Fugue-Boy and the girl they used to call Penelope.

We’re out on the rooftop, just us two, moon-bathing in shared solitude and lungfuls of the sky until our skins are a little tender. Even though what’s up there looks empty in comparison to the corridors downstairs, where we are frostbitten by the nurses’ eyes always watching us, trying to make their maps of us, we feel more exposed to the moon than we do to the white-coats. We formed an alliance, the Fugue-Boy and me; he calls me Pinocchio. Inside we stay silent so they won’t catch even a drift of what’s on our minds in truth. The times we have spoken aloud, we moulded our words into old English puzzles. Up here, more in the universe, in our paper gowns and the blankets we brought, untangling moonrays from our hair, we are trusting with language. You can't help it really. Anyway, the moon must drop eaves on the fluttering of our conversations as we sit in a jumble of missing parts.
“They make marmalade out of meanings,” he says, and his voice is digging. I know he gets angry when they treat the patients like children instead of poets, but he seems to react with a resurrection of his little-boy self. I don’t know why but I don’t ask. I just listen the words he spits out all sharp, like bites, like bullets made by his lips in between their pulls on his cigarette.
“It sounds so awfully like gibberish.”
Nodding, half daydreamed away, I reply, “Their throats get dense, being so bitter. It makes me queasy.”
The wind whips up a little and the hospital robes cling to our silhouettes. We’re just two ghosts now. We might as well have disappeared with the others.
“It tastes bitter always stubbornly pretending.” He looks over at me with those eyes that combed any pretences out of me when we first met, and any connection to the girl people used to call Penelope. She was always looking in daggers at the world, sharpened knives. It just looked spoons back
“You need to fix those eating habits,” his expression has become criss-crossed with various frowns. I don’t like it when he gets irritable and fights, but I know he’s afraid of losing me- that I’ll cut the string that anchors me in my body and drift elsewhere, or that I’ll be moved to a different bed, and in either case he’ll lose his friend. Without an any alliance, they break you down pretty fast They did it to George-Goodeye and Angelhead, two boys, both writers, who got cut into pieces exacted by the nurses, and they gave away everything intimate. They didn’t have our rooftop, and I think they were afraid of a real alliance. Fugue-Boy thinks they were both gay but against being gay. Their family made all their decisions about how they spread things like that, or their money, until they had not much of either leftover for anything but hospitalised poverty.
I look down at myself, and it's vague but I see skullheads glare in my knees and wrists. “I’ve been eating more because I get hungry thinking about things,” I confess, and he’s not tender in tossing the dart of his reply, “You’re all eclipsed, you’re going blue and I think it’s bone-death.”
I don’t know whether or not I have got that in my veins but I’m wordless.
Quickly, he is back to his schoolboy natural, “I want to get irrevocably drunk.”
He is always in the mood to drink. He says that he's in the "moon" for it, and his tongue gets longer with each swallow. I think it helps him breathe his real madness out. He reminds me of a song when he is drinking and I don't even know the tune but I know I sort of like it. I always spill and come over all sleepy. But I don’t falter when he pulls the vodka bottle from under his sheet gown and offers it with an expression that makes him look just like something that’s perfectly fitting to foxes.
The drink deadens my muscles at the first sip, like different hands surrounding me with pillows. He opens his throat again and pours back more. Even more like a fox, in my daydreamed sea.
The spreading of the galaxies and their wings feels tender as if the whole sky is there for our protection. I don't say this out loud because he scolds me when he thinks I'm delusional for grandiose thoughts such as that. He doesn't understand that it doesn't have to be real to feel something about it right in the roots of you. Well, he does for some things and not for others, but aren't we all like that?
I feel my spine against stone when I lie down, pressing my back to the flat of the roof, letting the night peel away my layers one after another, slowly, and get itself into all my corners. Once it's settled I declare, “I want to play with my Doctor's typewriter.”
His voice drifts away and I’m rising on the surge of an onslaught of words. A dictionary opening to empty all the pages' contents in a clatter over me.
“If you want to be a fantastic writer,” is the last I hear him say, “you’ve got to stop using those apostrophes.”

