poems and read them back to you when you woke.

I wish I could wish these things knowing you wished them too, like when I told you it was 22:22 and I wished for you.

But there are no more clouds in the sky now and the only traces I’ll find of you are the wet kisses against my bicycle’s wheels as they tread through puddles on the way home. Such a sweet sound it makes, like giggles from little girls when they realise falling down doesn’t always hurt.

I know it won’t always hurt. I know that everything happens for a reason and I know that nothing is ever truly permanent.

But if I could, I’d leave permanent kisses on your cheek.

Yours in wishing,
Jenique

Intentions

There are days when I sit down in front of my notebook, full of intentions. I look at the thinned-out black horizons that separate the sunrises and sunsets of the words that could see morning or never step out of the shadows. The broken railroad tracks over words underserving. Undeserving of who, I don't know. Maybe my future self? The same girl who wants to believe in the good of everything except her own fortune and ability.

It's hard to swallow that my biggest fear is a few moments from where I am now. That I'll wake up and set fire to who I was  before I put my head to my pillow. Sometimes I can't stand finding myself splattered across a page, pathetically claiming to have felt things and been a part of something that will periodically crawl back into the bottom of the kettle and ignite the next time I'm shown the slightest bit of heat.

The sound of ballpoint turning into the ticking of the extended arm of an analogue race.
A word.
Words.
An underground stream of dirtied sentences.
They show up sometimes without digging, sometimes only after finding the roots of century-old trees wrapped around my neck.

I hate words. I can't live without them. I hate words but if you asked me where I was from, I'd dive into worlds made up of previously scribbled tales from when I was scared, when I thought I had found love, how I had burned myself so many times before and how I'd imagined my future to be something everyone would read about.

Truth is, I read my own writing in song form but still find them unworthy of a harmony. Maybe all we are is a sad song, subjectively made positive by the five year old girl whose joy is found in licking the gaps between her fingers after eating ice cream without a spoon. That girl used to be you and maybe she used to be me, only now we couldn't bear being caught with our tongues out. And I can't bear the thought of writing another word.

Because I hate words. I hate words but I can't stop writing them. I look at my pen and I see myself edging towards you the way the ink makes its way to the page end. You're my punctuation; the comma in my breathing, the ellipsis in my hesitation to touch your hand. I could do with a world without fullstops but I think I'd miss the moments just before you've decided what words to say, the words you hope won't hurt me, but the words that are as inevitable as the fullstop that follows them.

Sometimes I sit down in front of my notebook, full of intentions. "This time I won't write about her," and sometimes I'll make it halfway to the bottom having kept my promise. But you're there, pole dancing around my 'L's and falling over my 'I's and you're racing my pen to the end of the page.

You don't have to run. We both know you'll win.