Je suis désolé de n’avoir pas été comme tu

For

what seemed like forever

and was perhaps

some lost sand

sifting through light

slower when observed

turning like eager sun dial

face capturing shape and shadow

as the moon faced women

blue in Picasso’s rough brush

your edges sleek impossibly

by Masters deft curve, mimicking

nature readily, surely as time will

erode the fullness of our cheeks

your high bones hold you up

that half smile imperceptable

through memory shaking her

coat free of rain drops

as we drift further into long night.

I recall being good at Tug of War

in school with my artex white shirt rolled up

the thin fabric of my skirt flapping

dangerously high, leaning in for the pull

boys on the other end heaving, purposing

(this was always about more than a rope you know)

their extraordinary need to dominate and

our quiet, tugging urgency to defy

even then I might have upset the historical balance

made you proud, if you’d been watching

the length of rope dipping into glassy water

with the weight of decades, days spent

trying to form words of consolation where none

seem worthy enough.

You have slim bones that cannot pull heavy

rope from weighted oceans and even if

your arms were strong, I wonder if you would

gather me to you, within the eye of rushing storm

our fragile satellites eclipsing, resolving

sorrow with gentle grace, unleavened bread

yet to rise

to feel your perfumed palm on my forehead

the beneficence of your gaze, or hear

your voice, its sonorous depths, call for

me and gladly, I would present myself

for any time in your light is time lived

well and good and whole.

in your absence there is only

shadow and cold

reminding me, estrangement is unnatural

when it pares two segments of the same orange

apart, with no mend, balm or eulogy

great enough to salve the hurt

building within us, mountains of

dried salt from spent regret grown

dry.

I long and shall always long

to return to you

in that hour where memory

tells me

we laughed and

in your eyes I saw

my center

verdant and blooming

with the tender cobalt nectar

reserved for what can never

be replaced.

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She breaks you with every glance your way

Yearning

You should have your own language

And if you did

At times it would hurt

Like a thousand pins

While the beauty, when it came

Carved your heart into shards of bliss

Just being near you is a feat, the inexorable desire to touch, a reaching in all but reality

You leave me starving for what I have never known

A strange cruelty in desire, sunk deep as well whetted knife

Shall not appear to cut.

Yearning

If you were a woman you’d wear

Form fitting clothes highlighting your impenetrability

You’d be honey too high to reach

And your sting would swell, relentlessly

I think of biting your lips and how

Your blood would taste

Would that I could stop wanting, turn from you, bottle my passion and fling it to sea

Would that I could switch off that burning torch or douse it

Truth is, if you lay beneath me, you wouldn’t open your mouth in complaint

Not once I began

You’d be crying for me to touch you again and wondering where

Your self possession fled

Which is why, recognizing this at some instinctual level

You shy away like feral deer

Your haunting eyes keeping pace with mine

The electric whip of fear, glinting in your restlessness

How you rearrange your clothes as if I had pealed you bare

Nude in my mouth, nude beneath my tongue and in the sweet consuming of you

Your thin wrists pinned beneath my surge. Did you say you were strong?

I am stronger. I hold you down against yourself, I’ve given myself permission

To have you all.

Move closer, do it

Don’t repeat the pattern, break it, leave it crushed

Obey me, acquiesce

Do as I say, become mine

Let down your surrendering

Let me unfold you like a letter

Feeling the words of you running in my veins

Assuage the need I have

For your surround and ultimately

That raw cry of mercy

And the murmured echo of devotion

I want you to love me fiercely, I do not ask

I command it.

Inveterate flatterer

If you let me, if I’d let myself

I’d mention you in every mouthful

Once, at 15, my father said; Stop talking about that girl, I think you’re obsessed!

I was, without yet acknowledging how deeply these things can go

Forget an arrow, your harnessing of me is a tattoo as inked as the one I already have

If you were a sadist you’d say; Good. Now crawl to me

I suspect I would.

