[x]

fall asleep with me tonight.If I wrote you a lullaby with verses of moonlit, fogged breath and a chorus of heartbeats- would you fall asleep with our melody in your palms?

I lie awake at night and watch traffic lights outside my window shout RED into the peace quiet and occasional hazy rev of traffic. I lie awake and shiver through layers and wish to silent stars it wasn’t winter, wish the nighttime cool wouldn’t paint quite so many goose bumps on my skin and make my eyelids so cold. I lie awake at night and night-dream without sleep- about you and all your eyelashes and beautiful wordings.

I like the way your collarbone lies horizontally beneath your neck,

why didn't you say goodbye?Love wasn’t in the air the night you unbuttoned my shirt and kissed my skin. No, love definitely wasn’t in the air the night we spent in heat of moments, sweating and tumbling and fumbling on your father’s bed.

It was anywhere but there. Does love go on vacation? I ponder and make fleshy butterflies from my outstretched fingers. Probably.

I can’t remember much but I can remember the beginning. The burn of acid bleeding and gushing past my tongue and down my throat. The noises and then your silence. The clumsiness and then the awkward kisses.

You had a garden of dark hair growing from your scalp and dirt eyes. You had a

oh the little thingsIt’d be nice if he'd let me breathe. Just inhale a little air to keep my teeth company- maybe even exhale again when they grow tired of one another. You really don’t notice how wonderful it is to breathe until you’re lying stomach down with empty lungs and the creepy man from the corner store sitting on your back.

But what can I say? Not- ‘please get off of my back, I can feel my spine against my stomach and I don’t like it.’ Because I really can feel my spine against my stomach and am breathless to say such. My cheek makes like feet against the wooden floorboards. This man has a whole forest of trees in here! A

the weeds across the street.She’s the little girl with flaxen curls at four pm flouncing down her driveway with her hands buried in her pockets, lips pressed out like she’s whistling. You’ll watch her out your window, with your tea lukewarm on the sill, and splutter a cough; fogging up the glass just enough to miss her smile.

You saw her once, twice eating petals off the roses in your garden. You’ve forgotten how to converse with children, you cussed between the wheezing and she stared right past like you were simply a knurled twig catching the wind in its leaves.

One morning you found her; purple stockings, blush mittens and a head of sunlight cur

picture death.I couldn’t bring myself to bury her.

I couldn’t bring myself to empty the ground of dirt and of earthworms and of the spindly weed roots, and fill in the ochre gap with her body. Her coffee-cream fur held her tiny skeleton from falling out when they hit her. I try not to think of miniature beat-less hearts and mute lungs. I never saw her dead, but I can imagine.

They found her on the median strip. Breathless and still by the endless whoosh of traffic.

In my mind I see Mum’s face; I see her heart throbbing at her feet and her cradling the dog, like a precious baby to her chest. I see the love flowing down her withered cheeks

the fluttered- a collectioni

Hear my joints dislocate, coming apart at the notion of sunlight. It falls and it settles in pictures of loveliness, golden tree branches and hints of leaves; of autumn, of spring.

I am so tall in the water. My legs are never-ending, crooked lines of peachskin- watching my fingers draw out ripples until they strain and buckle and fall into the cool. I’ll touch my toes and loop my figure and I’ll make giant ripples, abhorring fallen leaves and sending shivers of blue through his legs.

It’s a faded crimson red holding my breasts, tugging my hips and leaving my ribcage bare to the current. It’s smudged lipstick and smear

pretty boys break hearts.sometimes I think I’m just a mess of badly drawn lines. I’m just scrawled veins beneath paper rough skin, I wear poorly sketched scars on my thighs [skin deep red pen lines] and even my smile is lop-sided- but he never seemed to notice.

my skin [spread like thick icing over my skeleton] is a monotonous pattern of pores, a stretch of the world the sun never kissed. I can’t see the beauty in multitudes of freckles and chipped fingernails- but he does.

‘why do you love me?’

‘you make me happy.’

I never could figure out just how. was it my illegible love notes, or the tiny hearts I drew into his bare back wi

you can't feel through fabrictonight the rain becomes the earth
falling from hidden spaces in the sky and swollen clouds
i hear it make mud of dirt, and lovers of friends
and ask, quiet, where are you going but down?

i’m not all there in the head
you’re not all there in the head, my mother says
i’m not all there in the head i repeat
sometimes i’m there in my toes and fingers and heart as well

and now - in this downpour moment- i lie on the street
so warm that i think well that’s where love’s gotten to
but where is your shirt n? oh someplace else
and is that a light flickering in the house across the road? hide!

i rush in soaken w

leavemedon'tleaveme.you make me sick. you make my stomach fold in on itself and press out against the lining of my flesh. you put lumps in my throat and you tie strings to my tear glands and tug until the world is just a panoply of blurred lines, hazy colour and bokeh.

you made me do this. you put the knife in my fingers and you told me to tear, you said you would care if i hurt myself like this. you said you’d care if i opened my flesh up for you like a gift of blood and flesh and tissue. but you never really did.

