It is coming to that time of year again. Made momentous once and then repeat, repeat, smoothed over, tucked under the edges, spread beds not legs young ladies.
Last year, for a change and New Zealand cents, I reached out and rapped on your platypus door. You opened it, slim, I didn’t step inside. Though.
It is coming to that time of year again my sweets, my small and snarling children.It is coming to that time of year again and this time I’ll carry an axe.
My dear Delilah,
You may think you have just learnt to forgive or forget, let blood let, and you are now a far better and finer person for it. Look how your heart gleams with bleach white sanitary steam, cleans up not too shabby my mere Bagheera. Meek and mild, like a childless child. But let me warn you buttermug, that spiders still live underneath your feet and centipedes nest behind your ears. You may share your peanut butter sandwiches with the children at lunch time Delilah, but you can never forgive or let’s face it, for get me not, because you are a walking virus.
Love,
Sam
It would take twenty years for the sun to rise again. If he’d known, he wouldn’t have gone to sleep that night, stone for a pillow, penny for his dreams, a trip-hop-skip-jump into exile. Second-born son, wrestled with angels and lied straight-square-face to the wolves themselves. Threw the stew of his father’s father farther, ran away to Wichita, stole a kite up to the heighest height. Twenty years till the sun rose again my friend, running dark in the blind, swimming a black sea, jellyfish twists. When he came to shore, Nathaniel was sitting under the fig tree and looking at a pinkening picnic sky.
As she went to sleep, she heard, twice, bird chatter: once close, on top of her roof, and one atleast twenty years away. But it was night my child, it couldn’t have been birds. A monkey perhaps, or a choral group of soprano mice. Her room had no windows. No light leaked in, no cracks in the curtains to peer down at driveway drivebys. In that darkness, she’d stopped remembering her dreams. They would start with great ambition, only to become embarrassed by the heavy dark hum, sponged away, drowned by dawn. She couldn’t tell when the sun rose and slept in for the first time in her grown-up life.
When she finally woke up, it took her some time to recognize her face.
They crossed paths at the lattice-crossing on Queen Street, double take double take, blink straight face shoelace. He was walking with a Sagittarian, a sparrow-princess, carrying her sins in a brown paper bag. He was walking with a hooligan, a buccaneer, a tea-cosy in a banana boat. He was walking with the spitting image, but the spitting holy image, of her goddamn soul. She carefully carefully didn’t look back, walked thrice around the town, and fell down.
And m’dear, if you reach the day when your fingers seize up over words, skips a beat, skipper seat, sprigs of rosemary in the feet of a dried-up well-wall. We’ll all be well. When you can’t look back any longer, rear-view periscope, and the only thing that floats to the top is the strange volcano of seeing a boy blush, warm sugar, quince pie, then m’dear, you should count yourself finally finally blessed.
She had thought she knew how to lay low, lie quietly under hulking bodies, hold her breath in the gyms of foreign schools. She knew how to melt her mind, to swallow her eyes, to lie quietly beneath the bulrushes. But when it seemed that he had gone, she sat outside his house, naked, with binoculars. She straddled billboards, and called out from the top of mountains. She held signs at airport arrival lounges and wrote her phone number on the walls of every men’s bathroom she found herself in. She laid a trail of fine cheese to her front door and submitted suggestive classifieds to the local newspaper. No one replied except her mum wondering if she was ok.
Times were times, m’dear one, when we found each other in the middle of the night to play nicely with our words. When you kept your phone under your pillow, on the outside offchance that I would call. When you walked me the long way home incase I had a secret to let slip, when we ran out of sleep before we ran out of rhyme. It was a 2G world and you were my shaved knuckle in the hole, my sky in a pie, my buttercup man. Times were times times a thousand. I run to the end of each day, move things around the room, move houses down the street, move the animals around inside me (would you still be friends with me if I was an otter?) I make timetables for our timestables, and blink, yet, I look, but still, blink. We don’t see each other no more.
The hot air balloon man and I, wait to come down. Sharing our space with great care, great care, eating bananas to make ourselves heavy, tying on sandbags to all our extremities. We cannot go to sleep up here my friend, for if we do, and you know as well as I do, we may not wake up, as ourselves or as any other elves. Our fingers will fall off and we will secrete secret lace between our legs. We cannot move too much up here red balloon man. We must sit very still lest we blur into each other, outside the lines of our colouring books. In the moment, you may forget yourself. But remember that skin is only membrane, and semi-permeable at that.
Semiramis dines with me every second Wednesday. She sits by my wayside and speaks softly in tongues, in lip sink shipping routes. I put on a feast: sage sausage, already sifted pumpkin seeds, soft-centred shoe-fly pie and Baba Yaga neck-ties. For dessert, a persimmon with permission each. It is never a formal affair, sexually ambiguous at best, but on the off chance I put lavender beneath my pillows and two pairs of slippers by the door.
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