beyond the dust-deep sea

you broke my heart a year ago. then i broke yours in return.

how long must we muddle along until we find each other again? everything seems to draw me back to you; it's like a game the universe plays with us, putting a continent between us and making us claw and struggle to make things right again. making me forget you, remember you, making my blood sing with the call of springtime everytime we wander into each other's orbit. all the pain of this year, washed away when i heard your voice again. why can i only remember the good and beautiful things about you? nothing of the tears and heartache and anxiety we visited on each other. nothing of the childish hurt. i want to find you again, i need to find you again; you were the first true thing, and i wanted you to be the last. if only i was not so young and foolish; if only we were not six time zones apart.

isn't this what i always wanted? a kind of fatalistic love, stoic suffering, inevitability? love is not beautiful without pain, the pain of long letters and midnight phone calls, the longing to be butterflies and to spend our brief summer days with each other, intoxicated with the brevity of our delight. to be melting chocolate lovers touched by delirium. to keep a candle in the window of my heart for you, thousands of kilometres away.

i am afraid to hope. i am afraid to be disappointed again. how much a heart can harden in a year. how much a person can change, become ugly, tired, resigned. caution, caution! this way lies danger and tears! yet everything i learnt this year only makes me wish i had tried harder to keep you. and everytime i see your face it gets harder to remember to hold myself in check.

i hope the universe will be kind to us this time.

i.

i am not afraid merely
my cut-off words reverberate
on a computer screen
you've signed off. vanished. your
motorbike does 80kph on a viaduct
and my nineteenth birthday follows in a trail
of tears. the cherokee can laugh
i will stay true to my account.

the heat of your words sear
the soft places - the crook of my arm - the quickness
of my forgiveness. the spongy insides. i walk
through the fire and i come out
burnt. it was to be expected.

leave it alone. nothing will change. i'm good
enough to fuck, not good enough to
love. i say to the darkness
where your hands detailed my grievances. you said
you would never leave me. i am waiting
for you to make good on this
promise. now we stand at the platform
and the train is leaving. turn back the hour hand.

ii.

january was a time of resolutions
i made scratchings in a book and concessions until
march when school turned around and i
fled. bored. imagined your freckled back
remembered orion and the night
wind and the midday sun through the
curtains. looked out on the reservoir and licked
my lips to taste a trace of nicotine. perfect
delusion. the train pulls away from the
station in the drizzle;
you never once opened an umbrella for me.

forget summer when we loved
like thieves. forget how i believed we were happy if happiness was kissing
in secret under streetlamps and busstops and
hotel sheets. sentimentality. the closest thing we had
to love was the afterglow.

iii.

if i ran i
could not catch you or the train in the distance going
faster than 80kph.

Short story written very long ago in a prose poem form. I've tidied it up and here it is, in that fairy tale form I'm so awfully fond of repeating.

( The Traveler's Heart, original )

Hyacinth/Maple

The wait between parts just gets longer and longer, doesn't it? My deepest apologies, gentle reader. This draft has been languishing in my hard drive for months; I just found the inspiration to get it tidied up. I will try to post more, and soon; I have some ideas where this will go. Thanks to dark_babbit for motivation and letting me bounce ideas off her. Without further ado -

( part II )

Last year I submitted six poems for the local Golden Point Awards. I didn't win anything; so I think I'm free to post them up. Some were reworked old poems, some were new ones written for the competition. Here are the ones I haven't posted before.

( the heart is a metronome )

( extrapolation )

( the girl who loved books )

Warning: Possible spoilers for the ending of Lucifer. Set post-series. You need to have read the last issue to get this, so I'm afraid I have to paste huge warnings all over this.

( happily ever after, lucifer, mazikeen/beatrice )

How do you believe that star signs will point you in the direction of true love? Astrologers would be crying if they knew how you were using their charts, diluting them into ten adjectives and three steps to finding happiness. The Capricorn boy will be more reclusive; the Pisces girl must find the courage to be forthcoming; the two signs will have a difficult relationship initially, but with time and patience their hard work will be rewarded. Platitudes for your nineteen year old dreamer. I wish I could have warned you that starmaps lied, that the alchemists never turned base lead into noble gold, that their dreams were only carbon in the end - so much dust - ninety five percent skin, five percent otherwhere and cosmic debris.