Absence is a devour and every hour a little harder

It’s a tortured song locked inside my chest

Awaiting your key.

You, you, you, the bird who flies without feather

You, you, you, the permanent loan against my sanity.

In restless chamber of night, I wake feverish, imagining

Your cruel hands on me, the cull of my longing to lie

Beside you, above you, beneath you, inside you.

The funny thing is, you don’t try, you never have, it comes naturally

Like walking on hands or juggling, neither of which I ever mastered

As you master me with the flint in your eyes and the quiescence of your tongue

Sharp teeth catching against your damson lip, ragged once in a great while

I have become a collector of moments featuring you

The turn of your full cheek set against certain light, eloping into smile

I want to dose you with a spell that you’ll feel

A tenth, a quarter, a handful.

Even as you are a wild thing and I knew it then, as I know it now

A creature who enjoys the pin cushion of being desired

Each gentle intrusion bringing a little fresh blood

Painless for you

A hammer in my heart.

Underwing, in indigo darkness I envelop

My unspoken entreaty and braid it into my hair

With every twist, pulling tighter, for my darling, wishing is

Often pain.

In amber

You, unmaker of peace, wear your hat jauntily to the side

a dandy at appearances

i am incapable of wiping the smudge of regret

away in time, before

everyone sees my imbalance and points with

blunt, corrective finger—

there she is, she’s deranged with grief

surely torn mad

not yet. Maybe sometimes. In the damaged fur, just a bit…

this lingering thing called hurt

a purple tie around my neck and I hide my succulent scabs

behind silk blush, with the covet of a lover

and you? You are the abuser who with

toothpick, flicks detris from your life as

effortlessly as anyone without conscience knows

how to polish their shoes with another man’s shine

sometimes I want to cut your throat

with a very fine Japanese knife, I keep unused

in my emotional closet and other days I want

to use it on myself, such is the pendulate swing

and thumbless gait of grief, a sifting vignette of those in our photo albums

who smile, so convinced of a radiance. The other

day I thought of your determine, growing like wan poppy from souless sidewalk

thin feet, high hips, impossible secrets braided deep into tangled weft of your hair

eyes closed from me, turning in simmering amusement, some unheard world beyond blunder

like a tuning fork set high, your mavidad, a seekers entreaty, the

sea pearls of your hope sewn tight in seemingly empty pockets

if we drowned, you’d die rich and I’d float to gulp the waste of dreams

frothing there among the manifold immensity

it takes just one word, the swallow of truism and fakery, a broken pendant, emptied bequeathment, the ransack of joy

to master stoism and a stomach able to survive the pitch and vinegar of disappointment

in my head I hear your voice, its fine timber cresting Finnish land

and

I am the sot

gathered for wedding and funeral

spun into skin

held close and released

breathe me out

let me loose

where undertow has no purchase

to be weightless and the insubstantial

a feeling, a letter, washed clear of intent

just the impression remaining

something I left behind

in amber

Will

Does the wood pigeon know?

