Stolen Cherries

My tongue twists itself

into laurel wreaths, speaks

of victory even as it tastes defeat:

grand optimist. Knows it cannot win every battle it fights.

The scent of blood as my teeth drive stakes into my cheeks -

“Check your words before you speak,” they say.

My lungs breathing life, death and all between

into the chaos of this life I lead, I

feel my pupils dilate,

my heart beat palpatate,

fists clench, fight or flight and I do

neither.

Cannot run from whatever this feeling is,

cannot fight it either.

Every word I choose is picked, carefully;

like cherries blooming red from trees we do not own,

we gather them, share them, and I

stain my fingers the same colour as hers

even as we lick them clean,

pick the flesh of them from our own -

their seeds, bones, far too easy to swallow.

Like words. Like love, like

far too easy to cover up.

But it never stays hidden for long.

Bury the seeds and the trees will grow -

hide a secret and she will know, you know

she knows you too well to hide anything for too long.

Why would this be any different?

You speak of courage, tongue dripping with irony;

tell others to chase love no matter the futility

whilst you hide and try to forget it.

Tell yourself it isn’t fair to ask,

to chase what may not even be there to catch.

Tasting defeat, too afraid to try and ask if victory

is even an option.

Headwinds

The wind is singing

in the language of my fear;

it howls, long note, mourning drone, rattles the glass.

It is keeping me awake.

I watch the minutes tick by, listen

to the silence press tinnitus into my eardrums,

wonder whether, if ever tonight,

I will get some slumbering respite.

I doubt.

The wind is powerful. It does not knock gently

on the inside of my eyes, it

rages. My eyes are mere mirror - thus begs the question

what came first? The wind in my head

or the wind that I watch rip trees from their roots,

close bridges, turn rivers into rapids and seas

into seething cesspools.

Which came first?

Did I stare into the abyss and become what I could see,

or did this world look inside me,

and decide to show everyone else the turmoil…

the raw, unbidden emotion, the power of such love,

and hatred, exhaustion and fear

in equal measure.

Storms have a terrible tendency to destroy so much… and if,

God forbid,

when my mother named me, she named a storm,

I pray to whatever God presided,

do not let me lose that which I love

through my own misguided, fatal follies.

Optimism

She wears the night over her head,

it is the cowl that shields her face from the world.

It drifts to her shoulders, smooth curtain - this dark

is one I do not fear when I look into it,

not when it’s her;

eyes sparkling with her smile,

brighter than all the sky full of dead stars waiting to fall,

still impersonating life even in their death.

I watched her do that once.

It is the only time she has ever frightened me.

She has a crescent moon tattooed behind

her right ear. The night

whispers to her, spins her stories of the world’s truths

and she has learned them. Learned to see

the crescent moon as half full,

instead of half empty.

It’s hard to write when your head and your heart are not singing in tandem: my chest is full of birdsong, but the lightness of the sound is so weighted - a tonne of feathers weighs no less than a tonne of lead. My mind drifts, seesaw between heavy rock and melancholy piano: nerves, electric, pulsing, anatomy of gritted teeth, but the mind weeps, quietly, aching almost to the point of sweetness. Or maybe I’ve got it wrong. Maybe my head and heart are both too badly broken to make a sound; my body, a dreamcatcher become a story too full of plot holes to hold itself together, to even make sense. Maybe they are in tandem with their silence. And I am still left to find nothing.

- Tandem

Arrhythmia

To need holding sometimes does not mean

that you are without strength.

Just as mountains need bedrock foundations

as trees need soil to safeguard their roots

as oceans need tides

everything in this world walks to the rhythm

of a holding. A pulse.

All the words of my unwritten poems

stretch across the vast caverns of my conscious and subconscious mind,

syllables jumping between neurons like kids playing jump-rope

and like kids playing jump-rope

some of them trip and fall and

I cannot always gather the ones that do not land

fast enough not to lose them.

The words tumble, lost, through my throat,

past my sternum,

they settle in my chest and they burn there,

waiting to be found.

They do not burn quietly either.

Like the emotions I harbour that go without saying,

they scald my flesh where they lie and I

swallow the smoke.

Too content to walk to the two-step beat of comfort,

of safety,

can’t bring myself to break out into something more

unknown, more “avant garde”. My love is not

a quiet thing, not if you know

what that rhythm sounds like,

or looks like.

Assassins

It takes specific circumstances

and a very precise strike from a practiced hand

to kill a shadow.

Shadows love to linger -

they’re the bastards that’ll stab you in the back

whilst you’re basking in the sun - just when you think

the battle is won, they’ll fucking draw blood. They’ll cut you,

leave short work of you behind where you used to stand,

solidly, before you realise the first slash has landed:

by the time you realise what’s happening,

there won’t be anything left but a blown-away chalk outline

and a non-existent body bag,

because the shadows aren’t the things that kill you.

Damn wraiths will try and turn you shadow-man,

change your name to ghost -

they will strip you of every inch of the light you hold

if you let them. They will make you kill yourself

if you let them.

It is that light that kills them first. I know

it gets low, so low that the blue of the flame

is all but invisible. Hold it close. Feed it what you can - it’s hard, I know,

but find fuel, keep it close to your body

so your hands don’t shake so much,

keep it safe from the wind those shadows will call up.

Speak - shadows thrive on quiet so be as loud as you can.

And when the time comes,

and your flame has grown from match strike to flint spark to bonfire,

that it covers you, shield against that which would destroy you,

those shadows will be too afraid of the light to even come close,

let alone touch you.

But remember to feed your flames,

because those bastards love to linger,

and if they see you burning out they will have you.

And they will turn you shadow-man.

And they will have you change your name to ghost.

They will strip you of every inch of the light you hold,

if you let them.

So hold on, and hold on tight.

All At Sea

There’s a storm brewing out there,

in the dark of periphery.

I can taste the spray, feel the wind,

smell the breath of the beast as it comes…

My mind is all at sea;

my anxiety comes in waves arching

twenty feet or more and I am alone

trying to steer my broken boat back

to some semblance of a harbour:

She’s got a cracked hull and split sails

trying to fly on a halved mast. The beast

is hungry for more than my ship can feed it.

Her anchor is sunk far beneath the depths

content only to steady what sand it settles in whilst I

battle to keep my head above water.

Sometimes these storms get so dark, the wind

gets loud that every wave sounds like hounds baying

for your blood. And if the beast has marked you

for death by drowning how can you outrun it

when there’s nowhere to hide.

The oceans are where storms are born after all…

but also almost always where they die.

I can’t remember dawn now, though I try.

I know daybreak will split the sky - the sun

will come. I’ve just got to ride out the night.

The beast is not unbeatable.

I’ve watched him cower, heard his whimpers as I have forced him back.

I don’t feel it in my clenched teeth, but my bark

is stronger than his bite.

I know this.

And for a while, the howling does not seem

quite so loud.

There is all of this grief you are carrying

and all of the grief I am carrying

and we meet and fall in love

but neither of us knows where to put all this grief

so we let it spill all over each other,

let it colour our edges like soot and smoke

that slowly finds its way into our mouths

and neither of us knows where the fire is,

yet here we are in ashes, in ashes,

holding each other and saying,

it will be all right.

It will be all right.

-Nikita Gill