Protection

There was more I could have done. There always is. It’s like the perfect comeback to that cunt on the bus or on the train or inside or outside the pub that you always think of way too late, after the incident’s over and they’re gone and you’re never going to see them again. This was the same. I should have done more. But it all happened so fast that the cliché is true – it was a blur. I don’t remember how old I was but I think I was probably in my early 20s, because you died when I was 24 and it was towards the end of your life. At least, I think it was. Maybe I was younger, in my late teens, but I don’t think so. It doesn’t matter anyway. The point remains the same. Every time we walked past this one house round the corner from mine, on Mandeville Road’s curved trajectory, these two dogs would yap crazily from behind the double-glazed window of their living room and press their noses into the glass and bare their teeth. It never bothered you but it annoyed the hell out of me. One afternoon as we walked by, the front door to that house was open. I didn’t think anything of it, until we walked closer and I heard the feral growls of these two dogs louder than usual. Before my brain realised what was happening, they’d set upon you, plunging their teeth into your stomach, because these little fuckers were smaller than you and they got underneath your legs – or one of them did, anyway. And I remember panicking as this silent fear rose up inside of me, manifesting itself in goosebumps and shivers because I was fucking scared and I didn’t know what to do. I remember shouting and yelling to scare them away, but at least one of the dogs still had its teeth plunged into you and you were squealing with pain. I don’t know how long it had been – mere seconds, probably, but everything that happened in fast-forward blur also took place in slow motion so it felt like minutes – but I heard you whimper and I saw the dog beneath you and I kicked that motherfucker. I didn’t connect properly but it did the trick and the dog – I don’t even know what type it was; I think a terrier of some sort, but looking at pictures of them on the internet now they look too cute, so maybe they were Chihuahuas, that most redundant and repugnant of breeds – yelped in semi-pain and ran back inside, followed by the other. Luckily, you had so much fur, their teeth didn’t do much damage, but as I walked past the house I was fuming. But I didn’t have the guts to confront the owner, who was just standing there. I don’t know. Maybe he didn’t hear or see what happened. But I did. And I should have given him the hell he deserved. Even today, the thought of it makes me wish I’d crushed the skulls of those little cunt dogs. It makes me want to strap their owners in a chair and stomp the life out of those dogs in front of their eyes and then burn that fucking house down and hear them scream in agony and watch as their skin charcoals and their bones become powder and ash. Because you were always there for me – unwavering in your love from the moment I held you in my lap on the long drive back to Canterbury from the kennel in Norfolk – and, eight years later, I still love you and miss you like hell and I can’t help but feel that, that day, I let you down. I’m sorry.

dead skin

alcohol breath
counting steps
tinnitus leaking
from your ears
like life from limbs
crushed beneath wheels
- "did you hear? they say
he'll never walk again."

old photographs
unwritten books
the slow tick
of the clock
dead skin
turns to dust
and ghosts glide
through your dreams.

snohomish, wa.

the bridge was train tracks
stretched across a river
beyond a fence
we could have climbed
we should have climbed
we didn't climb
that day.
we swore with bitter breath
the next we would.
we never did.
not because
we didn't want to be a cliche
like the movies -
because that stand by me nostalgia
makes my bones break still -
but because
we never made it back
and time ran out
like coal and steam and train tracks
that stretch across a river
beyond a fence
behind a tattered sign with peeling paint
that says 'no trespassing'
as waves lap hungrily below
and ghost trains speed across in fury
as decades pass in minutes
and seconds turn to years.
i never even took a fucking photo.

broken suitcase

vast blue and vivid green
fill my dreams of then 
back when we were one long dusty highway.
we sliced through texas and its morning roadside breakfasts
glimmering with grease and our greatest expectations
as wheels spun past polaroid snapshots of vacant car lots
and bankrupt bail bond offices offering freedom for a fee,
where the slumbered homeless slept through the afternoons,
too drunk or weak or dead
to wake just yet.

and in these restless visions, sweat clings to clothes
and weathered veins bulge blue through tanning skin
and fingers twine tight as white knuckle drives
take us far from our origins to render us lost
cross country in that crisis-ridden continent
searching for a future
that was outlined by the poets of our past
and which we kid ourselves is hidden somewhere
in the desert's brimming, burning, ever-setting sun.

from greyhound station to greyhound station,
decade to decade, state to state,
the same sad hand grips a broken suitcase
and writes postcards never sent
because they can never be delivered,
like dead roads traced on crumpled maps
that can no longer be traversed,
that only exist on paper now,
inches long and miles short
of the vast blue and vivid green
that fill my dreams of then.

Resurrection

More of his blood is outside than in, but the boy is alive. Stiff, crimson bandages hide holes in his hands and feet. His skin is translucent white. He whimpers slightly as paramedics wheel his stretcher through the hospital. 