i like being small, i like being the blue eyed girl sitting amidst background noise, rubber band arms holding the necks of her legs together.

dear diary, today i diedshe's a ghost of a girl in the mirror. dark hair tangles like weeds below her shoulders and cuts at grey eyes. harsh shadows don't leave her with a skeleton like she sometimes hopes, but she feels it in her mind. feels the sharp edges and the trembled fragility, the silent cry for another's flesh and that outward plea of don't break me. cold fingers make love to cold glass while the sky cries over and over for sun.

this afternoon death made to kiss her lips but missed. he'd come so close she now knows what nothing doesn't feel like and she cannot fear it. it's a blankness so removed from consciousness she cannot reach it with thought- but sh

colour blind.She saw him at the park once. He was the colour of dirt; with bird eyes and white, mapped palms. Her little forehead lined as she felt the bile force its way up until her saliva was acid. She counted her toes and bit the inside of her cheek, should she run? Are they fast runners? She figured this one must be if he kept himself out of jail. The dark man flashed a mouthful of pebbles and held out his hand- which would have swallowed hers.

'Don't touch me.'

Her hands were all knuckles and her baby eyes tore into his. He faltered and stepped away, a half mouthed sorry. He looked upset, a grin spread like fire between her dimples.

Suddenly she

flesh puzzlesIn the beginning it was enough. I’d be wide-eyed, quietly watching her through the windows. Limbs and torso like a slender tree; bowing in wind and always shooting up toward the sun. She’d wear summer skin in the middle of winter with freckles spoiling her shoulders and cheekbones. Her birthmark was a dull red stain at her collarbone and she had a mole beneath her left breast. She was thirteen and I thirty, but my, oh my, did I ache to see her insides.

The house next door they called the sea house because it was two stories of cerulean blue. Through my bedroom window I could see naught but an empty bedroom. But late September the P

vacant.Look at her; she’s a porcelain doll with never-ending milk legs all stapled to the bed, thirteen years young with forty-eight years suffocating her figure. He’s right up to her baby lips, offering cigarette breath and grinding his stubble on her cheeks, it reminds her of gravel and she closes her eyelids as it falls across her neck, inhaling the cloud of dust.

The curtains are draped across the sky, dried blood red casting shadows she can’t tell the ends of. A dim flicker of a light and maybe a filter of moonshine illuminate the crevasses of his eyelids, forehead and awry mouth. His skin tastes of sweat and earth.

She was wit

never grow up.I have a monster living underneath my bed.

He’s made up of burnt frog skin, white-red cobweb veined eyes and a collection of missing pebble teeth. Sometimes we play scrabble.

(The first time he was just a mechanical hum beneath the bowing wooden planks, he was just a faint smell of green and he was just a hot cloud of fog around my lips. It’s the wind, it’s the wind, I breathed. Then he breathed back, heavy and loud and monster-like; AM NOT.)

He always spoke in capitals; MONSTERS ARE MUCH TOO SCARY FOR LOWER-CASED LETTERS, he informed me one night under pink covers. I shined the flashlight into his eyes until they changed co

this aprilThe moonlight falls through squinting blinds, bowing softly to hug the arc of his naked body. The blankets are strewn about his toes as a girl, no more than sixteen, lays wide-eyed and warm-bodied beside him.

She silently watches the dreams come and go beneath his eyelids, she quietly feels his chest rise, rise then fall and she listens to the heavy breathing that accompanies it. Beautiful breathing, she thinks, tracing generous lips with fingertips.

The air is cool but she is alight.

Everything in this room bathes in blue shade. She watches the alarm clock beside the bed, numbers coming and going out of fashion before her eyes.

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sleep-talk.

by ~Pretty-As-A-Picture, Jun 24, 2008, 8:25:55 AM
Literature / Prose / Fiction / General Fiction

isn’t it curious how your fingers fit perfectly between each of my sclerous ribs, or how your breath mimics mine with belated accuracy

                         (count each breath and you’ll run out of fingers.)

don’t you remember the fairytales?

                           (and they both lived happily ever after, until after ran out and the monogamy became as non-existent as  the magic.)

you were never one for myths. with discerning eyes, you’d plant kisses along the ridges of my back
across my shoulders
and the hollow beneath my jaw, questioning my pastel skin and every involuntary blink.

“I am not a myth.” I’d breathe.

Even when my back wore naught but jutting wing bones, a street of spine and a field of freckles -bare of feathers- you weren’t religious enough to use the A word. But behind closed eyelids and incoherent sleep-talk, you were thinking it.

gesticulating to your chest you said “you’re in my heart” and your blood composed amongst your cheekbones deliriously.
but the x-rays showed nothing of the sort.

                         (maybe they mixed yours up with another’s, doctors do these things you know. I’ve never been very fond of the second-hand air and recycled smiles)

you tell me everyone dies, but you can never prove it.
                         (you’ll never die, God loves you too much- I can tell.)

sometimes when you sleep I talk to you. one day you spoke back.
among a disarray of incoherency and lullabied whimpers was repose.
that’s when I realised the hardest part of sleeping is waking up.