Looking

He looks at me like something and I back myself into this corner and he laughs
I move my hand like he does
Slide down the wall like this; legs splayed at some awkward angle, not because I have to but because I think he might like it
he leaves the room

I am lying on his floor strewn with some kind of rubble and other things, smoking a cigarette.
I look at him with this extensive list of desires or maybe needs.
I am trying to burn them into the back of his neck.
"Fuck off" he says, without turning towards me.
"I'm painting"
he is removing the caps from various tubes of paint, sniffing them tentatively and/or squeezing them onto the back of then -based on some mysterious assessment of the results - he throws them either into a green shoebox or somewhere over there towards a dark corner.
I smoke my cigarette
only it isn't a cigarette
I smoke and feel this overwhelming sadness for the discarded paint lost to that corner.
later, when he's gone out, I gather them and I place them with some care in a box of their own.

His chest is bare and the tattoo of a feather curls across it from near the centre
just here, the place you touch to signify your self
To the right, this delicate arc above the nipple.

Something like dancing
an intense, damp heat and a bass that reverberates exhilarating in my ribcage, my heart and I sway against some arch blond boy wearing mostly white
He pulls at my arm, pulls me outside and the air is cold on my hot, damp skin. I breathe for the first time. People are smoking and there's that smell and there's others - like rotting yeast and sugar, drain and city rain. Around a shallow corner he forces me backwards, my feet disturb bottles.

Now he is looking at me the way I want him to. Like this arrangement of skin and flesh and bone speaks to him about something mysterious and valuable
I don't know
Pupils dilate, a star right there burns and then blur and when I am mesmerised then he falls on me.

Growls obscenities close into my ear until my knees buckle. This, and the bright pain of my arm forced upwards behind my back empties me sufficiently. I am a space, a cypher he can use in order to understand something about himself; blazing there inside me
I am still there resting in this empty space
"Don't -" I whisper, much too late and he makes a fist in my hair and slams my face into the wall. He looks intently at this work, but it's too dark.

At my home I sit on the table and he puts iodine on the cuts with a pale blue handkerchief. He turns the lights up very high because, he says:
he wants to see more

Gap

You said "we could live here probably" I knew we couldn't but I went along with it.

Right here in these fucked up bushes.

I don't care.

I could stay home and re-arrange the ornaments. Half a syringe, soiled paper (some of it dissolving) empty containers; polystyrene & polyurethane,condoms, some other shit,leaves.

Keep house

I drink a lot of water from a tap marked 'not drinking water'

and we eat some white sugar from paper sachets.

"maybe we should eat the brown sugar?" you say, like this is the healthy option.

Your tooth is missing - at the top next to the canine. I put my index finger in the hole and press the soft give of your gum. Something flutters, here in my belly.

You go inside to use the bathroom and hand me some more of the stuff from your pockets - for safekeeping. My own pockets are so full now that it looks like I have this weird deformity.

When you drop your trousers everything falls out of your pocket, you wouldn't think to pick it up.

I know I'm not the most reliable guardian of anything, but out of the two of us I'm clearly the best bet.

I watch you walk across the grass and then part of the car-park your arms outstretched like for balance, like it's not turf or a plain of concrete but a very thin wire. You disappear for a moment. I guess you fell over the little shin-height wall there but you're back in view pretty quickly, your hair this radiant halo in the setting sun. You look so tiny and unreal.

blink once and you're gone.

In my hands the latest cache of your things - it's pretty much like the contents of our new home plus this piece of hash, about the size of my thumb.

We plan to sell it , very slowly, to the people who stop here - buy food and soap and whatever, with the proceeds. It's wrapped in silver foil, like a small, misshapen bar of chocolate. I unwrap one edge kind of tentatively and take a small bite - it tastes of earth and some musky perfume - not so bad. I pull off the rest of the foil and stuff the whole thing in my mouth. It's kind of hard to swallow as it sucks all the moisture from in there and sticks to my teeth in little crumbs. Like I said, a mouthful of perfumed soil.

