the weather reports

your local purveyor of metaphor-addicted melodrama, among other things

[theweatheredreports]

Venom

You spin me into sugar and complain that I am rotting your teeth, sink your mouth onto mine and steal my breath, pulling at my clothes, pushing under, opening me up into your light, and I close my eyes to your glow;

look at me, your voice like a snake as our limbs twine together, and I do;

it feels like sin and your kisses confession, carving transgression, and I pull you in like antidote to poison, irony singing in my head as you pour into my mind,

a godsend, an omen, a fever dream turned reality, and I hold on until I break, hoping, praying, that you stay.

[theweatheredreports]

Acid Yellow

The world is brighter today.

I have your number in my phone and the ghost of your kiss on my mouth; I have Pink Floyd in my head and the memory of acid under my tongue; I have a thousand things to do, but I also have you –

– and so today, the morning is a painting.

[theweatheredreports]

After

I. The sunlight is oppressive, relentlessly bright, as it falls in through your bedroom window, cleaving your body into two shades, whispering to me, is this really it? I sit at the foot of your bed, half-dressed, arms pushed halfway through the sleeves of my shirt, eyes caught on your eyelashes at the curve of your lips,

I was hooked.

II. The ticking of my watch demands a decision, so I take it off, and I take off my shirt, and I leave my glasses and keys where they sit on your bedside cabinet beside your copy of my favourite book, and I lie back down.

III. You shift in your sleep, draping an arm over my side, pulling me closer. It’s too hot, but your skin on mine burns like something good, and I shut my mind to the day, to the world beyond your closed door.

[theweatheredreports]

Utopias make for boring tales.

You and I are a speculative fiction, but all my favourie stories are dystopias

( but all the same, remember: I’m a sucker for happy endings, for enemies slain and for celebrations, for romance and luck and forevers, for history and my reimaginings, for pseudo-strategic applications of artistic license,

anything to create what I’m convinced are the best stories )

that you rarely read, and never enjoy quite as much as I do.

[theweatheredreports]

Ascent

I want to be off my face in a foreign city, tucked away safe in a hotel room or a rented apartment, somewhere lovely, either in pseudo-suburbia or towering over the rest of the world, brain filled with all the psychotropic magic that’s so much harder to get at home. I want to be there with you, seeing you with new eyes as you rest against my side, nuzzling at my neck. I want us to ride the high together, and I want that magic to still be there when we wake. I want to walk with you along cobbled streets, savouring some kind of delicious local fare, taking pictures and posing for selfies. I want everything with you to be effortless, to feel like we don’t even need this place, that we could be stuck on a delayed train at home, in the middle of a tunnel with no cell reception, and we would have just as much to say to each other, that just being together would be enough to bring the words and the smiles and the laughter into existence.

I want to be in the most beautiful place in the world and have it all fade away when you catch my eye. I want to rewrite these chapters with you, and I want the daydreams to become reality.

[theweatheredreports]

Reinvention

Dye your hair pink and start wearing eyeliner. Relish the clicking of your heels on hard surfaces, stride tall in pretty dresses and long coats. Get high in four different cities, kiss on sidewalks with alcohol buzzing through your brain.

Break his heart, cry for days, get it back.

Write about new things with a resolution you are determined to honour, at least for now. Make pictures with new colours.

Blow all your savings on international travel and too many impulse purchases of clothes and shoes and beauty products.

Learn to ski and gather an impressive gallery of bruises in the Austrian Alps.

Send out so many applications for jobs and internships, attend enough interviews to no longer be cripplingly nervous. Get that letter. Hope they don’t change their mind.

Make out in a cinema for the first time in years. Run through the rain to his apartment door, grinning to the song pumping into your ears, pulling at your heart.

Hope he doesn’t change his mind.

Hope you don’t change yours.

