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Ben & Jules' house is filled with
simple indicators of homely status;
a disused beer-pump fridge, its
functional twin in the kitchen, doling
out sputtering home-brew remnants
matched brandy glasses in neat
collection carriages
I showed you Barcelona, deep
and dry and tiled - its wines
no longer mysteries to us
the foreshore a familiar substance,
a track line passing through
millenial steel, white and certain.
I worked hard for that weight,
laboured to lose what love and
catastrophe had given generous
It's back and my more ample
contours hide famine and
putrescence from all prying eyes
I'm not discernable to casual
onlookers, I'm not yours to see.

*

* I'm still sorry

I'm already trying to remember you

how the room re-arranges itself
with tags and clues of some
broader extra you. Unseen hair-pins
receipts for canceled concerts,
bookings for a parallel tryst
triage states, failed soviet cities -
a Berlin I'll never know from
maps,
I wonder what you won't pack, how
much jewelry reminds me of you
and which you'll claim outright
for your bold new life,
the endeavor to remind yourself
of a fierce independent
you, all sass and modern
disregard

Beach

Blocked and it's happened
three times, you scare a
weed - yep, nup, yep
I wouldn't worry about it
Sorry, but like no it's not
it does later
it needs to happen with
that ring, especially the
area
we had to surf, that's harassment
I was getting so over it
that's boys - it's like so bizarre
and I was 'no' for so long,
that's the crowded part
then
I always get nervous looking
at it, does it grow?
let's so get away

doubt

I've begun to doubt the structure
of things - I fear slipping out the
bottom of the bus, tumbling through
seats into the ocean basalt
everything seems dangerously translucent,
opacity removed
I see skeletons, rigid metal under-
structures but the skin's gone and I'm
porous, seeping out
I'm losing faith in the structure of
all things

fiscal returns

I've been living beyond my means,
reckless, irreversible, for far too long
I've borrowed, spent and spent
I can't sustain it anymore.

I've taken from you
freely given perhaps, but pounds
are pounds when paid in flesh
and this is nothing less than liquidation

you've nothing to give, oh, I know
I'm scrambling, pleading with
implacable men in dark suits
inscrutable behind horizon lenses

you're out there, lost to deprivation
we wish each other sleep
we wish each other well but
I've nothing you want anymore

far

And now, very suddenly, inexplicably, I am alone again.

On the far side of the world, with someone who can't love me properly anymore, because she doesn't feel she loves herself.

I have only love for her, still.

But that's not enough. Not anymore.

I'm flying 'home', where she isn't - I'm not sure if I'll come back.

What choice is there? Stay and forge a new life in the same city or leave, fleeing her and here; write it off as a bad bad year and slip back home, slink back home, alone, without her.

Whilst she moves and lives, on the far side of the world...