The Wildflower and the Weed

 


One of the two was a wildflower and it was everywhere in her, feeding the soil until underground worms felt their world quiver.  It seemed as though she didn’t need to rely on any stem to elevate her, already so buoyant, so brimming with beauty to the point of explosion that a booming sudder whisked up the air around the proud petals as they poised themselves. When she faced up to the sun and let it sprinkle her with golden glitter, she preened for the sky and all the passers by, who couldn’t help but stop to admire. She was not the sort of beautiful flower that one would pick to tuck into an assorted bouquet, or one of those chosen in the art of flower pressing. Other flowers flocked together, all unidentifiable so it was impossible to tell one apart from another. But this wildflower was found standing alone, but by no means lonely. As they wandered past, their eyes could not resist becoming hooked on this self-assured, soley graceful and flower. Her scent beckoned people close, enraptured by the allure that did not fail her. Even the scotch-swilling bankers who could put a look in their eyes purely for the purpose of seduction, a shine pollished to perfection just like their city shoes. But she kept it for later stages of her imagination, uninterested in stroking egos but nonetheless almost violent in her passion, with which she plucked the heartstrings of bus drivers and postmen and schoolboys all over. This allure was nowhere in particular, just everywhere. All burlesque and ostentatious, her bellicose, winsome voice; her lips that left their blood-red stains on hopeful cheeks, suggesting the promise of some later--on passionate kiss, but at the end of it all she would either disappear like an overblown breeze that swept through open windows and whipped all feet off the floor, or indeed she would stay and she would kiss, but she’d bite off their tongue, before escaping as though she’d never been there at all, but the aroma lingering in her wake that could not be used as evidence  to prove her presence at the scene of a crime, but was inhaled in lungfuls by the men who had looked upon her, overcome with lust. Everywhere she travelled, she would flourish and then ramble on, leaving behind a trail of wanton wilderness.

No one would ever dream that they were bound by blood, this flower and the other. The other had started to stretch into life first, but somehow never made it as far. She was not a wildflower. She was afraid of the wild. She was more like a whisper, this wishful weed, who belonged in a boneyard; very small and very sweet, but underground her roots were twisted, groping blindly out in search of some place of permanence where she could plant herself. It was unfortunate that her name when spoken tasted like sugar on the tongue, because the boys whose mouths moulded it became giddy to the point of disillusionment, and that always ended in damage. They threaded thoughts of her with endless make-believe fields where they could go nowhere or they could go everywhere- run off with any wind that they wanted or else lie in the softness of a light-white-pink-gold petal carpet, where the flowers would shyly reassure them of their souls. But whispering flowers were not what was waiting when the boys came aglow with idealistic expectations. Visions of anything like freedom, or any semblance of a pillow on which to rest one’s cheek- those were washed away within the first weeks when boys brought their love letters to a girl not pure white but gradually turning grey. She tried to comfort them but did not have the comfort of blossom bedding they’d imagined, because she rarely frequented a bed of her own, and she was so brittle, so prone to spontaneous breakage. As for her voice, they got it right  when their assumption was shy.  Shy became a stammer and a stammer became a stressor and you’d never learn anything objectively true from these words. Her speech was too lyrical, meaning irrelevant to the listener, and the world from her perspective was always distorted. One may have guessed rose-coloured glasses, but her lenses did not always see a half-full world of bright sides and silver linings. She could shine with optimism, with a smile of childlke genuine joy. Yet she was so easily frightened and also could not control the deepening pink of her blush when bashful. Around the time at which night fell she would talk of shadows and so what? She doubted everything, but herself most of all. Such a tiny flower could not bear much weight yet sometimes in the soil she felt the weeping of the whold world. In these moments, she curled herself closed in the profound sadness of a cup that would always be a touch too empty.

They could not differ more, the wildflower and the weed. And this tale has no surprise awaiting at its end. It was not long before the weed was uprooted from the soil and too weak to speak up when she was stabbed in the back. She was used in a long thread to make a necklace that someone would put on, glowing with the pretty little string of weeds they wore. Meanwhile, the wildflower continued to plant her own glow, boisterous and beautiful as she strode in and out of lives, a trail of hearts left broken along the way

Laundry lie

Hanging out my fresh washed sheet,
I'm paler but forgot to eat.