The most beautiful girl from 1973

This hot endless summer strings herself through long weekends.
She parches skin and tongues thirsty for cold beer and laughter whilst she paints faces with freckles.
She breathes over honey-hued shoulders knocking against each other at jostling tables of hands on glasses and smiles that reach to the corners of eyes.
Her hours are all-night diners and we wait on each other in short skirts, frills and skin.
She holds with bold arms, chuckling at waves of hair she’s kissed before friends noses tangle themselves in them.
Her black nights are hot with moist gums and groins that meet and greet, shedding frowns like clothes under a blanket of youth.
She tastes of salt and smells of honey.
She smirks at our open voices and hollers through new accomplices’ swollen lips,
‘Are you guys rock stars?’

‘Sure we are’
we sing back at them.

All my tired pretty horses

I like to get up out of bed at night when my thoughts are hissing and flicking their scattered tongues, weaving in and out of my ears.
To wear nothing but cotton undies and a woolen jumper while sitting at my desk, one foot curled tightly under me, indulging for a moment in the luxury of the midnight silence and the empty space surrounding me.
Feeling royal in a Collingwood flat.
Chasing ghosts with thickly buttered toast and black cherry jam.

I’d like to write down some of these slithering snakes, to pluck them one by one out of this browning apple and pin them for you to understand.
But you see, it’s easy to catch and talk about the big ones; deaths, rapes, cheaters and all the other gods and events.
To be completely honest, they are lazy and not worth worrying about as much as their size may suggest.
It’s the small things that churn me. Flexing their tiny bodies under my skin. Resembling translucent maggots rather.
The devil is in them, hiding because he’s too ashamed and embarrassed, petty in his jealousy and mistrust and digging himself in deeper with tiny teeth, a whole round mouth full, every time his ego is bruised.
Feasting on my juicy insides, eating away with each new disappointment until one day there won’t be any of me left and they’ll fall off chalk bones.

Saturated.

Bellies swollen.

Gluttonous little fuckers!

A girl like you and boys like abandoned ship bells

You’re a weather pattern.
You’ll fall like the leaves when your heart grows cold, hibernate until you’re ready to blossom again and wear short skirts and attract the bees when the heat almost becomes unbearable.
There’ll be a drought and when it rains it’ll pour.
And pour it does.
They wait politely for you to take your pick and have your way with them, while you wish they would just have the guts to push you against a wall and have their way with you.
Politeness is a killer in the tug of love and sex. These things are never meant to be polite. They are intrusive by nature.
And intrusion is what you want.
You want the eyes to hold your breath when hands are around your throat and your knickers around your ankles and you need a crooked accepting smile to be sent your way when you’ve opened up and exposed yourself, little by little.
So you throw the reins up into the air and hope one of them will catch them.

A Night of Black and a Day of Deserts

‘Your skin is making me think I should go home, I don’t know how to act around it and I want to hurt you, I’m so crazy about you and your face makes me wish I could punch it and squeeze you up into a tiny ball with all my might, you’re so beautiful’, he whispers.
‘It’s o.k.’, I say.
I understand.
I have wanted to bite people fiercely too, a thousand kisses deep out of bursting love in a moment in which it’s hard to contain.
Somewhere where nails become claws and limbs become hooks in skin like rice paper.
It’s a restless night between you and me.
But in the morning there’s a cheery wave from stranded you.
Stranded in my town called indifference where it doesn’t really matter which street you walk down or turn you take, you just end up back in the main square with the dim lights.
I’m afraid I just don’t see you.
And I grow sad.
Because I wish I felt that need to hurt you too.

It's hard to breathe when you're choking

Have you ever thought about what it would be like not to feel physical pain or know the concept of it?
How liberating it would feel to punch that wall without hesitation?
To aim your knuckles at his face guilt free, thinking the only pain anyone would feel would be your sorry heart?
To whirl on a rink of ice on your skates without fear and run down that hill so fast, tears welling in your eyes, tripping over your undone shoelaces, the concrete smacking your teeth, getting up and just keep running?
To pat a shark and tell him it’s o.k., you get angry too.
To break your bones by landing badly, after you jumped from so high, but didn’t worry, just contorted yourself in the air, your mind at one with the wind and air licking your body on the way down? You could just get back up, snap your limbs back into place and walk off in front of that green car, just to take a better look at its driver through the windscreen.

Things we left to the Fire

I meet him at that little bar up the road, my heart two skips ahead of me.
It’s been a while.
We smile broadly, it’s only polite.
Our words trip over each other until filled glasses come to our
rescue. And we’re moving right along.
He speaks with armed teeth, a mouth of bullets as my hands grip my
drink clumsily and I hear them. Screaming. Becoming unwired. Pondering
the flesh below the curve of his spine.
My mind comes apart like fairy floss. Tongue lose, missing his salt and musk and I follow a late second.
I admit having turned to boys with noisy fingers and louder lips but
don’t mention my head having been far away, somewhere full of shhh…
and tree choirs, my arms outstretched and spinning so fast the world
became one big comet in front of my eyes.
I don’t wish to know who’s skin has been resting beneath his hands,
because frankly it still makes me feel sick.
Success stories outdo each other, achingly aware of their insignificance.
We sit there a while, my past and I, contemplating all the things we
left to the fire and I grow irritated and hurt at the lack of them.
I think how funny it is.
How funny to love and hate in such equal measures.