when he calls his coo into the night

the cats who stalk will slink toward

the smell of blood and feathers

as I have gathered myself into quills

and spices sealed in alabaster jar

the sum of me is traveled

through moon and sun

like a cut orange leaves her

stain on wood, sticky and bitter

as your imprint has become

my mandala and the furtherance of us

defies life and death

shaking itself off like a dog released from bath

will hurtle, maddened, toward nearest escape

I grew my vines in your wood

my embers are your fire

this melange of you and I

twined like grapes gathering sunlight

before first frost

and the women take in the clothes, hanging on frozen line

even as they capture the day’s warmth

you stretch in this paper thin life time

sew the jagged edges of my need

with your ivory needle

as if we were part of the same

garment

held up

by

sheer

force of

will

Where you once turned

Without you I am a blank erased space

emptied of misletoe

I am the weed that grows fitfully from concrete

without nourishment I survive

but survival is too great a word for what I do

enduring time like chewing tobacco

to be masticated and spat

black and stinking on unsullied

surface

you are the spark within me

I used to have many years ago

a key I misplaced

perhaps I hung it from a tree I was climbing

and it was simply lost

though I suspect

the key drowned

fell to the bottom of the lake

and was unreachable

glittered as it did from the depths

my own hand claimed

by weeds and gravity

the need to be lost in that

murmuring ache

I saw the key once in a while

sparkling from below and for a few hours, maybe a day

I could pretend briefly like a long drink

I was wearing scarlet tights again and you were

pushing me in the shopping cart

my cheeks red with laughter

the rings on your fingers counting down the days

until we cut our hair and sealed ourselves inside

envelopes to nowhere

you were always better at

pretending there was a point

I did not know how to

make things grow in my garden

with you absent

the moon even

an eclipsing reminder

of those waning moments

before the storm

so still the skies

so hush the trees

like velvet inhabited nature

a majesty of peace

I closed my eyes feeling

the length of your slim arm

a pulse behind our skin

like neon lights left flickering

long after dark

your eyes reflected against

deep pools of water and gathered

tears all emotion spent and real

something sincere in every ushered

appreciation of you

even as I am the only one

still paying attention

for you are staring out of windows

watching migrating birds

cross colorless skies

they are heading away

and you wish

for something to stir

the calm opiate within

your spare and unheated room

feel something

again

turning to stone

slow and grave like visitors to a wake

sometimes it feels like preparation for

our own funeral

yet there is life still

catching and flickering

the smell of sulfur

the sound of laughing

when we knew nothing and we knew one thing

the resound of the other

making music in

all we touched

and you touched me

deeply and with the earnest of

something bound not to last

for a flame is most beautiful

when it is fragile and almost

gives out

lighting darkness and ourselves

just enough

until it is not

and there is cold again

in our cupped hands

beseeching the void

where you once turned

and all the world existed

in the love from your eyes

And how

Hear how the fox festoons dusk

With larkish bark the color of a young girls best pitch

And how

Bathed in sweat I consider mortalities strange lyre

The photos of parts of me transposed and caught in time

Nothing is real and all is magnified by the mind

As she weaves her dream about our smoky heads

Tiptoeing over slate roof tops like ballerina forced to cat burgle

In this sliver of reality I choose

To disguard any mantle of victimhood

In imperfect slices of myself I have survived

Nothing will tear me down, save the last licorice root before tree fall

I have played acquiescences tuneless keys long enough

This is what growing up feels like at any age

The acceptance, not all is well or right yet

If I look, I know my worth

I’ll not give it away to appease those who seek

Through their own brokenness, to strip me of waterproofing

Time is too drunk on her singularity

She is in the bare knotted tree branches

Bowing together in subjugate to winter’s breath

Fat cheeked children licking plum juice from woolen fingers

And though separate, we are in conversation from

The very moment of our meeting

I am talking to you and listening close

As river water hides stoop of cold

Dashing its relentless self across us all

Bound and sheltering

From chill? From ourselves? The secrets behind our eyes or

Those said things unwrapped and steaming on kitchen table

The fire changing light to ghosts

I hear three generations

The reflection of another casting

My own breakage

Gathered with bright leaves in sacks of deposed

Being told fear is a disease we let enter

Turn it out, rent out those rooms you no longer inhabit

Turning as I have, to you

The shining of your throat covered in words

I’ll not let loose

Waiting for you

At hungry waters edge

In any country in the world

In any language

You run ahead

Turning back

The half moon of your face

Drawing light

An infusion

Aching

And the unseen fox

I imagine her as you

Bold wordless vibrance

Full tail, muscular legs

The twitch of beauty

Stark against tarmac

Owning darkness

Fear – Candice Louisa Daquin — FREE VERSE REVOLUTION

Fear for a child is very different to the adult and exactly the same the child inhabits another decade, in the past, another life before they knew they were who they become the child wets the bed because she misses her mother who is beautiful, ethereal, slender and absent the smell of her still lingers […]

via Fear – Candice Louisa Daquin — FREE VERSE REVOLUTION

Not even ourselves

Why and when did people stop being interested?

