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SOME WORDS

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Low tide

Sand stretched taut

Polished and buffed to a mirrored sheen

Reflecting the end of the light

The breeze tousles the film of water

Strums its aura

Ripples radiate out in all directions

They break upon the waves

And rest to cradle the sky

Low Tide (an extract)

(im)possible performances, 2021

Life Drawn From a Distance

masticated to a pulp

a cast 

of the inside of my mouth 

with 

lock jaw

 

descriptions clenched between 

indentations 

 

Muffled repetitions

Feeling familiar boundaries

Gathering breath

A faint tang ruffles a memory 

Teetering on the edge of recognition

 

Somehow they escape 

Only not quite as intended

In clicks and whirs and glottal stops

 

Notes 

vibrations

Scratched into the air

The trace left hanging 

 

You shimmer like a mirage 

Slowly taking form out of the corner of my eye

 

An uncanny sense of disease. 

 

you barely know what to do with me

 

Where do I fit?

 

Why don’t you ask me?

...and maybe even listen to the response. 


 

I step into myself as viewed by another

Words marble across my flesh

Cool, damp

Slowly seizing to an itch

I lie in the sun

observing the surface crack and flake off 

 

You scrunch between my toes 

I let you hang for a moment and then fall

To form a new strata

Something more to be buried


 

I watch you swathed in blankets

Buffeted with soft energy

 

A life drawn from a distance

Extended and abstracted 

Past the points at which we meet

That lie with assumptions

And tangle in a new configuration.

 

You pick at the knots

Unravelling a gesture

Drawing them out into filaments 

Barely whisps

 

Trembling

With fingers flexed

Writing in response, text 1 (an extract)

MEANDER, Köln, 2020

                               They find you walking in extended circles

                               Treading ashes already sown

You can’t or won’t tell us where you’ve been

Not here

or anywhere at all

No way of mapping the presence of your senses

The tense slips

I slide into you

And there you stop not willing to engage

Your shell curves in front of me hanging empty on the hook

You’ve already replaced yourself

Shed us like skin

‘You wouldn’t understand’

 

She opens her hand and closes it again

I listen to the gaps picture the tongue rolling inside its cage

‘How could I?’

 

Instead I stand looking up at the leaves as they float down

 

Fallen pollen golden     a slight sheen 

They sweep you into a petri dish

‘You’ve covered some distance’

Or so they tell us

But you’ve been here the whole time the same shade as the shadows

 

From the next room

I hear you bumping along the ground

we are hidden     overgrown      

  resting on the edge    waiting for the brittle concrete to crumble        

   its lips lean over whispering to you in an empty breath      birds chittering    waves crashing into the wind          

    surveying the crest you launch the thread       a hopeful hopeless action      

     it rebounds     gold flashes        the sheen hums at high frequency before flickering out  

       

       you mark the moment with a single note         

        she blesses you with an endless return and adds another half-life to her orchestra

                     

          edging your feet up you feel for a perch           

           coal            

            graphite          

            chalk           

            clutched tight           

            stretching with delicate balance you mark your reach         then let yourself slip           

            you greet the surface         it shudders      afraid of its own fragility          

           your body traces the curve      sketching the descent

          the sound abrades then abates    harsh and sore

 

        a dull pop as the lid is levered open excreting a sickly sweet sweat   

       the scent lingers on my tongue and coats my teeth      

      the spoon slips inside and returns to you an artefact encased in sap          

     holding it up the light illuminates a viscous halo          

   the amber syrup reflects the mustard lichen adorning the surface          

golden          everything playing at sunshine

Writing in response (an extract)

(re)collecting (f)ears by selina bonelli, 2019

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