Last Call for the Lifeboats

I can tell by the gentle slope of the hallway

as I wade on through leftover luggage

and by the way the fluorescent lights

unignite

I'm just a little fool

I've got no head for physics or for maths

I've lived my life for pretty lights

glasses of effervescent wines

minor crimes

of the heart.

It's not my area of expertise

but this near to the closing of it all

even I can tell our ship is sinking.

Go to, unblinking. Hike up your skirts of cobwebbed silks 

and carry on. Here, the stairs.

The rushing of the ocean

cannot overtake

the memories of dancing

just a little while ago.

I know where the exits are

I can even swim. I won't. 

This is the closing of the ball.

The last call.

There's no one waiting on the shore.

The lifeboats have already left.

Yet, I've got an itch

a pinprick of a thought

that if I get to the deck up top

the stars will still be smiling high above.

she her I him them us

Fragment, 2024. 1986.

Seal

 I dipped my toe into the water, 

and it was still delicious. 

Selkie-fat and full of happiness, 

sliding,

I bit down, 

and my mouth filled with the sweetness,

of another's sweat.

Write

Don't sabotage yourself, he says. I do nothing else. Write. 

What right do I have to create? 

I want to tell stories, that's all. Beautiful painful little tales. I still ache for the plot. Throw some more at me. Let me fall, like Alice, into reveries. Let me slice myself open on heartache, hurting deliriously from the knowledge it all will end, it almost already has. 

Well, it has. 

We're in the after. There are no more kisses, no potential. She didn't become an artist, or a scholar, or any other kind of immortal. She's just slowly dying. 

A kind of luck, of course. But still. 

Write. 

Shut up, I will. 

 Do you ever think that maybe you started disliking yourself to make it ok for someone else to hurt you?

Paradise Lost

The heart is heavy with melancholy, the mind is angry and hard. Want to do more art. Want beauty to be easily accessible in everyday life; not something to constantly compete for and never reach. Want more touch. Want to share life with a friend group like when we were students. Want to let myself be vulnerable again, be excited again.

I felt loved at this game and around it, and also intensely lonely. I felt beautiful and talented and also strange and clumsy and shaped wrongly and in the way. I want to dance five more hours of waltz; I want to start my own studio, making only games in the dark feminine aesthetic. I feel so much love. I want to drown myself in embraces.

"intentativity"?

 The exquisite feminine sensation of discovering a whole new array of insecurities, you hadn't realised you were supposed to carry. 

Creation and the End of All

William Blake: The Ancient of Days

Just dust and flower mites?

The little cakes I bake are also a sort of poetry, 

nevermind the almond flour or the sugar, 

they contain 1 tsp longing and as much hope 

as you can locate in your cupboard. 

the past has just begun