I should have said something

I should have said something –

But I let you tie bricks to my ankles, then push me into the sea of self-doubt
To choke on the salty foam of your airy promises
When all you wanted was a tight, warm body
– When all I wanted you to want was my spirit – my soul – my mind –
And all the fairytales that nest within my heart.

 

I wanted you to feel more

– than the skin of my stomach
Stretching nervously beneath your fingertips
– or thin air when I just couldn’t take it anymore
And asked to keep my body just that – mine.

 

I gave you way more than I should have

– reached a hand and got my arm bitten off
By the nameless, faceless ghouls that haunt the depths of the ID.
Forever chewed up by another’s desires
That I was oh-so-quick to cater to
Just so I could hold you – feel you – have you
for one more day.

 

Just one more moment
…………………………..Melting away under the Sun
Like the wings of Icarus
…………………………..Waxy vanilla gelato
Dripping off of split lips
…………………………..And into fresh scabs
…………………………..…………………………..Picked off – never left to heal

 

Shockwaves ripping through my heart –

Stopping the old clock
Then restarting it once the pills wore off
And I woke up crying
My only friend cuddling up to me, purring in the garden
Making me feel like my life mattered
To someone
– like someone really wants me
– needs ME
– and not just the skin of my stomach under their rough digits.

 

You placed your bets high –

……….And played your hand like a pro
Still sipping drinks at the casino bar
……….Where all the losers go after civilised pubs close
When they’re not yet exhausted enough
To escape their sadness

Run faster than the pain

Snort another line and make it all seem like

Last year

………….Like tropes about Surrealist short films
– the only ones you’ve ever watched –
Like fictitious dishes invented in the hopes of getting girls to undress
………….At some point. Some other night.

Just a bottle of wine
…………………………..………………………….. left open on your kitchen counter

 

Oh, just how low

I must have been running on self-esteem

For all this to matter

More than a passing conversation

With a stranger, standing at the bar

Leaving his girlfriend in a corner, with the noisy crowd

While he chats up pretty blondes

With a splash of false confidence

Over watered-down rum & cokes.

 

But my friend
……..– You wanted the idea, not the girl.

 

And can I just suggest that

Maybe that’s because you knew

         That the girl, you didn’t deserve

Anyway

 

JBV

A well-trodden track

Those muffled moments ring very true to me – your pretty shoulders curling upwards, hair up in a little, messy bun, perched on my bed, semi-naked in the golden haze. A snapshot of a happy memory, a photograph to hang in a future home; somewhere spacious, and light, and all ours. A memory of the past meets a memory of the future – we’re just trapped in the in-betweens, somewhere along the way to that quiet summer afternoon in our very own place, watching as golden dust stirs then settles on the arms of our cream-coloured sofa.

My love for you’s at peace now. It’s curled up on a soft kitten bed, soaking in the afternoon sun in that quiet ‘forever-room’ – it’s out there somewhere. It’s a future I know exists on the other side of becoming adults.

So many words, yet none make sense in that golden silence. It will just be you and me, sitting opposite from each other on the carpet next to the coffee table, knees drawn up, fingers absent-mindedly tracing the red rows of tangly fibers surrounding our feet.

You’ve always had a place here. This room’s always been yours as much as it’s been mine. It’s just committing to it forever being yours that scares you, I think. And I won’t keep you – there would be no point unless you’re ready to hang up your pictures and lean your guitar against the wall next to the fireplace. Unless you’re ready to make a home.

It’s with love that I set you free – and it’s my love that waits for you in the forever-room, curled up like a kitten, purring quietly in its sleep.

It’s just this in-between that’s making things so very hard and heavy.  Some nights it gets quite hard to breathe.

JBV

Solicited Suicide

A portion of the powder to fill up the cracks
In your vast, empty space of a self –
You call it freedom
I call it something else

It’s form over substance, form over substance
each and every time in this town,
in this country of loves and sweethearts
Running around in sweatpants
Staring blankly at cashiers ringing them up
for sausage rolls and Irn-Bru.