“Fucking kids,” says one to the ER doctor. “They were ‘playing’ crucifixion. Friends get three nails in before he lets himself scream. Parents rush out, find him pinned to a tree. He’s 12.” 

The doctor shakes his head. “Jesus Christ,” he mutters, without realising. 

Eight minutes later, he does. 

“This one,” he sighs over the ECG’s flatline beep, “isn't coming back.”

yesterday's news

our loss was
circumstantial,
situational -
discarded papers
at the station, all
crumpled up
and muddied
by commuters'
dirty footprints.
it was as if
we missed
the 8.06
into st pancras
five days in a row
and our boss just
let us go
without a warning.
but really, we'd
misread the signs,
instead aligned
that caffeine-stained malaise
from all those days
stuck behind desks
in london grey
as life and truth 
when, in truth, that life
was sucked like smoke
from smiling eyes
to make us unnotice
how lucky we'd been
and how fast our past
had unravelled unseen.
and so, instead, we
merely stood silent -
the living dying dead -
burning our lips on too-large sips 
of too-hot, shit-brown coffee,
wishing for more milk, more sugar
and a fuckload more sleep
while we read yesterday's news
and waited for apologies and trains.

Insomniache

Thoughts scrape the inside of my skull like dead bodies dragged through a forest late at night. They dart like eyes in the darkness, bouncing off the walls looking for a resting place but finding nothing except infinite momentum. It’s too hot and it’s too cold, covers half-strewn across my legs and torso as I rustle restless relentlessly. Insomnia. Insomniac. Insomniache. I want to sleep but I’m wide awake. I don’t know what time it is, but it feels like 2am, 3am, 4am, 5am, yesterday, tomorrow, last night, last year. The start of the universe and the end of the world. I hear cars pass through the curtains and the window, hear you sleeping silently beside me, you rising and falling peacefully and calmly, the way it should be.

But then I wonder if you’re actually there or just a figment of my imagination, whether me being awake is just a dream, that really I’m asleep and lost deep within myself, that this reality is unreality and this unreality my life. The lines are blurred and I can no longer tell. The dreamer examines his pillow. I pinch you and you murmur something, inaudibly disgruntled, and shift your limbs slightly, edging them ever further from me and towards the edge of the bed. But there is nowhere you can go. You are on the inside edge, the side against the wall, and there is nowhere to go except to push yourself ghost-like through concrete and glass, a dead soul sliding through atoms to mix with the crisp air of winter.

I get out of bed and I feel my way through particles of dark, tiptoeing as quietly as possible so you as not to wake you up, and I make my way to the kitchen. I open the fridge and bask in its cold yellow glow while I look for something to drink or eat. But there’s nothing I feel like so I close it again. I rub my arms as I walk towards the bathroom, wince as I turn its bright light on, close my eyes once the piss is flowing because I can hear my aim fine. I flush, then wash my hands and catch my face in the mirror as I do so – large, dark circles under my eyes, my skin a sallow, sickly yellow, pimples and veins decorating the surface of my flesh. I hope it’s just the light, that this is not who I am or have to be or what I have grown into, but an unfair reflection, a grotesque caricature, a replica that exists only in the parallel world of that late night/early morning mirror, but as I splash water on my face, I feel how old I’ve grown beneath my hands. I know what’s been lost.

I head back to the bedroom via the fridge again – still nothing I want, but I want something in there I know it – and then fill a glass with water and drink it so fast my teeth hurt. I refill it and head back to the bedroom. I can’t see you in the darkness. I can barely see myself. But I can feel the cold glass in my hand and I know I am here. I place the glass down on the bedside table, then take a swig, then put it down again. I sit down on the edge of the bed and the mattress sags under my weight. I lie down. I touch your arm to know that you’re still there. I hear all the words you’ve ever said to me run through my mind. I try to think of the last time I saw all the friends of mine who are dead now and remember what, unknown to us, would be our parting words. Always so much left unsaid. 

I lie back, eyes wide open and listen to the buzz of the apartment. Everything is magnified. The clock ticks louder with each second, flitting between the past and the future, my future and my past. The ebb and flow of your breath increases with each inhale and exhale. I can hear the fridge hum from the kitchen, even though I know I can’t. A car drives by outside but it sounds like it’s racing through my skull. My heart is beating loud enough for two. The hours pass and as they do I start to make out the shapes inside the room – the bed, the desk, the wardrobe, the record player, the clothes lying on the floor, books, a coat hanging from a hook, the radiator, the heaped duvet next to me, my naked feet wriggling restlessly, the bones of my toes trying to escape their prison. I watch the pale rectangle of curtain grow brighter and brighter until there is a world outside. There is a world outside and the world outside is waking up. I yawn and yearn for sleep.