oddly even now

you feel too far away

your words arrive and i feel
like i have found my bike, stolen
and given up
for belonging to somebody else

my life is a collision of
workandwords
and not enough sleep in-between

i mainly write when there is no
time to, and instead
when there is no pressure i find myself bare
and scared that i may never again
create and then
it comes and the pattern continues

to confuse. i was writing
some longer and shorter and now i find
they are musical and true

but please send me everything, even
the left-overs, for i am hungry
and have missed your home cooking.

are yours? my hands are cold and i cross
them and bury each one
in the opposite armpit

softly falls a girl who falls softy

rumblefish

i am eating breakfast at my computer. jono is shaving his beard for the audition. when he joins me at the table i peer above my screen to see him sitting opposite. i study his face freshly shaven. his cheeks look patchy as though just in from the cold.

i don't touch them and instead eat the muesli he brought around to my place because i couldn't face the supermarket last night when i realised i had none. couldn't face going out in the cold to buy oats.

i look at the photos of you as happy then, as you are unhappy now. i shut the browser down too sad to think of you not smiling. jono says soon there will be more photos posted of you smiling, and happier than you were even back then.

jono continues to read the article he started last night when he arrived bearing muesli and a late night episode of the mysterious disappearance of the cat bowl he ritualistically fills for the neighborhood strays, while my thoughts are a disobedient school of fish swimming in different directions.