I go back to the tap marked 'not drinking water' and drink some more. Rub at my teeth with my finger.

Sit down again by our new home and think about my scrap-book of mining disasters.I'm sad to have left it behind:

A boy of 11 years of age, named Henry Sharp, was scalded to death on Saturday last. He was an inmate of Reddrie Reformatory, but had got leave of absence to visit his mother. He was playing about No 3 Coalpit, Newlands, belonging to Messrs Dunn Brothers, when he accidentally fell into a pond of water, which was at almost boiling heat. The alarm was raised by his playmates, and he was promptly rescued, but he was so dreadfully scalded all over the body that he only lived a few minutes.(22 March 1875)

I don't understand - I think dreamily, why the pond was so hot...

Then this overwhelming need to press my face into the soil.

You drag me into our house I think.

Screw up my eyes real tight and spend that night guiding you through a car-park littered with treacherous, boiling ponds and hidden mine shafts. It's quite difficult, you keep falling over and your medication is pretty much worn off by now.

You're complaining because I'm gripping your arm so tight. Your bandages are unravelling again.

But it's better than being scalded to death.

Probably

It's ten hours or so before I can speak.

"We should go back"

You look a little regretfully at our hollowed out bush, but you nod and we trudge together over the bridge to the other side.

Five Days

There are five days - I counted them:
(this part is very quiet & still)

There are: feathers falling behind my eyelids, again.
a small child in a blue coat
a hole approximately the size of a fist opening here, above the left eyebrow, and flesh, and bone reforming like molten metal, behind this fist.
a searing pain located about three inches above the top of my head
four small plastic bags, a bottle that once contained milk now contains petrol.
And I have no idea how to touch you, or how to not touch you.

At a party, you show me how to climb up the wall and wait there just below the ceiling, invisible. You tell me about a kind of spider that weaves a ball of web at the end of a thread and scents it with fake moth pheromones. It waits somewhere high up with it's lure dangling, until some amorous moth tries to get with it. The moth gets caught up in the sticky fibre and the spider reels it in.
"How long can you stay like this?" I ask.
"I dunno - " you reply,
"Days?"
Someone walks beneath us, they don't look up.

I find you in the garden stuffed into the tiny gap between the compost bin and the fence,plucking at your bandages. They're unravelling around you like sorry streamers or some disintegrating shroud. I'm trying to gather you up somehow but the confined space and your complete lack of co-operation make this impossible. I'm holding you at the wrists,still raw and shiny like skinned rabbits beneath the shreds of bandages. Your eyes are very bright and unfocused. You thrash about some and kick me a few times, in the jaw and somewhere else.There is soil in your hair and you give off this aroma like a sick animal. I keep hold of you until you give up and lay back limp and empty. You seem to fall asleep after a while, there's some subtle change in the nature of your breathing. I cover you with my coat and rest my head against your back.

In the car park, by the far side of a bottle bank, some man is fucking me.
"Take your coat off" he keeps saying, more or less insistently. He's trying to push his hand up the back of my clothes, looking for some skin I guess. I pull my hood over my head. You sit on the top of the metal box, moving your feet - sort of rhythmically. I try and work out what music you might be listening to from the pattern of your foot movements. I'm breathing close against the metal, and this breath smells of petrol

I watch you negotiate the hazardous journey from the door to the mattress, one hand vaguely sweeps away something in front of you, like mist or cobwebs maybe, scatters a little ash from the cigarette. The other clutches at the waistband of your trousers. There's a bluish and inconstant light from the TV.You weave a little, from side to side, as if these floorboards are the deck of a ship.It seems so epic that I feel like applauding when you finally arrive at this destination. I flutter my hands slightly, they're heavy and hot - that's enough. You pitch yourself onto the mattress and end up horizontal and face down across my middle - so from above we would make this cross of bodies. Large, transparent feathers fall softly from the ceiling and your hipbone is a dull ache in my liver. I'm sleeping or something pretty close and then I'm not. Your hand, with it's fresh bandages makes spirals across my stomach.
And I have no idea how to touch you, or how to not touch you.