Tell me, love, where have I heard this conversation
One million times before?
Or where have I seen your face
On every corner I turn on my way to the nearest deli?

Or where have I heard your name and
seen your life played out in
Every British soap I’ve ever watched?
You’re a throwaway, one in a dozen,
A plastic mold of a person filled with
The zeitgeist of a dead present made up of
nowt but the debris of time;
Segments of memory – sentences uttered by the ones before us,
Pictures taken and scenes filmed and
Conversations written in a present
Yet to suffocate under the dead weight
Of endless, empty, forever multiplying matter.

Seconds tick by and drown out time itself
As I sit on a plastic chair and decay in silence –
Cell by cell I rot away
Because at least in death we’re still originals.
No one’s wasted away quite like this before
And yet everyone has in some ways, I think.

Am I just another simulation?
An evil of an era past the end of history?
Am I just an echo of sentences uttered
in another place, another time, by another ‘me‘?
Am I just a memory replayed in the rerun
of the same drama that molds the many threads
of life into a single Narrative?

Am I just a decaying cell falling off the face of the Earth
once I grow tired and let go of the same routine

Replaced by a thousand others

Nothing has changed

JBV

Compass

You come to me at night – just as tall and valiant as ever. It’s been a while now… It’s been a while, old friend, but you look just like the day I last saw you, carrying a leather bag, looking offly grown up in your navy green suit trousers.

I remember how the light flickered on your face as we shared a drink over a blinking tealight in a secluded corner of your favourite ruin pub. It felt like a private moment – a very quiet ‘Until next time’ in some ways. We both knew we’d not be seeing each other for a very long time again and yet it felt nothing like a goodbye.

How could we ever truly let each other go, ever? You’ve been part of my superego longer than I care to admit and I’ve become one of your primal drives – an island in a deep, dark, dead sea where life still exists in one form or another. Where things still happen – really happen and not just repeat past forms like the cheapest of Baudrillardian simulacra -, and quite possibly even more importantly where you could still experience love. Caring and being cared for. It astounded me how hard you found it in your daily life yet how natural it seemed between the two of us.

We fit into each other’s lives and psyche seamlessly – it’s almost disturbing how boundaries melt in between, how nothing (nothing!) seems to really matter when it comes to letting each other back in. I think it’s because I was 15 when I first met you. I think it’s because you were 17.

In some very odd way it feels like we’ve grown up together, shackled to each other’s roche, orbiting each other silently like darks stars in the night. Sometimes closer, sometimes really rather far apart, until my fingertips traced the edges of your slick buzz cut again and your arms locked around me under the electric neons of yet another summer night. It never really ended well on the long run – and yet in some ways it always did. You always wanted your essence to be made into art and I wanted nothing more than to immortalise you.

To keep you safe, healthy, and stable. Alive.

And yet it was a harder task than I ever imagined. A lot harder than I was prepared or equipped to handle.

Slowly you slipped away and in some ways so have I. You’ve become a thing of 2AM texts from numbers I don’t recognise, and I’ve become a thing of Christmas cards that arrive empty and read nothing at all.

And yet every once in a while you still come to me at night. You blow powder on my face, powder from your palms, and the white dust settles on my eyelashes. Thanatos is your name and the night stands still around you. It feels a little bit like dying every time you ask me to stay.

JBV

Inward spiral

I’m in the same old box, chewing on the same old nails, drawing blood and biting down again, walking headfirst into brand new walls and banging that same old head a dozen more times until memories scatter like legos on the floor.

Can we reset our souls? Wipe them clean, light a fire until everything burns to ashes and the smoke suffocates all the goggly-eyed evils lurking in dark corners, haunting my nights.

3.30 AM – I wish I had something more to say. I wish I had something more to say than I killed a moth for fun when I was 6. I killed a whole lot of them, I set a candle down by my grandfather’s empty whiskey bottle and just waited quietly in the darkness. Motionless, fazing in and out of reality, lazily watching as the moths flapped their wings and struggled against the sticky liquor gluing them to those shiny glass walls. I watched quietly as the candlelight flickered and danced on the elaborately engraved glass, tilting my head slightly, letting the moonlight trickle down along the edges of my face, dripping onto my pale, bare thighs.

