I might be something, dreaming.

Suppose I write a new, for the old?
My dreams have been so tell-tale lately!
And so unco-operative as I attempt pen them down!
Blasted, unrelated, unrealistic sub-reality of one's own mind!
But so realistic! It is the problem, they are so!
For I feel in them,
Feel as you might breathing in the rain on a routine stroll to work,
Feel as you might on that first dive into the cool of an outdoor pool!
The people in them, I have seen, mostly, I have!
I have grown with them, I mightn't have all of them any more,
But they have been here, in this supposed waking world.
And growl, have I, at waking on occasion,
To find they are still not here.

It is proof of my time-walking?
It is certainly proof of my dreaming!
And it is all of the dreaming, it is all of the mumbling in my sleep,
And the constant logging of dreams!

Suddenly, I awake and am onto something,
Suddenly writing is as writing can be,
And I've a beginning to that story I never finished,
And mightn't finish if I should have trouble sleeping again.
On all these notes and the above and below, I return to my dwelling, I return to the screen and pen my endless papers! It might just happen, I confirm, it might!
I may have stumbled onto what a life I am supposed have,
Or at least the same road.
Well, same city at most,
But the same nonetheless! On the map it all is!
I can be something,
Can't I?
As awkward as I am in daily situations,
As dull as my voice sounds,
As vague as I ever am,
As unshapely as I may be:
I might be something.

I might be.

Bridges, And Real Bridges.

The light and wintered cobbled streets,
That hold our name,
I cannot write of the beauty that I see with you,
Your arm at my waist as we scour the Cadbury centre.
And the white sunlight against the windows of the olde shops.
The history we discover as we attempt the memories we make.
And I’ve no longer words, but I cannot write nothing!
I long to unleash terrible things to you,
Unimaginable future that hold us both!
I stop myself at the empty walls we pulled down,
And I wait for you to join me.
Hiding at the bottom of a cage,
We lie in wait of another day,
For another may be the opportunity we seek,
And the other might be the binding fear,
With light-hearted tear and want!
Want of it all!
You, I saw you across that browning street,
And I thought I saw her horrid silhouette,
I thought of your waistcoat wavering undone,
And I felt your hair in my grip from afar,
And you entered a door I assumed I would never see open again,
Once more I had turned,
And missed your returning.
But I met you on the bridge,
Oh how I met you on the bridge,
How alcohol lingered in my breath,
And every sense I had was mine,
For it all felt like nonsense.
For I wanted to reach into you,
Into the nothing I thought we would ever become!
I looked into the kindest eyes of blue, I gazed and perhaps never gazed away,
For even then I did not know what I would do with you,
I did not know if I should see you in my home town,
By my sea or at each smile or frown.
But I never, in wake, touched another I never glanced back.
The moment you managed a kiss unto me,
I could not climb back over that wall.
I waited on your words far from me,
And I let my heart leap about the page from which I deciphered,
All the unimagined feelings you portrayed!
Now I may even make up word!
For I have nothing to say to you,
For you feel it all.

A quiet wait at the end of a working day,
It would see you having already returned,
A stationary silver car beside a bank,
And summer threatening at the backs of the walls,
But the scent was warming.
We bought a few things together and we took a trip back to my place,
Idols on the television,
And you but metres away from me.
But hours away from me.
A rush of hours, a mind of weeks,
Trips in your car and the music, it speaks.
The sun above and the night all about us.
‘Your voice, it keeps me up at night’.
And you finally return your kiss to me.
You return your delicate hand to my face,
As if you had never handled so precious a thing.
Than corrupted little I.
I needn’t have even wished that I had never felt another touch,
For I hadn’t. Not like this.
And I wondered then what I would do if I threw caution to the air,
The waters from the docks,
If I dove into nothing headfirst.
If I couldn’t see a metre in front of us in the fog and yet I pulled us through it,
A speed of which I slowed,
With the beating of my heart,
As I first felt yours, beating against my chest.


And I do believe, that had you not crossed my path,
I would have crossed yours.
And we did meet , at all times and never the same,
We did speak the same mind.
I discover, still, why this place has a purpose.

Lightening heart of yours,
Always takes the darkened; mine.
And bleeds into it,
A sort of golden blend,
A feeling that bares renewal blind,
But forceful.
That puts a hand in mine,
That lingers a gaze in mind,
And only with eyes as yours,
Do the crystal seas seem true.

An awkward conversation.