Crying to sleep with illustrated lies: The boy is a collection of ink markings on a page and a girl who was once upon a time like you writes his lines to his ink-bride you want to believe is yourself, and he makes you feel more than oddly any human boy has. Even the one who keeps side stepping your messages, who smiles like a drawing but opens his mouth and says so how, the project cannot finish by Tuesday and you say you'll have his slides done by tonight. Just because he smiles like the ink-boy you gave your heart to, after 120 pages on the train ride home.





Once upon a time I must have been like you, but then I started writing the dialogue for boys who hurt and bruised and tore at each other, before tumbling into bed together. I taught them how to hover and circle and snag at hearts with their empty gestures, how to mimic affection, how to fall gracelessly into shower stalls, bedrooms, backseats, furniture, cold hard floors. And somehow when I look at him, all I can see is how perfect he would be with a boy just a pretty as himself, pulling at slackened ties and choking each other with insincerities, in an effort to slake the emptiness he feels. The emptiness he must feel. I am certain of this.





I find it very hard to love, when I know now that alchemists are liars.

three pence and twenty dollars
we are here in the empty spaces you left behind
here in the crayon beneath my nails
here in the sunset we forgot to draw the curtains for

we are strangers in the bed
we made and were made to lie in
tracing starmaps in the air
remembering Egypt
and sunflowers
the taste of the wax paper shells
our shortcomings were delivered in
waking up to dust motes pretending to be
the
last
bright
constellation

I am learning how to take my tea black
learning how to stop loving
an editorial you

Let us speak of love, then, as a happy thing. For we are young enough to still know how.

( in memorandum )

A new chapter of the night court story will be forthcoming soon. In the meantime, here's a little picture:

( Hyacinth; Lamplight )

Hyacinth/Maple

I apologise for the long wait (for those of you who were still bothered to do so!) The bulk of this was completely shortly after writing the prologue; I had some doubts about posting this for a long time, but the story makes its own demands. It's moving again, and I think it's time I put up what I've written so far.

( part I )

We are a roadmap of lies. Start here: where you first kissed my fingers, and trace the lines of deceit, pass wrist and elbow and collarbone and throat hollow. With the lights turned off I think I can feel you trailing empty promises everywhere, teeth on my shoulders and nails digging into the spaces between my ribs.

The first night, I stayed awake, dry-eyed beneath the covers, surprising myself. You called the next day, and said you understood how much you had hurt me. You had heard me crying in the night; a soul-reverberation. A sticky, sugary morsel of falsehood I choked on, smiled, and swallowed. The first, but not the last.

Teeth on my earlobe and nails in my scalp, twisting, dragging, marking. Petrol in five kilometres, a rest-stop in twenty. There is dust in my mouth, and it tastes like your tongue, like a bend in the road.

How funny, and how simple it all seems, when you trace your steps backwards, back to the tipping point: the first lie, the first untruth you pushed aside and buried, the first wrong turn. The destination was obscured; we walked away from the sunset and your touch was ungentle even as your mouth swore undying truths, the evening light casting shadows through the window that fell over my eyes.

+

I have lost the taste for travel.

Hyacinth/Maple

Author's Note: To all the old readers, who recognize these two: the characters stay essentially the same, but I am rewriting their story from the beginning.

( prologue )

January 18. Power out (neighborhood #3)


Allen's hands are cold, stiff, like claws. Linali laces her fingers with his, tries to warm them, tries to reassure herself.

"It'll be okay, Ri-ri," he says. In the dark, his hair is a ghostly halo. She can't see his face.

"Don't call me that," she says, and he laughs. A breathy, tired laugh, not the sounds a young boy should be making. She edges closer to him.

Outside, to her, it sounds like the sky falling. The windows are a thin, tall slits in the stone, and don't afford a view. Occasionally, something flashes, bright and soundless, and reedy wailing follows. Maybe it's the wind.

"Let's sing a song." Allen leans his head against her shoulder, and Linali wants to kick hard, kick down the prison cell, take Allen and spirit him away. She'd keep him safe.

Her incantations bubble against the roof of her mouth, restless, her seals itch and they burn, her skin crawling and threatening to blister at will. Instead, she keeps herself still. Allen is her little brother and they're huddled in bed together, waiting for the storm to blow itself out.

Allen's voice is sweet and drowsy. She holds him, lightly, rocks him to the singsong nonsense. She thinks she fell asleep sometime in the night. Allen's hair smells like talc, like phantom shimmers in her dreams.