‘…nothing one does in bed is immoral if it helps to perpetuate love.’
Gabriel Garcia Marquez,
Love in the Time of Cholera.
I dreamed that we were on an Italian beach at sunset, sitting on the sand. We watched as night passed over the ocean and climbed the cliff face as the sun withdrew beneath the rim of the world, leaving the heat of the day to radiate from the earth as the echo of its passing.
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2.
I wonder if I’ve become a kind of Max Cady figure for her. Perhaps I am representative of old misdeeds and have turned up, winking and flashing like a bad penny.
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“I am not telling the truth about Dean, I am creating him out of my own inadequacies. You must always remember that.”
– James Salter,
A Sport and a Pastime.
It is worth mentioning that I found myself awake this morning, on my day off, at 4:11am. For this, I blame Y-.
For whatever reason, good or bad, I decided last night to stalk her on Instagram.
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An ex-girlfriend of mine turns 28 tomorrow. I have spent the last few weeks writing her a sonnet, to the surprise and consternation of the friends with whom I have discussed it. Continue reading
Your voice is a caress most definite
On velvet footfalls your words descend
The vertiginous staircase within my head
To take up mysterious residence
Modelling from the darkness a bower
Where meaning is resonant temperature
That blossoms across my eyelids into colour
A verdure of mysterious flowers
These flowers turn their faces narcotic
Toward the distant sun of where you are
With a febrile yearning in their motion
Reaching toward that place exotic
Whose voice describes a sunset-coloured shore
Whose windswept weave is salted with its ocean.
Tattoos and piercings lodged in the weave of her becoming
A pale flame that undulates from my hips towards the ceiling
She feels like mine but is held within the darkness’ grip
Its heavy fingers printed in the slats between her ribs
I want to reach up inside and touch her deep as she can take
But the one who came before me is coiled there like a snake
Suddenly cruel, I insinuate the word ‘love’ into her ear
It is the single weapon I have that will cut into her
At the impact of my cruelty her groan shatters into a cry
And I see the truth congealed upon the mirror of her eye
Satisfied, I watch the tracking of a single salty tear
As it snakes along her cheek to hide in the hair below her ear
I apologize in a voice almost innocent of the lie
But if I couldn’t make her love me then at least I made her cry.
You rang me like a bell.
I lie on my back with the night pressed against my face
And the images resonate one after another –
Lying propped on your elbow in the eddies of the sheets
Looking at your bare ass as you’re bent over packing your suitcase
Prowling the footpath beside me with high-heeled precision
Reaching up inside you toward the depths of where you dream
Her absence
luscious and pendulous
rhythmic and sussurant
respires beside me in the darkness Continue reading
We met at the gym. I can remember the handful of occasions I had seen her before we spoke, before she flowed inside the parameters of her name. Continue reading
Theme Park at its Darkest 