There was a dull chill in the air, a handful of stars in the sky. Her skin had taken on a pale defence to the night's weather, and yet still she sighed contentedly. She must've been sat on this mound for around four hours, more or less. Her legs had become slightly numb, but she needn't have realised for lack of movement.
"You don't always come here, do you?", Came a sultry Voice without intention, as though it had always been there.
"Well... no", she replied rather obviously, glancing downward slightly to the mound on which she sat.
"Oh", came the Voice once more, as though expecting much more of an answer, "Well... You aren't planning on leaving?".
"No actually", she replied wistfully, her colourless eyes fixed upon the few stars and the lack-lustre blue beyond it.
"Well it won't go away..." came the Voice, now seating itself beside her, though she paid it no attention, "That is to say, it won't come back? Well you know, that, that down there... it won't go away, but, the thing that it was, well... it's... gone. Yes. Quite gone".
"Aren't you supposed to be a little more... informed on this matter?", the girl asked quite naturally.
There was a pause after this, in which the Voice sat quite calmly at her side, imitating the girl's glance toward the stars. It shifted it's weight upon the earth now and then, and applied itself to an itch upon it's arm, but otherwise it was rather still.
"It just becomes a little bit of all the same... if you follow?", the Voice queried as an unidentifiable bird swept past heavily with one lift of it's wings.
"I don't I'm afraid. I'd of only assumed you were here to offer me something".
"Offer you something?", the Voice's velvety slithering tone took on a slight crackle.
"Well yes, advice, a choice, an offer, an exchange... Is that not how the stories go? The stories I had read as a child...".
"Well that should tell you it all! You were a child when you read them, things have changed", the Voice came with a classic huff, had it have bothered moving it would certainly have folded it's arms and turned it's head at this point. But it's ancient-tones shared enough.
"I am eighteen years old. And these stories have been passed to my school from the Greek times. I do enjoy reading you know", the girl maintained her wistful tone, her eyes ever upon the blues and silvers of the night.
"Well... do you not suppose you should be at home, reading then? There is not a sweeter way to mourn than to read into another view of life that you only wished was yours!".

Her expression did not change, but she said no more. A desperate and rolling cry came from somewhere nearby, of which the Voice assumed to be that recently passed large bird. It ceased, and the general clatter and scurrying of the middle of the night (which It was so very used to) became clear once more.
The Voice rolled it's hands around one another slowly, and glanced back to the mound on which they were sat. The girl had slightly sunken into the fresh mound of earth, having been sat on it for so long. Little tufts of grass from either side of the mound were poking through and swaying in the breezeless eve, and the stone of which the mound leant slightly against glistened silently and still in the silver glare of the moon. It looked alone, and for the briefest of moments, the Voice felt rather sorry for the girl. But it passed, as it always had done.
"Look", came the Voice once again, after a long quiet, "I didn't mean what I said, I suppose, well... you know... you've got that job at that bar and... well, don't you just get irritated when customers tell you how to do your job? Not to say you're a customer... Or even a client, I mean, this is different...".
The girl looked slightly toward the Voice, and sighed. He really was mumbling on about nothing, and with her view on life as it currently was, she was aware that she no longer had time for such rambling.

"Suppose I were to just stay here with you", the Voice's classic tone said later, "Suppose I never bothered others again, nor stalked the night, nor exchanged anything or made any deals..."
"Have you not collecting to do?".
The Voice went to reply, but for the first time in history, was politely interrupted.
"Excuse me for stating, but in all the stories, in all the books and the unwritten legends... you are rather important. You are feared so much as you are necassary, or something along those lines. If I were to grant you to sit beside me forever, mourning upon my loved one whom you did not even know, I would not, in some twisted and strange way, be doing the earth any favours".
"But I'd be doing you a favour", It said rather simply.
"But you do not grant favours, you only exchange them. And any way, I never asked for any company tonight, I was quite happy to be sat upon this heap alone. Thank you".
"It is only a dog you know...".
"I beg your pardon?".
"No... no, I didn't mean that either, I know it's a human. I apologise. That was uncalled for". The Voice began to wring it's hands again, referring it's glance to the mound and the stone. "I suppose we could carry on arguing though? For quite some time?".
"You really dislike your job, do you not?", the girl asked the Voice, pushing her feet comfortably into the disturbed earth.
"Yes. Quite.", Came the Voice.

~

Unedited.

And indebted.

