Category: longer reads

It's not that you've forgotten how to feel, It's just that scar tissue goes numb after so many years. If you focus, you can still see the afterglow of all the hands that let go Or held on so tight That you still wake to the choking of them in the night. There are things you are too terrified to unpack and know, So you drag these boxes like Marley's ghost with never a backwards glance. No wonder you never felt comfortable in your skin, You never stuck around long enough to unpack and begin to make it a home You never stuck at anything long enough to figure out how to sit still and grow. You used to smoke - You said it's what artists do, they burn, But…

I'm filling up my home with yellow. I'm filling my lungs with burnished well-worn hellos Instead of the long drawn out shadow-and-dust goodbyes, I'm drawing down the sun one golden sunset at a time, I'm buying armfulls of sunflowers, I'm adorning myself like a goddess in gold and cinnamon, Instead of my native black and silver secrets. I'm filling vases with corn and wheat-grass I've started singing in the evenings, Filling creeping shadows with mellow jazz. I'm lighting anything that'll burn, I'm turning sunshine on a dime, Hoping to unwind the doubt that always Seems to knot itself in sheepshanks Beneath my kitchen sink. I'm drinking amber-coloured rum In some bar somewhere by a river, I'm laying honey prayers on parched lips, I'm dripping butter on every inch of this…

You have been the best of me, You are the whetstone Smoothing each ragged breath Caught in my sandstorm chest. You leave candles burning In all your windows So I can always find you In my darkness. You harness the hurricane in me, Always leave me tea and toast To warm my brittle bones, You sail my gunship home. You are every holy sunrise In my mourning heart When I have been sure The dawn would fail me. Your hand pressed against the War between my shoulder blades Is my safe haven.

My heart is a comet, A chaos of battered ice trailing Bright tails across my bruised skies, All contradiction and complication and old pains Hurtling a billion miles an hour around the sun, Screaming "Wait!" Screaming "This heart is too soft a thing to be Thrust so fast into such a violent spin!" Comets spell omens of disaster from the Misplaced letters of "bad star"; I guess that makes sense. Humans are terrible messengers. We never remember the right parts, And every pass close to the sun melts another Frozen moment from this fragile heart. But I made my wings from wax and Eventually begin to come undone. I can't figure out what to hold on to, What things to let fly. Newton said humans have never figured out How…

One of my best mates boxes. He gets up early on Sundays and makes his way to the gym To spar with a kid five times the size and half the age of him, He says they taught him to keep his eyes open when he gets hit, And that shit just hit me in the gut like - We can stare down a fist but we close our eyes when we kiss. Like, we can sit at the table with own our violence but We can't bear to be in the same room as our own gentleness. It's these kind of dichotomies that keep me awake at night, you know? Like how we really only come together for Weddings or funerals or sporting events, And the rest of the…

She lives in a land of mountains and fire. It is so beautiful there it should be illegal. I mean everything there is so incredibly alive and feels all Full of light and warmth and chilled out, blissed out, sun kissed sunsets and BBQs. And a wine or two. Or five. And beaches there win prizes. It makes you feel clean, and sort of “new”. It is the perfect place for her. If a person can belong to a place then she wears that place like a tribal tattoo. She’s made of mountains and fire, She’s waterfalls and night skies, Filled with so many stars you feel dizzy looking up. She makes me feel dizzy looking up. She has a job and a house with a view of the sea,…