"First there was the children’s house of make-believe,
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
The playthings in the playhouse of the children.
Weep for what little things could make them glad.
Then for the house that is no more a house"

Leaving what stays for me, staying for what
leaves. I’m every limit this flat flat world
falls from. (Erosion. How I am renewed
always by what is torn from me.
)

In an earlier summer I found myself at a cafe in the Marais, with an American traveller who had also ended up in Paris that month. It might have been late morning. She’d had the place recommended to her, so she took me there. I hadn’t eaten anything for a few days, but in that moment I ordered an espresso, not a meal. I wanted to try a coffee for once, and it was the cheapest thing on the menu. It tasted as acrid as vomit, with a texture not much further off. Strangely now I’d give so much again for that awful taste, the bags under her eyes, the crumbs littering the table all over.

Instead I have a second-hand copy of King Lear. I found it this afternoon at a stall under the shadow of a bridge on Oxford Street. It belonged to someone called Katherine; judging by the notes that cover each page it was probably used for her A Levels, or earlier. There are many kinds of ink, and with each one she tracked a different theme – all marked off with a key on the inside cover. Red is madness, green is sight, blue is nature, and yellow stands for “ɴᴏᴛʜɪɴɢ”. As you move through the book they creep in more and more, until each page is saturated with kaleidoscopes of notes, even verging into deep purple for sin, loyalty wrought in amber, and a washed out grey for endurance, and I feel in all their small ways the words, not the words even but the inks, tell a different story entirely, and one of far more various colours, if they could only be all gathered up into the cradle of a meaning.

He passes by in blue
and says nothing;
I don’t believe him.

"I am surprised with an uncouth fear,
A chilling sweat o’er-runs my trembling joints:
My heart suspects more than my eye can see."

So it turned out that I did look into the mirror, and he did open his stone eyes, and in the end it happened as I said it would, which of course wasn’t much of a solace. Two moments of the heart thudding. Each a breed of fear.

“I hope this lasts,” someone said. “I hope this lasts.”

"Anyway what even is a ghost but a coda?"

The end of some great tale only now trailing off behind a half closed door, dead on the lips or dying.

The quiet sound
of your life, continuing on, is the finest memento mori.

The tree, the tree, the tree.
It's far from close and I wind about it
again and again convolving through myself.
The fissures of the bark answer life to the lines in my palms.

"Solitude. Hailey's bare feet.And all her patience now assumes."

The nine day sword has already rusted
by the time my flesh riverbeds into openness.
This is how the sky feels,
I gasp,
(still running beneath it,)
torn wide and bloodless.
Polished to an echoing sheen
by ink tongues spit and bleed.
Somehow,
for once,
not a contradiction.

It’s probably fortunate,
he goes on. Rips out a tooth and lays it on the table.
Leaves it. Leaves me
studying its pearlescent whiteness.

That’s one way to look at it,
he says, and spitshines a mirror.
Holds it in front of his face.
Asks me to stare.
Eyes and eyes needle through me.

I’m at a loss
Silly, each time. without fail
Learning to unhand an invented palm.
Certainly I could find lines there.
I could even fool myself and say I read them.
See them.

The cracks. The truth is I read another truth.
All I have. What I say now.

I saw nothing. I saw stones.
I saw your eyes.

On fire. Blaze a breeze. | I'll devastate the world

"Reveille Rebel"

late hour

Something again in the smile I can't place.

                How it creeps in after years
    and the black bark unlit behind.

"The old house, for those who know how to listen, is a sort of geometry of echoes. The voices of the past do not sound the same in the big room as in the little chamber, and calls on the stairs have yet another sound. Among the most difficult of memories, well beyond any geometry that can be drawn, we must recapture the quality of the light..."

"Riu's house stands out on the sky,
                with glitter of colour
As Butei of Kan had made the high golden lotus
               to gather his dews,
Before it another house which I do not know:
How shall we know all the friends
               whom we meet on strange roadways?"

Perhaps preceded only once by those lips sloping off into points and the blurred eyes downcast.

I've developed this habit lately (I say lately, but that only describes how long I've consciously been aware of it). In a daydream or a reverie I end up remembering some past encounter or incident or even, occasionally, something that didn't happen at all. They're always in the first-person. And if it's a pleasant memory I will suddenly emulate the smile I had on my face at the time, and if it's an unpleasant memory I might grimace. I think I wrote about this earlier, about metaphors that weren't metaphors.

I had a moment where it happened again. It was at the edge of morning, and I was leaving the apartments. There was something happy (re)playing at the back of my mind, and since it was too early to have things at the front of my mind, I smiled. I think there was laughing in the memory. I don't remember what it was now. There's a girl about my age who I see around the place, probably has a room here. She mostly lives as a peripheral blur. I've only ever seen her in passing, a half-familiar face. Today her hair was glistening from a rain shower that was already destroying the snow that had arrived the evening before. She was entering as I was exiting, and crossed into the path of my eyes before I could look away, or drop my smile, and I'd slipped into her gaze, and so she mistook my echo of a grin as directed at her - as directed at all, I suppose.

And her eyes brightened and she gave me the first genuine smile I've received for god knows how long. As if she recognised me. Or as if she didn't need to recognise me. As if she knew exactly what my face meant, and knew also how often it meant nothing at all, as if she took all that and let it fall between her fingers anyway. As if she were some accident of positioning, the hunched hollow of some rock face, shrouded by trees, on a mountain opposite someone's call already ended. And then she turned against the door and was inside, and I'd ended up by the gates.