Once, Again

The wind pushed too hard that night and my hair mad with mess, we huddled for cover.

The church glowed in the distance against orange security lights and a playground of metal and dreaming swings silhouetting what lay outside us. A wall of tall trees swayed, holding hands,sighing in jealousy twenty yards behind us as the dim from the street played god against our horizon.

We were in love right there and then. Hours, months, years since poured into each other ‘s hands not understanding in those breathless moments the gravity and inevitability of the spread of fingers tired from a strange new exercise.

You and I, eighteen, in the middle of nothing, on a square of grey discovering purpose for the first time.

Close your eyes again now, love. This is it.

Shells

Something happens to people when they are falling in love, they evolve into something different. If you catch them at just the right moment, you can see them begin to crack open,their sheaths curling back like pages of a book, burning on a fire, exposing little sweetnesses between the lines.

They open up and unburden their hearts the way a woman takes off her jewellery after a long night, setting down those heavy pendant earrings and unlacing the stiff corset to slip into a loose comfortable robe.

They tell you all the pain pressed into their flat chests as they sift through the betrayals and regrets. Given encouragement, they grow younger and younger and they being to see things differently, like someone who has needed glasses for a long time—and finally having gotten them-they look around just for the pleasure of it. They see the detail, the colour and lights and sharp edges of what the world has to offer.

They drag out all the musty sorrows and joys from the basement where they’ve been shoved with old photos and shell collections. And after a while, they begin to glow, like souls slipping into the bodies of babies about to be born. A year goes by, or two and like broken bones those cracks begin to knit back together.

Things I Wonder

When Scientologists have sex, do they scream “Oh, L. Ron Hubbard, Oh, L. Ron Hubbard”? And of course by that logic all religions and their various deities. Oh Buddha, oh Buddha…

Honesty…

You won’t come by it here, as much as I might like to say you will.

And you won’t come by it there.

Honesty.

…

Honesty.

Can we really say that we are truly honest with anyone?

Anyone?

We compartmentalise our lives.

A friend who knows this.

A lover who knows that.

A colleague whose shoulder we dampened.

Our most trusted intimate companions who know everything but…

Can anyone really paint the whole picture?

It’s those secrets.

Secrets.

Something I both love and loathe.

Little lives, lived on the periphery of the registered reality.

Secrets.

The the fodder of a bored mind.

A requim for the dull or discontented

Secrets.

Can’t live with them, can’t live without them.