An Adventure into Warp Speed: A Collection

The Other Truth

Clenching my lies within my fists I stand prominent, forcing the pressure of weightlessness onto them until they crack; opening up like wounds, drenching the tips of my fingers in venom and lava.

Their acid burn seeps into the cuts in my skin from times I have fought this before; an unyielding inevitability soaks the marrow of my bones as I stand – defender and defenceless, my fists still closed, un-bloomed.

Primed to punch, my stance is unyielding, as if my body and throat are at war between the truth and the other; head lolling in despair at who I have become and what I am holding.

The way out is the way in and I’m looping, rolling down a hill in a memorial summer, catching myself at the bottom and finding it to be the ash-sky; continually Catherine-wheeling through remnants of other iterations of this inevitability.

We always end up here. We always end up here.

Semi-Plagiarism

Copy yourself, make something other a binary you, in a world of starships and code and the fact that death doesn’t really mean anything here.

Right here, we don’t need oxygen or food, in this world of falsity and fantasy and the sweetness of hallucination that aches behind your body.

Stand still, headset firmly on and breaths calm, a new world awaits your better self where you forget the depersonalisation of still always being human.

Copy that, you’re the captain of false starships, hurtling through uncertainty with virtual reality comforting you when you realise that you’ll never be like this.

Another you, version fifty-three in a chain, never changing yourself or becoming something better only sticking in mistakes and pretending like it’s improvement.

Copy yourself, make another other for another self, forget your body and transmit human signals to other fake-people who tell themselves aching stories

of a reality that we daren’t change.

Interstellar Estate Agent

We bought the galaxy on a mortgage of borrowed time. Because I wanted to give you something grand and you wanted space and all of the stars.

Who’s in charge of this? Not us, lying in a single bed traversing the skies; you need a bottle-opener for your wine, so you destroy a planet and forge one in a star – one use only.

I tell you that if we fall into a black hole, we’ll see in front of us everything that will ever happen; and you tell me you’ll look behind, instead. We try and find one, but our hands come up empty, and you say you never liked vacuums, anyway.

I know all this. I’ve always known all this, and yet still, I let you destroy any home we create; your hammer on the mantelpiece. Perhaps spinning through the universe is worthwhile, because it means you have to hold onto something; finally.

Erosion (I)

I trust and believe that the words of others are truth and law; we’ve always been standing on unequal ground here - forever on this titanic plane.

The crowd of everyone and the universal singularity: me.

You say whatever and I say okay; I say I’m drowning and you say you’re waiting for something in the water, to pop up and tip the scales.

When you knock on my flesh I tear open a door for you, let you worm inside and deposit your truths under my skin; let them grow like parasites within me, festering in septicaemia.

With my rotting body like sea-soaked decks at the bottom of the ocean, I’m asking you to validate the fact that I am becoming the decaying waters and swallowing the boat,

because you made me this way - and I?

I am somewhere in the picture, too.

The Day Before Dénouement

I’ll lie to you tomorrow, but tell you today that the next 24 hours will be the start of something beautiful;

a lie only becomes so when the truth is impossible – for all the times I say tomorrow will be wonderful there’s a possibility

unfulfilled.

So get a load of this, me, again, smiling to show my gums, me, again, writing down plans and burning them, me, again, hoping that the ash will be taken by the wind.

Unfulfilled.

Sunrises are the start and the finish line; it’s so easy to run, but it’s harder to stop before I’m not

unfulfilled.

Here we are again, the peak of the trough, and I’m telling everyone once more that tomorrow I will be (un-)

fulfilled.

Middle C Seems So Far Away

Arch your fingers, clasp your palm, touch the keys as if pulling at the heartstrings of a lover; back in the looming financial crash of 2007 when a family bought a piano and a new house, and a young girl ached Chopin.

With your hand out of the window and the car on the motorway, talon hands, poised, feel the air as a shotput; smooth, round, permanent - oxygen bubbles puppeteering pale fingertips until the window goes up and the radio is heard again.

Speaking three languages, la mort, la mort, la mort; D – E – A – D the keys cannot spell ‘childhood’, but her fingers reach more than an octave now (her thumb still fucked).

Chopin welcomes her to her final decomposition; her piano, dusty and blooming with flowers through each key, plays discords that don’t quite make a funeral march.

The Waiting Game

Havisham’s hands are bloody with the half-squeezed heart blackened by falsity, like thick red paint, her crackling fingertips keep moulding something invincible; the permanence of lying.

Altars still stand after the apocalypse, registry books torn to become cigarette papers; the ash of everything and a child, painting the phoenix onto the acid soil, until the core coils into chainmail.

The echoes of the innocent make pews into death row, where the absence of a void ruminates, glitching, triumphant; wedding dresses at funerals brush away the humid dew of unmown grass, as the softness of forgetfulness crowns each grave eternal.

Havisham’s hands are made of soot, the woman as the pyre, long-since engulfed in bitterness; one lie creating a fragile universe. Greek chorus repeating minor rites until the dead phoenix dies again, and only the smoke of lie-infested letters rises.

Cyclical Venus

Venus’ poisonous breath - invisible – catches itself on the ice of purged rain and falls.

Crystallising venom; no arrow-hearts, just the invisible murder weapon of a sacrificial lamb’s leg to beat love into submission.

Scorned lovers’ scorned love aches in the twilight of the in-between radio stations where Venus spits songs about eternal rainfall and dying in a bathtub of blood for non-poetic non-love.

Gods laugh at self-help books and the implication that anything at all is the same as the last time the world ended.

Beautiful Venus, with smoke in her eyes and golden skin, waits for men to burn under her; laughing and lying in one breath, catching and falling again.

Erosion (II)

Ship’s tipping, children crying, water lapping against my feet - summer-side beach shores flashing Polaroids through clasped hands in false prayer.

You, atop the bank rough hands; calloused grabbing the rail as you hang onto the upper hand.

No longer horizontal, ripped apart from the domestic bed, your chants to God beg Him to take my life, and spare yours –

It’s easier to be the underdog when everyone else is falling, too; I am the water, I wait to lap you up; please, I ask, fall onto me and let me love you to death.

In short, sink. In shorter, drown.

Rhetoric

Do we want to make it out of this alive? Was that ever the plan? – When we called each other beautiful, and our friends laughed because we were perfect for each other but I wasn’t made for you.

Do you want me to live through this? Even after all of this, being read, being spoken, I do not understand the role I seem to play.

Can you shed some light on my purpose? Right now, it seems, I’m only good to tell you stories from another girl who doesn’t hold a knife to her hair in the drunken night-time.

Is there still something to cut off? Look at me, asking you, shouting up to the pedestal I built, myself. What would you like for breakfast? What sacrifice would you like today? Don’t say ‘nothing’; it seems I am only good to cook you blood-pudding and pretend that I am talking to someone singular.

Will you take another hit? – Or is this one all mine? It’s another Tuesday afternoon, again, and we’re in the limelight milk-light and you’re somehow every girl I’ve ever loved but I don’t want to kiss you because you, and she, and I are not as real as the stories I tell.

2018