[theweatheredreports]

The Lighthouse and the Moth

All the old words I wrote for you felt forced, but these ones aren’t. You still don’t make me feel like I did with your predecessors, not in the way that rips effervescent insanity from me – yours is a slower poison, one that weighs down my days but shows no clear signs until it’s too late. Maybe this is what will do it, maybe characterising what I feel as malady will finally be the thing that ties me forever to you.

Forever used to scare me, forever drove me away, but somehow your absence hurt just as much and I decided, maybe, forever would be okay. I decided, in any case, that I’d like to find out.

Can you love someone for the wrong reasons? Do I love you? The words crowd behind my teeth every time we speak, and I only just manage to hold them back, but is that habit or is that real and is there even a difference now?

I should have seen this coming, and really, now that I think of it, I did. I’ve always loved history, not the ancient or the medieval, but all of the modern, everything that is so achingly recent I can’t bring myself to make the cut and sew up the wound and forge on into a new era. And so I have you now, so I have finally lived out my fantasy of remaking a home from ruins, and now it seems that maybe you will be the one this time to bring it all crashing down.

It would only be fair, one could argue. But I refuse to believe in karma, and two wrongs don’t make a right, but two negatives do make a positive and you were always more one for mathematics than aphorisms.

I want you now, and it’s selfish – but, as you always say, so is everything we do.

I want you now, but it feels as if you come with the randomised possibility of disappearance, that maybe you’ll decide that you cannot, in fact, do this.

There are other ships to sail, other waters to chart. But I only just learned this one, and I’m terrible with navigation, and most of all I don’t know if I remember how to swim. 

And sure, it’ll come back to me in time, and then I’ll find something else, someone else, and you’ll be a distant memory, you’ll be ancient history. But for now, I can’t take the seas again, I can’t take anything that tastes so strongly of tears.

I am just strong enough to let myself be weak, just strong enough to give you the power to ruin me in an entirely new way.

Do you still think I should trust you?

[theweatheredreports]

Code Red

You are red like a warning sign. No, wait, stop. Red’s my colour, not yours, you can’t take it — please, don’t take red —you’ve taken too many things from me, you’ve taken time and sanity and tears and oh so many words — I say, as I write, as I claim that you were a blast at a nuclear power plant, a terrible accident born of something I’m sure seemed a great idea at the time — — and yet of course I knew nothing of what I was getting into, had no idea I was playing on an entirely new battleground; no idea that I’d find myself years later spinning you into metaphors of radiation sickness, wondering why I can’t rid myself of you, trying to convince myself that it was worth making those mistakes to learn from them — but was it really? Because now I believe you, now I will happily corroborate all those claims you made of being a terrible person, now I know I should have believed you early on, should have realised your supposed fears that I’d leave you for someone better (fears, by the way, that I’m not even sure were sincerely expressed at all, because this is what you’ve turned me into: a pathological revisionist of everything you ever did or said, as it turns out that my trust in you can only regenerate so many times, has only so many shields of pseudo-protective stupidity) — now I find myself doubting if it was worth even the best of the highs, the most saccharine parts of the delirium, (no, probably not, it wasn’t — or was it?) now I wish you had crumbled like the empire I assigned to you, in jokes and in poems and in so many asinine analogies, now I wish that you were no longer red, because red was once my favourite colour, and favourites are hard to forget.

[theweatheredreports]

conductor

open your doors and let me in, for there’s a storm outside, and thoughts of you in my head are a lightning rod threatening to take me down;

you created this mess, my mind a half-starved, half-crazed thing —  won’t you face your deeds? won’t you remember me?

I’ll break you open if that’s what I need, if that’s what it’ll take for you to see how much blame rests on your shoulders, if it’s the only way that you’ll feel that the summer is now so much colder,

slicing into my skin like you once did, with words so pretty I should have known them for poison, this temporary sweetness cloaking the disregard hiding barely beneath the surface;

but now I see it and so will you, and this time nothing will save you.

