Remember when I broke all the plates?
You said I'd put you back together.
I wasn't a pile of broken bits on the floor
but that was their impressions of me,
and I think it might last forever
but you have a mind that's always open
and so the world changes all the time
right before your eyes.
You are so far from them, you can see
so much further. Distance can surprise
when it is less being cast out to sea
and more a feeling of something like free.
I said I'd never give up on you,
Until you, I hadn't been giving
but when I drop words with that weight
they're as true as they can be absolutely.

My friend

My friend came into my life by accident, it shouldn't have happened. But it did because accidents happen and because I open my door to strangers. We have known one another through several seasons,several disasters, and through to survival. I've known him through several unnatural disasters. I didn't know him through most of his lifetime and so many disasters. He came with long hair, with his sleeves full of tricks, and with no one to love. He was a very good criminal. His arms were camouflaged with tattoos, hiding a knife wound and showing the face of the Green Man god of paganism, He came full of untold stories and unspoken wreckage, ghosts from his past haunting his days and opiate-eyed nights. He was magnetic and missing teeth, scarred, and he didn't trust anything or anyone. He'd nearly died so many times I sometimes wonder if he really exists. He talks of a span of months during which his three friends- closest friends, without closeness- died one after the other. How many times could he come so close before he would become just another ghost? But I began calling him miracle man at the beginning when we waved our hands and signs and he a big painted daisy in the direction of one another's windows, when we both lived in the same block, and I suppose that's just what it is. Small miracles and unexplained things and what you'd never expect to happen- they all happen around him, He is a catalyst but the reactions he causes are not always miraculous or inspiring. He'd be the first to admit he's a catalyst for lost teeth and bloodshed. I wouldn't say it but by more than one I've been likened to chaos. We are both messy and we both like it. His abnormal mind began to grow out of him and stretch to places that can't be conceived of yet, and yet even more abnormal became obvious his evolving awareness of the changes. Many of those changes came about as a coin flips from one side to the other. Not too long ago, his whole life was critically altered. He escaped from an abusive alcoholic, a woman he'd lived with for fifteen years, and because of his absent parents and cruel foster families, she must have been his primary attachment figure. He didn't know about how other people lived, he didn't know a comfortable relationship, or a form of love that hadn't been twisted into something nefarious and destructive. He escaped and bought a boat. He was free for the first time, and his mind stretched out for more, beyond imagination. Before his escape, everything was making wreckage around him. I had grown so close with him, we spent time together just to while away the hours he needed to talk about what he had seen and done and how he managed to live on in bewilderment. The night before he had to move every trace of himself out of the place he'd been at a window's glance distance, we painted the walls all night and day. He painted enormous colourful, turbulent maelstroms in one corner. I painted on the wall the words; there are no words for moments like these. It was a warm-weather time, when wax melted in the trees and light t in through the blinds and seemed to move like sharks, carrying drifts of powders and pollen and the residue of paint on walls. Dust is invisible unless there is sunlight

I wasn't always there to help pull him out or give him shelter. I was brittle then, fresh from being mind-fractured, still healing. I now hold myself together and it makes him proud. I said 'forgiveness' to him one day and innumerable black echoes ceased, and everything was peaceful then. He forgave his birth mother and I managed to get her online, had the privilege of being there for their first conversation since he was put into foster care. He is not a criminal anymore. He is a one-man circus, a 5 star performance. He's also the standing ovation that you never expected you'd be so relieved to hear in all it's thunder. The roof beams raise high and the ground is shaking because you are getting stronger and your life is changing. He tells me that letting him into my life saved his. Knowing I had done something like that changed mine.

 He keeps a scrapbook now, as I do. He let me photograph some pages.

Unsure

Sometimes it's black marble, igneous rockets into endless dark and space.
and then sometimes it's an echo, resonating shades of black,
the frown on a clock's face, or the absent moon,
the illusory balloon, the ball that you chip away, also black,
while following the garden paths,
which don't meet but collide,
and the dice that are rolled ricochet,
echoing back the old days-

what could have been, what might have been?
the answers stand either side of the street,
face to face, but neither seen.

The clouds circle round you, windows blink in sunlight,
glaring, the obvious that hits you loud and with spite
and then the ground beneath you shakes,
the crowd are all staring when everything breaks,
you're a pile of glass, the same way everyone else is debris
of earthquakes: a fist of lost teeth, the split in twine after the fray,
the twist in time, and mistakes made by the billion everyday
on each lifetime's path, and every path at some point meets.
They may, for a time, treat you like hot sheets,
like what makes up their headaches. Be brave-
you may, for a time, forget all reasons to laugh.

Love knows no boundaries, they say. All of which I'm sure is
that it doesn't know how to say please, or any painless ways to go,
to find the exit sign, yet on the contrary, it enters with ease.
When you walk alongside it you cross every line.
It’s not the task that’s small as they tell us it will be.
You feel little and funny until you find yourself
more times than twice on the edge of a line
drawing rainbows that people saw from the ground,
like the light-shows of lightnings and applauding
rumbling sound, like bones and rocks and the
walls of Pompeii crumbling down all around.



you find yourself more than twice on edge of a line that drew
the rainbows you saw above the war,
you want to go elsewhere for more,
go back to before you forgot what love poems were about,
before the cats all got out, no need to lock the door.

Hitched a wagon to a star and fell off

Cabin fever, feverish dreamer, saw the northern lights
on one of those nights, or had they only seen her?
The gas that spirals into stars left a burn on my
elbow, when I was catching-what-I-can-before-I-go,
and I stretched for all I could reach but
I dropped back to earth, found a face full of sand
on the beach where I'd come to land with
an empty satchel. I tell myself, oh well, most days,
oh well, here's a bit of a green glass bottle,
and as well, here's a half broken shell, the same
colour as the one I only ever see when I dream.
Oh well, you never can tell with the northerners,
the lights, the stars. I had just been so sure
they were, for a long time, simply ours
for the taking. But it takes more effort than
one might suppose to visit the solar system
when most planets keep all doors closed.
I told my best friend I'd seen something or one
extraterrestrial, and she thought it was a story
I'd spun to be extra interesting. She was
right of course and I was faking, which I don't
do very well. Gut-full of anticipated remorse.

The process of neologofactisation (a word I made up for the process of making up words)

disidioconscity - (n.) a state of being separated from self-knowledge, or the denial of it
glottowart - (n.) a protector or guardian of language

abschronoparamatic- (adj.) pertaining to the feeling that there is no time

mensequential- (adj.) threatening, continuous and ongoing in nature
omnibiothermic- (adj.) related to or pertaining to all-consuming bodily heat
autocryptious- (adj.) characterised by secrets regarding the self
malpathajection- (n.) the casting away or rejection of negative emotions
nosomnifactism- (n.) a doctrine of belief that one should go without sleeping
antipugnist- (n.) someone who is against fighting
belliform- (adj.) resembling war
aesthangelicaster- (n.) a person who feigns the feelings of an angel

necrophyllization- (n.) the dying process of a leaf
intraponoublient- (adj.) having the tendency for forgetting the contents of thoughts
pseudoxenotude- (n.) a falsely foreign state or conditions
metamemorise- (v,) changing or altering one's memory

cryptoconfuge- (n.) escape from the knowledge of secrets
perphonogratious- (adj.)thoroughly pleasing in sound
chronomatosophic- (adj.) having or relating to knowledge concerning time and motion