as kids we would sit on benches and talk about our pain

there seemed then, such a mercy in the air

it hung like cobwebbed dew around us and

despite the hardships we bore, our friends were

our succor

Why and when did people stop being interested?

and grief was labeled an annoyance?

why does growing-up mean we no longer write

poems like this

do we no longer feel the same

or just hide it away?

and if it is hidden how does it stay so

with the swell and the surge and the blistering salt

I hear rain falling into a tin can somewhere

and briefly I remember eating out of cans in summer

my lips sticky with apricot

it was a luxury then and my grandmother carefully

spooned each peachy globule out and added ice-cream

I hated the taste of ice-cream and I loved

the feeling of lying high in a big tree smelling apple leaves

in those days

when tragedy struck

we children who are called resilient

had the hope or the armor of youth

and the cherish of our friends

I saw her running toward me across the fields separating our houses

her red hair and freckled face red with exertion

we ate stale cucumber sandwiches left over from her mother’s

garden party and she held my hand in her own

clammy seedy palm

as if I were a starfish

I told her of my disappointments and the ache in my chest

all those who had forsaken and gone their own way

with the wisdom of child she wrinkled up her eyes against the sun

told me what I needed to do was pretend I didn’t care a damn

because one day you’ll grow up and nobody will be able to hurt you

I held onto that advice like a piece of paper framed in my chest

but it wasn’t true it wasn’t true

and I wonder where she is now

if she has children

if she is the same kind of mother she was as a friend

if I could see her again I would say

thank you for giving me the hope to get to this point

maybe it wasn’t true, maybe adults fool themselves into

thinking they are not children with ageing hearts and

brittle bones

maybe being an adult is harder than any childhood

because you don’t have afterwards to dream of

and the future as yet unsummoned

with all your magic and all your wistfulness

seen through the eyes of someone not old enough

to know the reality

I would tell her don’t tell your children the truth

let them dream as we did just a bit more

where I can still hear my grandmother knocking over pots

as she makes an apple pie and the smell

of summer is all about us in a haze

and your red hair makes mine look blonde

and your freckles tan your legs whilst mine remain blue

and your hand in mine is the first hand of friendship

I would thank you for running when I called

because nobody has run since and I suspect

adults have ways of doing things

us children never quite understand

I’m thinking if I could choose a side

I’d go through time and clasp your wrist and run

into the high grass fields out the back and where

nobody would find us

not even ourselves

years from now

Kissing phantoms

I saved an eyelash of yours

grew it from seed in a

blue-bottle

at first the greenhouse huffed and curdled

not used to cultivating such delicate wings

till I put you beneath my mattress

soggy with tears morning dew

you see, I had become

a cocoon again

needing no more than

one drop of rain on my

sewn together eyelids

scalded from rubbing

you see, I had thrifted

the parts of me that had

touched you the most

so I did not have to be reminded

why my hands stayed trembling

on countertops or reached

at night into marjoram dark

why my lips were chaffed and sore

from kissing phantoms

better then, to return to wax

bury the hatchet

and ones history

in somnolent earth

smelling of tea bags and bird feathers

ear wigs and lady bird nail polish

your smile

caught winking through amber sun

your convex toes

wriggling at the end of bed sheets

like crocus pushing up

the paving stones of my new city

it will speak a different language

contain no source for tears

no receptacle for self-harm

the last newspaper says

she left to parts unknown

wide indigo wings catching

cusp of moon as

clouds colored by grief’s insistence

curdle against wan light

mist abounding like a girl

carrying her skirts through water

involuntary sound of loss despite

washing your hands repeatedly

smoothing down the shards of

wakefulness

something grows silently

in you and cannot

be reborn