Even and Odd

EMAM and MEFM sharing a month of poetic bliss.

[even-and-odd-blog]

February 29th

When the morning comes, and I’m starting to run out of reasons to believe her - the gorgon smiling but I don’t think it’s with love.

Dance, but you don’t care. Into my open arms come,

nothing more than a distant comet on a cold spring morning, she doesn’t look back.

Her tongue is thick, she can’t help but love him - dreaming of dawn and stronger than you.

It’s worth it on mizushima beach, thinking of my flight home - I’m okay with that too.

On the first wife’s 40th I wish that was me.

Loathing to actually live the very best of the very worst - who will I be married to?

Bleeding life and poetry, depression fucking sucks this is not pretty.

“Call off your ghost!”    you did.

         Jealous is the night

- MEFM & EMAM

[even-and-odd-blog]

February the Twenty Eigth

"Call off your ghost" she pleads with him. Eyes blood-red and cheap lipstick smeared on her cheek. Tears brimming; stinging her slapped face. He whips around, coat fluorescent with souls, fist clenched with the anger that gave him his name. Then he softens. Hand first and face second. "Who hit you?" Voice catches in his throat. Demons in his skin retreat. He steps to her. She steps back. "You did."

[even-and-odd-blog]

feb 27th

This is not pretty, Diana, but at least she is I’m leaving another voicemail I know I said the last one was the last one but here we are.

How are you? Are you still thinking of me? We always said we’d still be friends, But this is the fifth message I’ve left you.

How’s the new girlfriend? Oh, wait, hand maiden I mean /a nymph or a driad/ I saw you together the other day,

She looked beautiful / I don’t blame you,

When I pointed her out to Dom, he said she looks like me, but thinner, And I guess that hurt

I don’t blame you, Diana, I jus think it’s too much to ask to see your future walking past and she looks a lot like me, maybe the oracle at Delphi saw her in your palm.

Last night I dreamt about you. Cast your name in my tarot cards, spritzed the last of your perfume on a pillow

and waited.

And I’ll be damned, here comes your ghost again but that’s not unusual, it’s just that the moon was full, and I happened to call.

Baez told me that ‘love is touching souls’ you were there with me, in me, and I know it’s not so, but here I am, leaving another message,

Call me back, love, and call off your ghost.

- emam

[even-and-odd-blog]

February the Twenty-Sixth

"Depression fucking sucks" he says to me. And yet he has no idea. He's speaking out of turn in some warped moment of sympathy. I can't blame him. He's only trying to understand. But how can he? He has no idea what it feels like to be a candle with the wick burning at both ends. Staring at the sky with cumulonimbus colliding in the moments before they fall. He has no idea what it feels like to want it all to come crashing down. I'm in an cruel love affair with my mind. Worse than an abusive ex-lover and more beautiful than the aurora borealis. And I hate it and I love it and I hate it and I love it and I hate it. Trapped in therapy and boxes of little yellow pills. Don't be fooled. This is not pretty. -MEFM

[even-and-odd-blog]

February 25th

Bleeding life and poetry Spilling smilies with each iambic heartbeat Is this your pentameter or mine? Spilling sibilance Pouring pantoums on the parlour room She used a kitchen knife to do it Sliced her arm over 50 times Suffocating from sadness, let me tell you It wasn't as pretty as the first verse made it seem The postman saved her. Dialled 999 Duct taped her split slit stanza Pressed dirty teatowels to her forearms The ambulance was there in 10 minutes Hospital was overfull the workers underpaid They rubbed the sleep from their weary eyes And fought to heal Stitching the poem back together The nurses hugged each other, doctors clapped their friends on the back, held open their arms and sobbed Fuck poetry People need to survive And I was trying not to romanticise it but Depression fucking sucks. - emam

[even-and-odd-blog]

February the Twenty-Fourth

Who will I be married to? The girl in the sushi bar with kaleidoscopic dreadlocks and a bullring piercing - who oozes spontaneity and love letters written at dawn? Or the boy in that busks outside the Great Western - smelling of weed and beer and playing melodies on heartstrings? Or the girl on the train, thumbing the edges of a second hand book like it were her lover on a cold winter night - smiling at me with Matt red lips? Or the boy in the elevator at work, with windswept hair and a summer-loving smile - with the devil in his eyes and hash in his pipe? Or maybe I'll marry myself. Fall in love with the way my hair curls perfect on my shoulder at the end of the hardest day. Or the way politics light passions burning in fake-fires in the dead of night. Or stars leading my path home with sand stuck to the soles of my feet. Or Spring moments spent under the memories of cherry blossoms and koi fish. Or my lead-smudged palms and ink-stained fingers bleeding life and poetry. -MEFM

[even-and-odd-blog]

feb 23rd

                                                         The very best of the very worse                                          you are and always have been

                                but

                  I lay in pearl water               plucking petals

Petunia               Peony                           Peaseblossom                                                      Periwinkle                                                                           Primrose                                                                                      Passionflower

                                                                                    picture me picturing you                                                                                  floating in pink                                            my fingertips are wrinkled               my nipples puckered

                                                                she loves me                                                                              she loves me not plump         primed                  reading my own palm

                                  casting my love spell                                                                      tisty tosty                                                                                    tell me true

                                                                                             who will I be married to?

