Forgetfulness and Other Graphic Novels

The sky tonight's a disowned chore of blue

and it hangs over my bed in irrational snatches. Like

the second-last paragraph of a conspiracy novel, printed

as a footnote to the foreword, for no good

reason.

Sometimes it scurries across the wood trails of my shallowriver gaze,

other times it just

hangs in there, looking down at me like

I'm supposed to put a finger on it's awkwardness, number

it with my favourite digit. Why

should I have a favourite digit? I think

I am fond of words. Some days 

words are

kids in love, some days 

they are lonely planets traipsing 

around a hungover wall clock. Words are like

ancient mineral rocks on the far side

of the moon, waiting an eternity per

second, imagining a small

'hello' 

over and over in their heads before

they explode 

over their ocean of 

allacrossness. Words are

patience. 

May be it should have

been words up there in that

tumbling sky, instead of dead 

stars - to calm the nerves, fill

up the spaces

and all the rest. Imagine

lying on your back, looking up

to spot a blinking

Hello, find a tilted

You ,

shining in calm

awareness. 

And you could

trace your fingers across

it all to join them up, any

constellation you like, any

day. 

That'd be something.

But the sky tonight's a disowned chore of blue.

I think I'll sweep it up now, before

it pukes paper moons and other

Jane Doe planets in the

name of 

getting noticed. 

Feeling pretty is a war-time fairytale.

A Mid Summer Noon's Dream

And Summers have a way of slipping into dreams. The droolface, the doodlebreath,
the little wiggly sunshapes
crawling across your floor,like lousy projector-shots
of happy-high Mockturtles and Gryphins. Heeh.
I don't know why the noons are always at each other's heels,
Three Doors Down, always.
And if you try fix your gaze on them for longer than it takes for your eyes to well up,
they might even take you along
when they slip away,
away, into,
their dreamscape. Some days, you'd really like that.
You can rollup your shorts and hopscotch around the wobbly frames of
Time and Space, humming someone else's favourite song, thinking
it to be yours, all the while. You can sprint across whole worlds
of sunshine,
run through fieldsoffaces and
fieldsofforevers, run
run
run
till you are on the other side of
the brilliance, aching, undone, breathless
beautiful.
You'd meet people on the way, and you know how people
take you up on their toes
so much more easily, when they are not just
people. There would be laughter, happy
echoes. Not the kind of happy that hurts.
Just happy.
And if,
people,
slip their hand into yours,
there would be 

walks, like a
three minute song
on loop-
You'd try to fix in memory all
the streets and shadows that
you pass, may be end up
naming a few of them together. And if
you cant quite trace back the map
a minute after 

you wake up, that's
all right. That's all right, because
there'd be laughter.
As for the small part towards sundown
when you'd stretch every shadowcell in your
shadowlimbs to be able to
touch
this renegade one, and
all you'd touch is wakefulness,
that's all right
too.
All right because there was

laughter. 

So much of it:)

A Very Little Rainy Song

I wrote a
very rainy song, still
very little
warm, from waiting
under street lamps, terribly
tall, and I
wrote
a very rainy song, a little
very washed out, a little
brown slush or

love

across 

her cheeks 

and a little cold and 

lost or
dreaming, very possibly
happy, happy
like that, a little,
and I
wrote a very rainy
song, 

for a boy
or a town, for

each, or
none, I wrote, little
by little, I, well
I,
wrote him 

a very rainy song

for growing up 
under the
rains

with me

Magic Realism, Who?

He is lying awkwardly on our favourite patch of grass,
a convoluted mist of silver draining steadily out of his chest.
Leaning over on wobbly knees, I put my hands on the gash where the stray clock bolt had struck him before rebounding into the sneaky summer light.
It had struck him while I wasn't looking. But when it had struck him, it had struck me too. And I am now
looking.
Clocks have always been my thing, you know? I'd seek them out and gather them in rows. Like
something people do with stamps or coins or tickets. That kind of thing.
It is another thing that I am always running a little late
in brooding over my collection, comparing amused notes over our shared apathy towards time.
I press down harder, stretching my fingers to cover as much of the wound as a hand my size possibly can.
He has just enough time to see me take off my ring (I figure it'd feel really cold against his gash) 

before closing his eyes.
Yeah, that should help. He needn't see this wreck around him.
I continue to pour over him, cupping away those sad stains that start to overwrite the stripes of his now-wet shirt.
This is a favourite shirt. This is a favourite boy.
Suddenly I cant recall just why I had looked away anyway.
I keep it light, the fumbling strokes. I cannot hurt him.
Or can I?
'Oii, I've got you now. It's okay, I'm right here' , I mumble, scared of our quiet.
'Shush, It's all right. Don't hurt. 
Oi, don't, 

don't hurt'.
And in reply, yet another batch of dusty days and seasons drizzle down the hole in his chest.
I am not ready to sob just yet. So I swallow some.
We are now surrounded by a pool of blooming vagueness -
brown leaves, pebbles, laces, filters, wrappers, biscuits and bills swimming around
in the puddle of his silver, amongst
other things.
Lost, demented, darling
things.
‘Oii! Stop. You are bleeding Us 

all 

out! And my hands are all aches and stains now. Oii Oi oi!

Make.it .stop!’  I scream, 

my voice a lousy ghost of my panic.

He rolls around a little, more undone than unheeding.

Now I go back to half-whispering.

Something’s got to give. I keep stretching my palms to fit his spreading wound and

he keeps bleeding fresh bursts of silver onto

my favourite patch of grass.

‘Oii, oi oiiii

open your eyes. It’s getting so dark. And I can’t see.

Oi, please?’

Slowly, with a tiredness that looks 

a lot like me, he opens his worn out eyes, 

barely.

And suddenly, all at once, I recognize the shade of void that I had been trying to awaken.

More out of habit than appropriateness, I smile into his beautiful gaze.

‘I’ll leave now. I’m removing my hands from here, okay?  Be all right. Be good 

when you are done bleeding..’ .

 I watch my numb fingers make a lame attempt at rearranging that familiar mess of hair across his forehead. ‘And oh, change into something else. 

Something not a shirt’, I add.

Something about that makes him smile back,

 a little. The flailing

authority in my voice, perhaps.  

‘Oi, does it feel any better?’  I plead, beginning 

to lean away in a dizzy, dizzy circle.

‘It feels better’, he calls back.‘Yes,

it feels

Nothing’