Your breath like snowflakes
coming from your mouth,
as though it were the only thing
you could dream about after
so many days of white horizons.
In the morning I wake before you, chilled,
to see it still uncurl from your lungs,
my talisman, my lucky charm,
my prayer beads I count one by one,
as they rise into the morning air.
The train moves like a diving bell
through a sea of night.
Cities luminous shoals of distant fish,
until all fades in the depths,
the world closes in,
the window shows only my reflected face
orange under neon light.
The train sways suddenly
moves the centre of myself,
away from myself,
unchained to rails or seat
I’m thrown back into remembering
that last hour of the journey home,
when eyelids eggshell brittle with tiredness
closed against harsh amber light.
The carriage a decompression chamber
coming slowly up from the depths of us,
but never slowly enough,
so that when I arrived I still had the bends.
The pressure of your absence
bubbling in my ears and veins.
Now every train ride sounds
the Morse code of our embryonic
love within the rail’s clack.
Bees swarm the hive drowning
the skin’s honeycomb in sticky sweetness,
a pulse flutters its wings at my wrist,
dances figures of eight around my heart.
A new honey hums upon my tongue,
tastes of strange moors are on my lips.
I remember the time
he came out of the woods
with the hares in his hand,
casually, as though they were
a pair of gloves, blood stained.
The summer silence
bloomed on everything,
a verdigris that rusted shut
the clamor of my thoughts,
I no longer recognized myself,
the way the lines on my face
softened around him.
My life before obscured
like the coin that grew green
in my pocket, unspent, useless,
the face on it blurring
beyond recognition.
There was no future, no past,
just this; the time he came out
of the woods, handed me this gift.
something we both understood.
Love; a currency
I had never spoken before, or since heard.
I recognise your kind
snake dry cold blooded
but warm to the touch
knew your nature was change
a long muscle smooth as breath
rippling time along its back
the mist from my mouth rises
to join yours: two tails
curling in the frozen air.
We are carbon based life forms
in different allotropes.
Insight is to breathe in air
and breath out diamonds,
cold and sharp in the chest,
the future scratching raw
against the insides of the present.
I have a talent for it,
seeing what people will become,
how the weight of pressure and time
will form the diamond in some
leaving others to sleep on unchanged
The chalk man is only a marker
for the dark man that lives beneath.
Who sleeps all day under his skin of grass
the slow heat beat of the earth unheard.
At night bones of flint and fossil
raise him up into the sky,
his vortex of silver hair fragments into stars.
The holding dark, when all is quiet.
An obsidian web, flecked with frost
whose silken threads hold
me with all the strength of steel.
Enfolded in a galaxy of spinning stillness
that goes back to before I began.
That does not ask anything of me, other than to be
until time and space dissolve
into liquid thought, a river of silvery fish
swimming me down sleep’s waterfall.
And in my sleep I dream his centre
the slow heart beat of the stars,
A galaxy curling in a spiral like an ammonite,
unfragmenting the fragmented light.
