A Serenade to The Ghost

I

This is just the beginning
and beginnings are beautiful…

II

We walked, hand-in-hand,
up the winding path,
to the unsighted cemetery.
The village steeple stretched towards Heaven.
Our hands clenched 
firmly,
gripped with emotion.
Inscription after inscription, dead lovers now dust,
remnants of what has always been.
Face-to-Face we etched kisses onto lips.
Fragrant petals cascaded down our cheeks as
we promised never to forget this moment.

Through shaded lanes and snaking veins,
sirens pulsated in a mirrored life.
Valleys of sound pounded rhythms.
The steady hammer of remembrance
rang out across the countryside.

I slipped a note into the folds of cloth and flesh
between earth and air.

‘Forever in my mind, our love will live between gravestones and carrion’

III
I am haunted by the space within
The gaps between our serenade
A ghost of you
empty and desolate walks
past

How have I come so far without this?

The hotel room quietens
as your soft
shaking palm
becomes still, your
pulse (beats)
whilst we lay upon other people’s
sheets

IV
Imagine my muse
stained by the fingers
of many men.
Their desire was ash that fell from the heavens.
Shooting stars
that made imprints and embedded
a soft form of remembrance through wishes and leaves.

Motioning towards a valley,
I cut a lone figure.
There is, of course, no one there.
Mauve embers light a runway.
Streaks of amber etch deep into the sky.
This solitude screams so loud.

We are just going through patterns
and changes.  
The lucid dawn of a new day breaks
If I whisper this ever so silently through water and valves,
in heart shaped movements, with cracked ribs and bruised cheeks
then capillaries will burst purple and impregnate the skin.

So I drown myself in grapes
with sour scents of longing
and reverse the order.
The ocean becomes gravity.
The moon pulls away, giving space to breath.
The seabed cleanses.
Water becomes Sulphur.
Air becomes Hydrogen.

I have to express death with desire,
in fragments of love that has faded, and an
occasion to celebrate a renaissance.

I am nothing but it is my nothing.

V

There is stillness in my movements.
My hands,
my poor poor hands stretch out amidst sound waves.
My nails bitten down to their bitter ends.
An itch,
a scratch later and
my wrist is on fire.

There is a quietness in my house.
Of living alone,
of this idle existence.
My bird caged chest shares
rhythms that beat and start
pounding over this city,
along the seafront, to the pier, sinewy in its decay.

My eyelids draw over themselves.
Darkness engulfs and I think of her.
In the smallest of moments
I think of her.
Memorising form
and tracing lost structures.
The arc of her body, the curve of her back.
Hair dripping down spines whilst
entwined in porcelain sheets.
The moistness of the grove between her thighs.
This softness develops an aqueous womb inside.
I dowse myself in opiates to heal,
to forget.

Umbilical moments are ripped untimely from my belly.
I’m desolate and alone.
She sleeps with lost men lined up in military precision.
I’m left clutching at the night like carbon
reaching out in the only way I know how,
with awkward sentences and demands.

I circle my fingers around my thighs
touching myself with hardness.
My wrists drips crimson to the sheets as
I close my eyes to try and find a way home,
to seek the path that leads me into the night.

VI

I’ve stitched the moon
beneath her skin
just to let some light in.

I’ve planted broken stars
in her belly to
grow poems as beautiful
as meteors.

A trail of glitter streaks across this city, 

guiding me in,

guiding me home.

VII

Beyond winding corridors
under wooden floorboards
in strangled boxes
beauty grows.

Folded away
in a
coffin of creases
The dormant words of love
lay
sleeping

Delicate fingers
softly pull at worn edges
Faded letters
flap their wings and
soar into the night.

VIII

Dear Haunted,

I am floating above you now, spinning around the heavens,
I dance inertly with the stars.
I am argon,
I am oxygen,
I am lithium
I wasn’t always this way.
I was once part bone, part flesh
I remember being full of love for you.
Now I am part of the dust that floats innately around this world.
In moments you breathe me down to the pit of your stomach.
I feel your joy,
your pain.

