"Tell me; if a tree fell in the forest, with nobody around, and its fall to the ground didn't make a sound - would you panic in fear that you didn't exist or would you bask in the bliss of your nothingness?"
Adam, Portsmouth, UK
It is almost 5am
and I find myself awake,
drowsy, and thinking
of you.
How I wish I could pluck you
from my dreams like the daisy in the field.
Find your name in these poems
like treasure hunts in Autumn.
It is hard, all this thinking
when I remember you are a ghost,
long gone,
like the airplane I saw glide by yesterday,
overhead,
full of dreaming people.
You are sitting on the tip
of my tongue. Between the words,
at the end of my sentence - before the full stop.
When you wrote me as a footnote,
in the margin, I corrected your grammar,
but you said that love (poems)
couldn’t always make sense.
Sometimes, I used to press flowers
between your poem-ed pages -
there is something so fragile
and delicate about love on paper
that suited being adjacent
to those small, pressed skeletons
that I’d look at when you were long gone.
I remember the last time
we spoke
how you said that you would break
my heart
so that you could grow roses
in the cracks.
I knew you loved me
the day I felt you tie a daisy-chain
around my voice-box
so that you could hang
off every word.
She said - “It’s always summer time
in my mind. It’s rainy roads
and muddy hoods, midnight moonlight,
fragile and thin, pale skin and echoes
that could guide you home.
Moths in lanterns - floating
to the sky, a rose with thorns
and the whisper of a prayer.
Remember how these words
and poems can seem to say
nothing at all
and yet - they are my every feeling
that I’ve ever felt for you.”
