When I’m an off-stage marionette en-route to a venue, head-nodding in a suitcase, hair forgotten and front and centre, peripheral vision and window dressing, long as uncle’s stories (and as in need of a trim)
When someone switched my path to happiness for a treadmill facing a canvas.
When there’s a change in and ocean and an old man on a rocking chair by the beach says to himself “rains ’a comin'”
When my head is more cluttered than the Claremont X-men run and I can’t tell what universe I’ve stepped into, but it’s not the one I grew up in.
All that’s on my side is the fact I’m still in it.
A friend of mine jumped off a building, he asked me “what’s your secret?” The only answer I had to give him was “making promises”
When I can lower the bar for feeling loved to receiving a smile from a Barista
and feeling strong to knowing I can handle myself against a man so bored
he’s driven to violence with broken pint glass
(so broken his boredom’s driven him to a pint)
(so bored by violence his pint drives him)
(so driven to his pint violence breaks boredom)
When the strings are cut and I’m limp behind the curtain, scared
I won’t get up before the show starts,
staring at his face in a crumpled t-shirt on my chair
and his frame standing in the shadows of my room
and all that stops me from searching is the sky turning pale.
These past last six months have as much light and colour as the Bendis Daredevil run and I’m sending a letter of compaint to this city’s Editor in Chief in regards to all these characters I’ve spent years in love with, subjected to such cheap plot twists.
When there’s a pinball rattling up top,
twitchy fingers waiting for the drop.
When I can’t get back across the eight foot gate
separating a park full of dog shit and playcentre
When summer was ball games
and photosynthesis and growing up had all the
drama and emotion of the 90’s X-Men cartoons where every revelation brought screams, tears and rage.
When I call Desirae and tell her that boy I love might not make it through the night and the loudest thought in my head is “don’t cry”.
When the knife was only meant to make a statement
and the drink was only meant to loosen him up
and the weed was only meant to calm him down.
When the boy turns from man to snake to boy again.
When a woman isn’t a person but a property
and free will feels like a robbery.
When the lactic acid build up shifts from the joints in my knees after a midnight run to sentences with his name and mental health buzzwords, like funerals end but eulogy’s don’t.
(How come I’m told to talk to someone
after everytime I’ve talk to someone?)
When I was given back all the comic books I gave him
and he and didn’t touch the ones about depression
cos who’d look at pictures of brick walls while in prison.
When I did make a difference, it’s just, the scales were different.
When it’s a long-arse grind for a long-arse time and I patch myself up with a simple-arse rhyme.
When it’s not iambic pentamiter, and it doesn’t iambit pentmatterer
When the past year’s been a disappointing album that followed up the most increidble mixtape.
When Pitchfork gives the album I cried listening to a five point eight
When I look between London’s sharpest teeth, devouring all the space I could’ve found a sunset in is filled with boys on pegasus peds, caught in the sensation of flight, of speed.
Like falling, but upwards.
Like fuck ups, with benefits.
Free from gravity and every
other element that held them down its spuds all round
