Travel Shorts

My eyes scan amongst the reeds and scattered leaves. From this angle, if I strain my sockets, your reflection comes into my peripheral. A version of you in monochrome with projection of cine-film layered into my concentration. My heart skips a palpitation and I can’t help but wonder if you see me too.

Your return was like a movie. I’d been working on the soundtrack for months. Building up a collection of carefully selected chords and blending hand-picked, eclectic harmonies. Weather shot: the lighting was how I’d ordered it: low, broad clouds with deeply furrowed silver linings and smaller ominous shapes stretching as far as our lost horizons. Everything was in place for this dramatic opening scene. I wanted my world to perform to receive you. Perhaps it would be enough to persuade you to stay.

Very wide shot, cutting to wide shot: A unsought figure saunters on to the set, causing a surge of agitation. Things are getting out of my control. Like the long suffering words from a writer’s fingertips, the imposter is tortured into relocation, almost as a figure oozing from a quill. Sunlight filters a convincing spotlight on her dramatic exit as the orchestral opening to All is Full of Love begins echoing; the haunting harpsichord rising from the pit of a chasm.

Close Up: My face - an exaggerated mess of exaltation, exhaustion and excitement contorts in pain as, like a thief, my shifty eyes move side to side expecting to extract answers, exacting upon you; extra-diegetic in a thought bubble.

Your return was like a familiar movie. I’d played it in my head countless times from the music to the weather, and each cleverly orchestrated shot in between. Our faces twisted in misery until we saw each other and the pain of the last two years melted away. Like excited school children we chattered nervously over each other and flouted all the conventions of normal speech. Our film was 'gritty', unpretentious and emotional.

As it went, your return was like a movie: that passed me by. Another day bled into the next, and I’d listened to stories about 'your return' from people who'd seen it first. My arranged music faded to hoof and horn until eventually there was nothing.

His floating workshop; a place he remembers
times past.
The wind up bird
her mechanical wings
laden with words. She'll knock you
for six
she'll blow you away.
Quietly squeal queer bird,
her mechanical wings
clipped
and words pirouette
like feathers
or hard rain.
Chained to a tether she only
makes whirring circles
and bounces like
the sound
of a moth inside
a lampshade.
His bird was flown some
time ago.
Left behind no
scattered seeds.

Hiding in shaded gardens where
she tends
to her rich fantasies
and in grand houses
where she hides things under carpets
and worries about dust.

Her dissembled sentences rolling too quickly from the lips,
His arms; the archipelago of oil floating on skin.
Her fingers tacking side to side across his back;
His shoulders tensing, rippling under her touches.
Her consonants crashing against vowels, fricatives spraying
His face with its crags and boulders.

“I can't have children.”

Rowing out to an island,
clinging to a rock.
Words bend truth like
waves bend wood
splinters
into a thousand pieces
each with a story to tell.
A ghost ship,
a kraken.
a thunderstorm,
a night of a thousand fish.
The night she slipped away from him
and his lonely hours by the radio