[theweatheredreports]

Revisionism

I. the strings are still there, but hey, i made some pretty good music with them.

II. the strings are still there, but they’re not the only ones. not by a long shot. and for that i’m thankful.

III. i am everything that has happened here, but more than that i am the writer, the master, the inventor, the alchemist. and i haven’t gotten mercury poisoning yet. (i’ve come close, though, so i’m taking an indefinite break.)

V. i want a tattoo. i can accept that there are things that will never fade completely from my memory, i can accept my mind’s susceptibility to pathos over logos, and i can use it to my advantage.

VI. your eyes don’t make me think of songs, but he never sang to me. i don’t write much about you, but never have i said so much to another.

VII. i’m not great with sharing, but it’s a pretty big sky (and the sun will always rise).

[theweatheredreports]

The Hit List

To the scarecrow,

I’m sorry for the beginning of our story and I’m sorry for the middle, but most of all I’m sorry for its ending. I don’t know how you feel about it, but I know I’m not proud of the way I said goodbye.

Do you feel bitter? Were you happy when the dream I left you for came crashing down? Something tells me you’re not that sort of person, and if you were, you certainly did a masterful job of hiding it. My point is, though, I wouldn’t hold it against you if you were.

I don’t know if you’d want me to say these words to your face, because I no longer know you very well – in fact, I’m pretty sure we never knew each other too well to begin with, despite the impressively long time we’ve known each other.

That said, I do know you well enough to say that I’d like to consider you a friend, and that I hope the feeling is mutual.

-

To my belligerent in ideological incompatibility,

I’d love to say you gave me nothing but metaphors, but that simply isn’t true.

You gave me fragile afternoons behind closed doors and curtains you promised weren’t actually transparent, no matter how flimsy they looked; you gave me the thrill of walking a high wire and the rush of vertigo whenever I caught myself staring at the all-too-familiar chasm below; you gave me reasons to smile as I watched the minutes tick down to the end of the day, reasons to be headily, readily reckless, and you gave me the hardest lessons of my life.

You treated me and my trust in you like cheap trinkets to be toyed with; it didn’t matter if you mistreated me or broke me, because you could always come up with some clumsy but adequate hack to make me fit for your use again. It didn’t matter because I was replaceable to you, and you knew it.

When you finally lost me, you told me sorry, but by then I could no longer believe in you.

-

To the walking stereotype that proved my predictability,

I should have registered your disinterest sooner, and adjusted my behaviour accordingly. If I were you, there’s every chance I’d hate to know that you were writing these things about me, so I’ll keep it short: hanging out with you was pretty cool. 

Also, it’s partly thanks to your influence that I’m now even more of an art student cliché.

-

To the one who’s summoned the fewest words of all,

I like to think there’s a good reason for that. 

Maybe one day it’ll be over, maybe one day our ending will prove to be the worst yet, but for now, at least, I’m not dreading that day. For now, at least, I can say with certainty that our story has given me renewed faith in the scriptwriter of my life and a suspicion that they derive enjoyment not only from my falls. It has given me recklessness and disbelief of a refreshingly different variety, and it has given me the inkling that maybe they do believe in happy endings after all.

[theweatheredreports]