It didn’t feel like I was 6 in that moment. I didn’t feel like a child. I had no concept of what constitutes a childhood, maybe apart from the freedom of picking cherries from the garden and deseeding them until their juice covered my whole body in what looked like rivers of blood. That, and sneaking almonds when no one was watching as I once heard that there was cyanide in them.

Looking back, I was never a child. I never really understood what a child was, either.

For me, it was just long stretches of silence – endless afternoons spent on the balcony, out in the scorching heat, watching the sun set and the waves glisten as sailboats crossed the lake below. It was talking to decades-old stuffed animals in the attic and examining every remotely odd-looking rock in the garden’s red soil. It was making up tales and listening to stories of how Krishna walked along the bank of the Brahmaputra in times bygone.

Nothing ever happened beyond the wall of silence. Nothing ever happened outside the snowglobe. I was waiting – it always felt like I was waiting for something. Something to happen, for the glass to shatter, for the world to stop pouring in through the cracks.

It still very much feels like I’m locked behind the same wall of silence, repeating the same stretches of stillborn time on an endless loop. I would struggle to explain how but it feels a lot like this cycle never had a beginning and it doesn’t have an end, either – it feels hauntingly like I’m still sitting on the porch, face glistening in the scorching heat, watching sailboats float by on a lake fairly close, yet just out of reach.

JBV

Panelkék, hosszú sorok, repedező ablakok elé állított nejlonszatyrok – két fekete kisfiú les ki a résen, nevetgélnek, a szemük végig követ, ahogy elhaladok a házsor előtt.

Előttem minden betonszürke, ormótlan, puszta erővel formált tájkép, felettem minden acélos; a felhők csatahajókként úsznak a törtfehér égen – lassan tovafújja őket a szél. A sarkaim kopognak az utcán, finom visszhangot verve a jobbomon magasodó csöndfalon – ki tudja, mi minden lapul a túloldalán.

Teljes a csend – egy percre mintha minden pillanatot hallanék elsuhanni magam mellett, kockáról kockára, ahogy egyik másodperc keretéből a másikba lépek, és mögöttem csendesen a semmibe omlik az elmúlt pillanat.

Csak egy perc – és vége.

Minden lélegzetvétel áthúz egy következő ütembe, a másodpercmutató kattan, és mint a kötél végén az acélhorgonyt, a csiga lassan közelebb húz ahhoz az egyetlen pillanathoz, amikor minden nyugalomba ér.

Csend.

Belekap a pólómba a szél, a fejem körött vörös glóriaként lebegnek a tincsek a feltámadó szélben. Üresek az utcák, üresek a lakások, üresek a járda mellett parkoló azutók, az ablakok, a lépcsőházak, a parkok. Mintha egyes-egyedül lennék a világban, arccal a mindenség hűvös üvegének nyomódva, ahogy a létezés gravitációja a padlónak szegez és sorra repeszti a csontjaim.

Valami fekete csöpög a repedésekből – mint tetoválásokból a tinta, lassan lecsöpög és lyukakat éget a világ szövetébe a koromfekete sav. Sercegnek a szálak – mint a padlószőnyegre borult gyertya lágja, lassan felperzsel maga körül mindent a folyadék.

Én felülről figyelem, az arcom még mindig az ég üvegének nyomva – tehetetlen könnyekkel, kívülről, mozdulatlanul. És a Föld csak forog alattam, fokról fokra fordulva a tengelyén, az örök körtánc egy pillanatnyi keresztmetcetében. Rajtam kívül minden folyik tovább az örök folyóval, csak én ragadtattam ki a sodrásból, holtsúlyként, mozdulatlanul – kettéágazik körülöttem a folyó, és én csak némán figyelem, ahogy mindent tovasodor az ár.

Semmi sem marad csak az konstans, mozdulatlan, ólomkoporsóként rámnehezedő csönd.

JBV

And then he said: let’s talk about how you lost a baby ‘over sourdough or whatever’