Forsake

Have you drunk enough water? I’d like us to walk back there, and home and back until you start remembering it. Cow parsley was stretched up to the sky and I could even hear the little burs shouting at to me as I took them from home with the velcro on my trainers. I could see a pink light, in the top half of the sash window. “Follow me,” you would say, and make me chase you up the stairs, pretending that you’d heard a ghost. I wanted to go home but I never told you that. We just talked about chucky and shivered in the bed, watching a moth come in through the skylight.  Terrifying. Blue teeth, tent-light. 

You told me about the tunnel of trees and how the raindrops would talk to eachother right until they hit the grass. We all wanted an easy way out. Funny that we even knew it at the time. And carried on. Why are those people upstairs? They’ve added bits on, we don’t need them. No one told me how many extra crumpets I should grill. I burnt them all of course, and my hands. Sing me to sleep sing me to sleep and don’t tell me that you changed your mind

The fog here stretches out such an awfully long way. Each break between cloud and clear lasting longer than anyone could know. They form a net, together intricate, ornately woven, letting only flares of light through. The kind you see out of the corer of your eye. The kind that fills up your whole head as you reach from awake in to dreaming. A car window is too small. In one fragile, prolongued breath, the millions of square centimetres just below the surface, every fraying hem, mouth corner, rising and falling. And rising. What happened to you? There is no jump, no landing. Only darting, trembling, words and more words in waves. Hands reach through and unhook, pupils shrink one after the next, and the mist does hit a glass plane before it begins to trickle away.

I’ve followed you home so many more
than a hundred times. Ten hours late.

Perhaps ten years early. Back home.
In one  patch of sky  I see the way
Your hands touch the backs of my knees
And the top of my neck where
It aches

I can taste the times we drink
together from the painted mugs,
In glimpses

And watch your lips reach my forehead
from behind someone’s window

Why must I feel the need,
to keep from you

Everything I ornament, the
Sounds that I hear the moment you
leave?

Drowning in the loud, torpid water,
of purple and green. You’re staying too
still, you’re forgetting, you’re
expecting the worst. But why would you
want that? Ice, scorching and fevered
covers your stomach, and the undersides
of both your feet. Trying to extinguish
the burning, the pictures captured
inside your head; they flicker,
never pausing. There is only brightening.

Enrapture and charm: what you
are clawing at, with everything you have,
until it’s too late.