New Year’s Resolution

It scares me how well I remember, it scares me that I can't stop picking at scars, it scares me that being in love with him was like slowly exsanguinating and yet now I barely even flinch at the sight of blood. It scares me that I am drawn to destruction, that I can ignore alarms, that I get seasick on solid ground and that all of this may have been for nothing, that I might be going back once more to being the person that I was (if I'm not already there). It scares me that I have your heart in my hands, and most of all it scares me that I am writing again. / I am a romantic, but sometimes I think that I can only weave my words to the tune of disaster, that I am a historian of the worst kind, a ghost trapped in the grasp of yesteryear. I think I believe too much in pretty lyrics about terrible people, that I forgive too easily while nursing bitterness that does more harm than good, that I am loyal to all the wrong leaders and that I am making a spectacular mess of the civil war in my head and of the boy who believes too much in the poet who wields words like a drunkard downs alcohol. Sometimes I think, and other times I know. / I don't want to list your treacheries and the lessons I learned from knives in my back; I am not interested in reciting the litany of reasons to write you out of my history and I am even less interested in remembering why that would be impossible. / I am no longer interested in you, nor in the girl who fell for you, down jagged cliff edges and into waters Antarctic with disregard. That girl has her place, as teacher, as muse, as beautifully exploding firework and as painfully predictable cautionary tale – but that place is no longer in my head, no longer at the throne, nor the helm. That girl has had enough of writing, and so she is putting down her scriptwriter's pen, and so she hands over the keys. / I take over now, with bated breath and a fluttering heart. I keep my eyes open and my mind clear, and I walk from the archival labyrinths into the light of day.

[theweatheredreports]

A short history of meteorological records

008. I wrote poetry because I could, and I felt nothing when I did.

009. I wrote poetry about the mockery of a love story I found myself cast in, soliloquies that should have been duets, and when I wasn’t doing that, I found myself putting into writing all the things I lacked the courage to say out loud.

011. I wrote poetry for the first time that year in an explosion across the page, a stream of metaphor-laden invective brought on by anger and pain and the undeniable fact that what I’d gone through so much to make mine had now fallen to pieces; I wrote because I was just a little bit broken, and that was enough to make the words come again.

012. I wrote poetry to submit to a student publication, stringing together old bits and pieces and tacking on what I had learned since, and though I was still running off the crash of the previous year, though I still hadn’t really clawed my way out, it made me smile to see my work in print (for more reasons than one).

013. I wrote poetry because something had gripped my heart and was making it sing again; I wrote while running on the delirium of half-tripping, half-leaping into a refreshingly new infatuation – and then again, months later, when I found myself being pulled in by the tides of an old one.

014. I wrote poetry as a side-effect of making horribly bad decisions about whom to fuck; I wrote as I tried not to fall for someone whom I knew would never make a single move to catch me, but who constantly interfered with my balance nonetheless; I wrote for the undeserving, and I wrote some more when the storm finally caught up to me.

015. I write poetry now when I’m angry and sad and falling apart, when the marauders of the past and the machinations of the present threaten to paralyse; I write now when the vagaries of my recent history start to fill my skull like wasps, when I can’t help but stare at the path I have taken that has led me here; and sometimes I write when I don’t feel a thing, simply to prove that I still can.

[theweatheredreports]

the arsonist

you light me aflame, pin me like a trespasser caught in floodlights as i watch your hands crack me open to reveal just how my heart beats for you; i scratch my nails into your back and you grin, teeth like a shark and eyes like vicious victory, and i try not to fall apart as you whisper into my ear, telling me everything i want to hear and nothing that i need, burning me, breaking me; i try to keep myself together when you pull yourself away, try to quieten the frightfully loud beating in my chest as you trail your brushfire touch over my still-shaking body, planting cruel kisses on my lips as you tell me goodbye; i try once more to quell the blazes you have lit in me, i try and i fail miserably.

[theweatheredreports]

Sobriety

I am a poet who wields words like a drunkard wields alcohol, plunging myself into oceans of militarised metaphors, wrecking my ship on the reefs of verbal histrionics because at least that’s an anchor of some kind while I’m getting seasick on dry land, at least if there’s a storm, I can harness the electricity.

There once was a girl who kept cutting herself open because red was her favourite colour and pain came with an adrenaline high. (She’s not talking about blades, but this was the kind of language he inspired.)

Sometimes I think about how often I spin words for those who don’t deserve them, but they were the pins that held me together, they were the spoils of my own personal war.

Then one day she bled too much and her cuts were infected with rationality, and so she bandaged her wounds and sought out new allies. 

