its always stay still, feet on the ground. don’t cry over spilt milk. until you stumble & trip, or catch a cold on a dusty day, & you fall back through the gates of an eastern european coast and you catch a glittery glimpse of bright red curls. is it only when you smell what had once spread on your tongue like a paper cup of amareno cherry on a sunny sunday? & she tells you her neighbour’s laughter with a friend reminds her of the endless laughter our apartment(s) walled in, & you feel like you’ve gained a lifetime of age since your shoulders were that light.
light, always yellow, always warm. white light is banned forever as long as you want to share a lease with me. & now you wonder how you were ever inconvenienced by mid-july rain or long trips to the shop down the street. she throws her head back & laughs at a joke you said & you know what? eighteen years was worth wait.
(but in the back of your mind, a part of your heart knew to memorise the engraving of the road, you knew there was a hand that rips the good away)
& so quietly you almost miss it, every last bit of your trace is packed in suitcases & brought back to this unfamiliar place. & any proof that your heart hasn’t moved an inch is sitting in this unfamiliar closet, packed in an orange shoebox. but how can these walls carry no memory of my existence within them, when all the pillars of who i’ve become are carved in them?
now your vinyl player plays on, in a place you have never been (& with a cat you will never like), & when the song comes on in a car on a dark road, you write this through the clouds of a badly rolled joint).