And to what do I owe,
This beauty that has surrounded my waking hours of late,
The nightmares that lay in the resting hours laugh!
Yes, the words that surround me are of different voice,
Now my familiarity,
The world at my window now that of crisp, clear horizons,
Of the new, the west and exciting.
What power has given me what I once dreamt of,
Only to taunt at sleep, to claim that I owe?

''Oh hopelessness, oh loneliness, to search the ends of time''.
It sings, so quietly in the back of my mind,
It lay undisturbed, long gone in green light.
How might I go about clearing it, the dwelling and the dust?
What has nuzzled into my vein today is sweet and harmonious,
What lingers from before bitter, and alone.
Still i feel the clutching fingers, not cold, but slick and of grease,
I attempt reconnecting with the world before me,
It laughs behind my back and wills me to join it.

When you have lived a life, in the dark of the back street,
In the dim of a room well hidden by bed sheet,
The moon a beacon with vendetta;
To have a light, so graceful, not white,
Appear before you,
In welcome, in slight appreciation, in wanting of you,
You must owe.
There must be a force that has worked out a click in the pattern,
Has mis-stitched too late,
Has moved the stars ever so slightly,
So that you may indeed be granted a life like the other,
And you must owe.


The photographs of my loved ones must be stored for today,
I feel a slight shame in their gaze,
For here is the girl, who sort of disapeared,
And, really, was found too late.

Salt and Sand.

As of late, I have caged that washed-out summer feeling, and once again it is encasing my emotions. Death has reared it's claw to another familiar face and voice and distracted with the masses elsewhere. It's being disgusting at the moment, I am not sure why, not that any are, but I feel it too common a place.
A friend, not so wise - it must be said, once said to me after the death of a very close loved one to us both;
''How old are you now? 19? -Here, he shook his head, fiddling with his thinly rolled cigarette- It's all down here from here, one after the other now''.
Of course, he was referring to deaths. It was a terrifying thing to hear, no doubt. But I remained calm, and responded only with a tilt of my still mind, a glance at him that he did not return, and the idle fiddling of the gift from her who had passed in my hands.
I have not been in that living room for quite some time, but then, it was exactly as she had left and decorated it.

Much of this, many of these thoughts, have provoked nostalgic, dry, white thoughts of the East end streets. The common, natural, and ever flowing longing for returning 'home' has returned. I see the crowded buses without faces, the tube journeys and the summer heat between Dagenham east and Barking. The cool tease of the tiled floor of Chadwell heath station, the dusty dry streets just outside of his home. The suspicious eye of the shopkeeper as I buy a countless amount of Jamaican Hardo Bread, listening to the likes of Amy Winehouse on my i-pod. The cracked, white cool of his kitchen floor, the strange and unidentifiably comforting scent of his then home. His final home.

The sky here at present is muggy, it is grey and lightless, thankfully, but the heat still rests at the door.
It is a home, that is for sure, but I find it rather difficult to connect these two places. It is not the first time that I have felt like seperate people, that I have been torn right in half for want of one place and need of another.
My life is pleasant, magical and astounding now, oh the thought that ran through me just weeks ago;
'It's my turn now, to live my life'.
My heart screamed out and turned in my chest, I have more than one home, how fortunate I am. But the people, those within those homes now, what do they scream?

And yes, I am having my summer block. Writing is difficult to structure, thoughts will not meet my lips with ease and my skin is tightening beneath the glare, but still I am here and to try. This rolling upset, this longing, these photographs, yes, they will always breathe down the back of my neck strangely alluring and soothing...
But what I have before me, oh what I have.. There are not words for the astoundment. I have not a way, yet, to describe how fortunate I feel. How scared that my lips tremble a smile. It is true, some people have it handed to them upon a plate, and squander it mercilessly. But at the moment, I feel like the only one. I grip this beautiful thing in my hands like the sand on my so-missed seaside, discovering silver shells and shimmering pebbles as the grains fall.
Water collapses at my feet.