I am the breeze but I wasn’t always this way,
I once was tied down by the weight of failure,
I once was Magnesium glowing bright, shining like a beacon before I burnt out too quickly

I was too fragile for this world

I once was alive, like you, but now I am a speck of dust in your eye,
molecules of space and time.
I am now the past,
my life now over.

The Ghost

IX

Naked. I crucify myself before this.
Exposed in purity,
in the still of night, I am still life.
A beasty crawls in the middle distance, a crow watches from attic beams.

My lover, I am humble before you.
The light here is softer than you think,
it is wistful wisteria climbing around this ribcage of mine.
It is the shifting pattern of rain against time. 
The sunset exposes flaws upon her cavity.

‘The cut…’ you say ‘…is light’
As crimson drip drip drips through floorboards
‘Answer me a question.
If you are an evil spirit, then why can only I hear it?’

X

These fingertips of mine
stretch
and reach out for The Ghost.
Wrinkled branches extend.
This decaying root
paints the night black.
Splintered nails grow rusty, twisting,
contorting in some kind of crazed trail
that leads outwards in.

How much time has passed since I last saw her?
Passages of moments,
of religious movements,
between clouds and sound.
The cold air burns the back of my throat.
My spine disintegrates as
The Ghost’s beauty strips breath from lungs

I smash rocks against my ribcage
to let this soft beating muscle out.

I pull at hair and try to peel skin from flesh.
I cleanse this dirtiness that has grown.

I cut valleys into my arms to alleviate,
to alleviate, to alleviate this pain

The constant reminder that
I am nothing and nothing is at least something without her.

XI

A spectre of light burst through attic beams.
Dusty boxes stacked,
choking on green twine.
The past buried within.
Rows of coffins,
relationships sleeping on mortuary slabs.
Tap. Tap. Tap…

A gust of wind forces a window
to smash.
Her reflection dissolves in time
as the glass shard pierces my heart.

Tap. Tap. Tap…

XII

The window crack lets the night in.
Blackness seeps through.
The cold dark room engulfs my being.

I am carbon.

A chill flutters up my contorted spine
as The Ghost lights up these shadows.

Tap. Tap. Tap…

I move towards her centre.

Tap. Tap. Tap…

XIII

Tap. Tap. Tap…

I fell in love with The Ghost.
Her fingertips stain my body,
tattooing my skin forever.

Tap. Tap. Tap…

We caress each other with the slightest of movements as
the smell of love haunts the bedroom.

Tap. Tap. Tap…

XIV

Tap. Tap. Tap…

The sound of death drawing near.
Silent breaths.
The echoing noise reverberating through the night as it envelops into ash.

Tap. Tap. Tap…

The constant orbiting of sound that resonates.

Tap. Tap. Tap…

The Ghost drags her feet slowly across laminated floorboards;
her nails scrape against time, her skin crawls over mine.

Tap. Tap. Tap…

XV

Tap. Tap. Tap…

Static erupts in a corner of the room.
The Ghost creeps ever closer.

Tap. Tap. Tap…

I cover my ears as this white noise becomes deafening.
The persistence of memory weighs me down.

Tap.  Tap.  Tap…

I pull at the fabric of my skin and
tighten myself around my neck.
I have become haunted by the lost.
The Ghost fades into the distance, 
as I become ballast.

XVI

I exist in a world of could be.
Of maybes.  Of endless untouchable possibilities.
A fleeting glimpse of something unobtainable.
The Ghost I yearn disappears out of sight.

XVII

I summoned the spirit one last time,
to see her face and
feel her presence in my mouth.
Holding onto this weight
I accepted goodbye and realized
chasing ghosts leaves you haunted.

Closure permeated through the night and evaporated into stars.
I pulled my knees closer into my chest.  Held onto my centre for fear of losing myself.
I gnawed at my knuckles till they bled and pulled out clumps of hair. 
My teeth chattered as the temperature dropped. 

This was the end. 

The only comfort I have is that it will all pass,
that these emotions never existed before. 
Through this loss, I have gained.

I, at least, am still alive. 
I still feel. 
My skin shivers in the corner of a basement,
tears of wax form to survive these visions and the realization
that with all endings come new beginnings.

And beginnings are beautiful…