- EMAM

[even-and-odd-blog]

February the Twenty-Second

             Loathing to actually live, instead of just exist in our              sandstone home;                                         Calypso sits with her back to me. Today,      she is colouring sand. Turning grey and golden flecks                of sea shells                      from places that she’ll never see into      vibrant bursts of                                rainbows in kaleidoscopes.                                                   She sees her lovers in the shapes, twisted between                  chiasmus and deltahedrons. Tinted            rose-petal pink and scorched            lover-burn red.                                       She used to think Odysseus was the worst,    turning his back on her    to fight for a wife he left,                   leaving with unbendable bows                   strapped                                between buckles on his back.                                                        But that was before she met me.        Before I took her              sandstone home and weathered it to ash.                                  I took her heart and etched it in to a                locket to sit shaking on my beating chest.                                I twisted her hair in to poetry                  and made my voice lyrics to her song;     before I trapped them in a leather-bound book,                        screeching beneath my fingertips.                                                 I turned her island paradise of Ogygia                        in to a water-trapped prison. Enticed her with dreams of                    silk and spices  and told her          that she couldn’t feel them,            that she could taste them.                                            She used to think Odysseus was the worst,                   before she met me. But still, she loves me. Because I am the very best of the very worst.

-MEFM

[even-and-odd-blog]

feb 21st

I wish that was me, with a diamond on my finger ten thousand followers on instagram, and a thriving career as a Disney princess impersonator.

Or maybe I wish that was me:   with a smiling toddler in the backseat.      a mortgage I had no fear of not paying         and a Labrador puppy.

Or maybe I just wish I was myself

But happy.

In love, out of debt, knowing where she’s going,                                                               not this shell                                                               of a dream                                                               too busy envying                                                               and loathing                                                                               to actually live.

- EMAM

[even-and-odd-blog]

February the Twentieth

On the first wife's 40th, the second husband thinks, without any malice; "I wish that was me"

-MEFM

[even-and-odd-blog]

19th feb

“I’m okay with that” the second wife smiles coyly, on the first wife’s 40th

- EMAM

[even-and-odd-blog]

February the Eighteenth ✈️

(There's an 11 million to 1 chance that you'll die in a plane crash) Thinking of my flight home, I wonder if this will be my 1 in 11,000,000. I wonder if this will be the last flight. It's the fifth one this summer and the decompression is beginning to kill me. Or maybe I'm just dreading reality. Fast-tracked and mitigating circumstances lying in wait in my sandstone home. Ready to pounce. To attack. Cut my throat so I can bleed my life in to the ink for my pen. Because I think I've forgotten who I am. I've lost it 35,000 feet above Earth or maybe 35 nautical miles out to sea on some wind-shaken and wave-beaten ferry boat. (There's been three of them this summer and I can't help but wonder why I haven't drowned yet.) I wish I cause pause, just for a moment. Hover or float between the time zones for week or two. Give myself a chance to find myself again. Bits of me buried in balls of wool and twined around knitting needles. Rolled in to puff pastry and piped along cream cakes. Pieces of my soul spread across countryside nights and laid out in stars. Wrapped in brown paper parcels and packed in the back of seaside chip shops. Thinking of my flight home, I wonder if this will be my 1 in 11,000,000. But if this is my 10,999,999; I'm okay with that too. -MEFM

[even-and-odd-blog]

feb 17th 🍒

On Mizushima beach we shared cherry chipped ice

The excess of sky bears down on us and squeezes all the air out of us as if the beach was the bedrock of an ocean on which we drowned.

but my heart was empty and yours was full.

When the sun goes down it is very cold, and you always start crying because the winter moon pierces your heart.

This pisses me off. I don’t understand you, maybe I never will.

It is so dark here that when the sun goes down the dogs in every household howl together at the sight of a star, as if stars are unnatural things that they must warn us of.

You held my hand. Your fingers are so cold

touching you is like holding slices of the silver sea in my hands, even when you’re right next to me it feels like we’re thousands of miles apart.

The cherry flavours our kisses. It tastes artificial, too sweet and too pink.

The motorcycles who come at night have left deep groves behind them in the sand as if to say ‘I have been here’

but really, I wish I wasn’t

breathing you in on mizushima beach, and thinking of my flight home.

- EMAM

[even-and-odd-blog]

February the Sixteenth 🎏

It's worth it; when she kisses you between fish-shaped flags on Mizushima beach. -MEFM

[even-and-odd-blog]

feb 15th 🍷

Stronger than you and yet lonelier too with my bottle of cheap pink wine but it's worth it. -EMAM

[even-and-odd-blog]

February the Fourteenth ✨

Dreaming of dawn, I learned to embrace the night; not to let it consume me. To cover me over. Instead, I let it set my heart alight. Because I am a burning supernova. I am constellations mapped in stone. I am soft-hearted and iron-willed. With a temper that'll bite to the bone. It has taken aeons to rebuild myself. To bond together scattered stardust. To rediscover my chemical composition; the atoms of my soul left to rust. I've realigned my equilateral position. I am Hayley's comet, coming in to view. A rarity. Once in a blue moon. And stronger than you. -MEFM

[even-and-odd-blog]

feb 13th

She can’t help but love him, tiger balm on bruises, transluscent powder sets black eyes with his bastard in her belly. her suitcases have been packed and by the door for seven days She says sorry 30 times a day standing in front of the mirror and practising smiles when will she learn that the sorry never sticks?

Love is ancient paiting preserved behind glass, it isn’t for normal people.

Love is a pop song with a catchy tune and empty lyrics, what really counts is a bolt on the front door.

Dancing alone around the kitchen table and dreaming of dawn.

- EMAM