Yes, I do miss you all, but I am aware that your lives are a little too advanced to be missing me too.
Moving photographs so I can see the waves, a stone heart beats softly into the sand.
I'll never know another day like the one that my uncle and I sat, getting rather off it on Rose from plastic cups, upon the seaside. Oh the pebbles and the sand, we waited for something that never did come about, throwing rocks at a coconut on the water's edge. It was our sunny evening.
The train back, the scent of sand and salt, tearing faces from the news papers and putting them upon others.
My hair was claret and blue, yours, of course, was slap-head. And we did.
'Your wondering now, what to do, now you know, this is the end'.
Taking notice of my music, reminding me of yours. You truly wanted to know me.
Oh how distracted we all were.
And then, there were the nights. How voices still run through the memory, the smell of whiskey and wine. The sight of Jack bottles in the bin outside, the constant damp of the garden. Amy wording the back ground, dices rolled and how I always managed to 'get the glam questions'.

It has grown cooler, the nights will begin to leak in earlier now. I ask the winter, the winter I have confessed my Love to, to treat me well this year. To be kind.

The Young Rambler.

The creatures that lie in the beds here,
Are the ones that once donned my bedroom walls.
I need not fear the monsters here,
For I did reside before them,
My deepest fear equipped masculinity,
It was caped in woes older than me.
When my years begin to gather,
I have written and I have witnessed the matter.

Make this true, within this natter,
I have got these things inside of me.
Rest child's eyes, and lie in the cool of stone.
The damp and the dry,
The aching, the fingers that pry,
My window was never a safeguard,
My humming nervous system did flail.


Damned away from the sun,
The same old monsters run.
As a child, I knew they would come,
During enjoyment, they waited with heaving chest and narrowed claw.

Rotted teeth and gaps in gum,
The glorious creatures shadowed.
The earth from my garden wrapped around each thumb,
Each claw, each tear in ancient, leather skin.

Is it the quiet of night that doth draw the worry,
Aware, was I, that my skeleton led within me.
Had mere younger years seen but enough?
They lurched in their places, even inhaling they bring a dull hiss.

And could my childhood ears have perked,
I pictured them at the window,
Even knowing they lived within the walls.
Still do they crawl at my hair, do they whisper at innocence.

'Oh what on earth is even holding you together?!'
And hear I, only, the response;
'Oh what is it that puts the colour in your skin?'.

-
- Notes to this piece;
Even as I speak the light dims and flickers, as if riding on my pulse. When will these demons leave me? The bell rang only once as I spoke 'The monsters were always faceless in the barn of my childhood home'.

By you.

Breathing,
Oh dank hang the words so strongly felt,
Another pause followed by voluptuous guilt.
Skin scrapes skin,
Oh no a second more.
I fear above all, that this night should suddenly lighten,
That I cannot see a star in the sky,
Fading red clouds lay motionless at head,
People seem not to take another step.
Our still, our nothingness,
Two of the dead slip past.
Just stay, no other words,
Not a drip of water runs beneath this bridge.

No sound passes by,
Just silent padded paws.
Oh a bike, Oh a car,
Can I not simply have them both?!
With eyes that understand as such,
I tear another nail toward the bed,
And linger there, in bedless, sleepless lay,
Had Tchaikovsky begun to play?

Rest does not play to eyes that have no seen their fill,
Like filling a bowl of flour with the butter,
The sweetest twist,
The warm rise,
Oh it is I who ache to take deep breaths,
I who spy alien ginger cat upon my garden, fresh cut.
I who seek to close the blinds before the light reveals my eyes!
Give in to none!
I cry and pull at my own cracking spine,
But my cage, it does lurch forward,
My neck does turn, my teeth do slither.
Oh throwing a television into the back of a van must be easier!
The shatter upon the tarmac below, was not I!
For i turned here with you, i pulled here and I have nothing left!
Am i alien now to the feeling emitting my own skin?!
A child first attempting to write,
The baby's cry leaking into the night,
Pulling paint down wood for the first time,
Kneading dough into ball for the fifth!

And where, upon corner of each eye,
Do my illusions come end!?
In night gown that have seen death,
In gloves so slim to fit?!
Have you seen the delicate slim of silver,
Protruding from the china sugar bowl?
The scent of pastry baking,
The slightly-to-the-right tie of the bow on apron?


And then I lay back down, all in one lurch i pulled from you,
Each image a blur through my minds eye,
And seconds brought it you!
And the image upon corner of eye became true!
And you awoke me by forehead, by cradle!

Running a-mock and turning each table,
I recalled a turn of events beside a snooker one.
It was dull green, though not as dull as the (in memory) windowless light that coated it.
I circled the table, though not for a shot,
and claimed the tables to have been turned on their head.
And i realised now. (I'm aware)
That i cannot stay on track of losing track.
Structure seems to achingly scrape at my fingertips, beneath keys or around pens.
Though the mind controlling them fears anything so much as
Being able to write in stanzas.
Or even. In sentences. Alot of the time.
Though i like some thing wonderfully outrageous.