It turns out there comes a point where no amount of artistic inspiration is worth the company of a traitor, the constant civil disturbances. There comes a point where sobriety is more appealing than some heart-drunk, stumbling parody of following in the footsteps of history’s drug-fuelled geniuses, because how many of those artists ended well?

-

In the midst of the drought she meets a boy with eyes like a watercoloured harbour, and he makes her feel safe.

I was all too happy to have abandoned my writing then.

They stay for some time, but then her scars begin to itch and she starts seeing red, and stability starts looking an awful lot like stagnation, collaboration like confinement, and she doesn’t want to bleed again, god no, but at least back then she could paint with that pain.

At least back then she had control over the cuts, at least back then she could see where the hurt was coming from, not like now with the pressure building inside, not like now with sails tearing, hulls cracking.

-

And so I pick up a pen to turn tears into ink, because my bones are shaking but words have always steadied me; and so I imbibe my bottle of invective and I sear my mind with flames; I cough and I gasp and when the smoke clears I can breathe; and when the ink has been spent I fall to sleep, exhausted.

I wake in the mornings and the sun shines again.

There once was a girl who fell for a boy who had eyes like the harbours of home; he kisses her in the mornings and holds her in the night, and he never runs out of words.

They stay.

[theweatheredreports]

Skies

001/ I am thousands of miles from home and sometimes the distance hurts, when all I need are the familiar words and commiserations of those who have known me for years, who have accompanied me through multiple previous crises, who would know what to say or how to act, who are continents and time zones and seasons and oceans and ages away. 002/ He has the name of an angel, and I think I am ripping his wings apart. 003/ There are moments when it's okay and I can dance around the thought of a future, and then there are nights I spend lying awake in silence, carving words in the air and my nails in my skin, because I don't know what to do. 004/ I used to have some mastery of my emotions, if not about whom I loved, then about how I reacted to it, how much I let it eat away at me. I became a fool's idea of an expert at playing with fire and revelling in the temporary glimmer of sparks, in the warmth that would inevitably burn. 005/ Now there is no more fire, but sometimes I feel like my lungs are filled with smoke, like I am standing on the most beautiful of mountaintops, but instead of drinking in the world around me, all I can do is fight the urge to fling myself back to earth. 006/ I am a star that you flew too close to, a rain storm rapidly turning into a flood, a snow-clad valley filled with the promise of eventual avalanche. 007/ You are the best thing to happen to me in a while, but I never found it this hard to be happy before.

[theweatheredreports]

should’ve stopped at seven.

i: lust you couldn’t wait, you couldn’t understand, and so you talked me from indecision into action into regret into wounds that have now healed for the most part, but have the rather nasty habit of re-opening with alarming frequency.

ii: gluttony i gorged myself on hope and pathetic dreams, on my painfully innocent belief in you and me, in a future that ended neither in dead ends nor in cliffs that waited so patiently, time after time, to dash me onto the rocks below.

iii: greed i don’t think you really wanted me, no matter how close i came to deluding myself, but all the same you wanted what i had to offer, and in the end you wanted it enough to tug on your puppeteer’s strings and play me like the fool i had been for far too long and would be once again.

iv: sloth you spoke far from infrequently of how terrible a person you were, and yet in my experience you didn’t do nearly enough to change it; i, meanwhile, spoke far too frequently of how terrible you were for me, and for far too long i did nothing to change that.

v: wrath what i should’ve felt in the years gone past has finally caught up to me, a rage like clashing swords in my head, and i want to hurt you, and i want you to suffer at least as much misery as you have put me through; i want you to change, i want you to become a better person, but oh, make no mistake, i also want you to hurt.

vi: envy you have always seemed less affected by this disaster of pathetic proportions than i have, and only in this way do i wish i were remotely like you.

vii: pride i could have said this all to you, but that would require approaching you, and after all that has been said and done, after all the times i should have spoken up but didn’t, and all the promises of distance that i broke again and again, this time i am sure: i am never going near you again.