I put my own skin against a test that needed nothing more than a pen, and a potractor.
My face feeling the temprature-less feel you can only get from an exam paper.
The hall run a-mock this time only with the sounds of pens scratching paper.
Ink injecting a tree, sap and honey i used to lick as a child.
Running out into the misty summer sunshine, into the clear shade beneath the tree on the left of the path before my house.
Seeing the ooze, remembering that trees may bleed too,
sliding my finger down it, some times frozen, and tasting whatever this fantastic new substance was.
No substance for that entirely could have ended up sexual.
A tree and myself.

I've honestly cleaned this up, from what is going on in my head.

They'll use it against me one day,

I'll be leant awkwardly against a white wall, on a silver chair, with black tips stopping the legs scraping the grey, dotted floors. The table before me may once have been seen as 'dull egg shell' coloured. Which is misleading, i always thought. The typical egg colour is that of skin, mostly. Lighter skin. Freckled skin.
Egg shell in the aisle, is actually a dull blue. Doused still in freckles, usually. Perhaps there was a minor mention of a duck. Still, dull blue freckled skin could still relate to the previous egg. Flesh gone off.
Any way, the man (or woman with her hair tightly pulled back into a bun, scraped across her head so that i figure without the black parts, the chair may indeed scratch the floor so that it looks like her scalp) will tell me 'Wipe the slate clean, start over'
Any I'll nod. Face against the cold wall, I'll nod.
Though inside i know, i listen, i picture a chopping board in a stupidly hygienic kitchen. I picture a wonderfully clean sponge covered in bubbles and fairy liquid, slopping away the scum and filth that covers the board. And i see it glint, shine in some unseen, unnatural light.
But i know. There are digs. Dips and slices in the chopping board, from old knives and cutlery. Accidental dents. All harbouring traces of scum. Disgusting bits of germs that couldn't have been caught and removed when 'wiping the slate clean'. They fester, lightly, and unseen.
So his/her words ride across this slate happily, like a small space ship over the surface of the futuristic landscape.
Work here is done and she's alright, release her, get her a job and get her in some flat.

My own eyes open now to the sap falling from lips of pyschatrists. My eyes blank and flat, believing and open to suggestion. I run my finger, mentally, across their oozing lips and take a commemorative lick of my finger.

Little one sent me away
little one. So i can't sleep
Said she knew the time in rome
and i couldn't try, and stop her from seeing past the bathroom door
and
oh no, she didn't try
to pry with eyes so bitterly dry from all the ache of
adolelesence
and all that i knew
was how to turn clocks to present time.
She wrote a few things on my wall,
covered up by papered paint
and all the sweet calenders.
Her eyes were softer after that, wider yet still full of
substance.
Some one took her away, after that.
He told me, he told me that i was wrong
To try, and keep a bird inside.
Inside me.
So i let her fly i let her be
Didn't she know that roundabouts always come back to me.
Motorway child and
Dual carriageway birds
I left car running on the drive to detatch the frost
I yearned for some sort of release, from captive wings and skeletal beasts
But his etches in my skin formed the outline of dictation.
I saw beaches at night, and i heard people's voices against the night time sky
Sided with the crackling of wood becoming prey to fire.
I tried to turn my head to face him those miles away,
but i felt a clutch around my face that kept it straight.
Did i become worse to bare the mornings?
Holding six glasses in two hands, i hummed a tune familiar of him.
And the scabs on my back ached in the dull way that his voice still led in my mind.
How could i think of any one else this week?
I found more productivity in writing all night than to have sex.
Did any one else feel the wind change?
he could never miss it, as i led upon my drive at Two.
My back arched over a corsa,
the stars lied to me with their presence dotting the sky above.
Subtle chords bought me lyrics from a voice i thought i'd heard before.
I knew he'd forgotten me again, because they stopped coming in from the shore.
Lying awake
on the beach late at night. My eyes begged forgiveness for day time's pathetic frights
and he hung over me
like a towel draped in water.
I couldn't say no to such a, dealt sort of character.
Kiss me, I'd sigh, and pray to make up his mind,
but all around me the soft sounds of morning approaching made it awfully awkward
and sullenly dull.
And my eyes lulled back again, glazed over with daylight's presence.