volcanoes melt you down (The 22 Moments Remix)
1. holding your own shoulders
As odd as it was. A man can be your anything, crooked wire, sweet shadow whispering across the bottom of your door. And you want it to be comfortable. New stormclouds gleaming with unreleased rain, here in London, in the countryside. (This is what she tells herself. Wrapped inside her sheets at night.)
2. when you see the sign you kneel
It's not what she wants, now, but maybe it used to be, maybe there was a sly slick seed of some desire in her, back before she grew her hair long, grew the vines out all over the concrete of her front porch, hung a lantern up and caught a stranger. Who would leave her.
Here comes another sun over that horizon.
3. all of her, way there and back
And who won't leave her: the brush of skin, the hand that's gentle, the ring of metal in that mouth. The ghosts, her watchers, her loyal, longest darlings. Cool and present. Dead and slack.
4. but what can you take with you
Then she supposed that was the way it's meant to fall, hammered out, time slowing. She could only make it lowly; and there's nothing here she owns, there's no face around her smiling. You have to get it. She bent the show.
She does it now because she's saying. My tricky fish, my sliding witch, my only, lonely love. Rock-falls, cricket, rhinestone necklace. Where it was. Attention wanes.
5. your hollow globe, your cardboard world
Through the wood door, through the sweet and cakey red taste of her makeup. A short one, all right: and she's gone. Imagining the spot where he stood.
(The deepest shade of pink. Like the movement quick inside her?)
6. what you are to me is nothing
So there's this little thing. The edges of her, pale wax-paper, peeking out from candy wrappers. Pulling leashes. Wrapping cards. This is the girl you knew, or isn't: what's still under her, it can't be graveyard dust; it can't be wild-fire. She's thick with flesh. She's full of him. She's bone-ash, light and empty.
7. what you are to those should ask you
If everything is living then everything can be called forth; the smallest movement, dot on paper, squiggling line. Each stone a peach-pit.
Trickles moving down her arms and dripping off her fingers. She can trick it: she can cut the milling motion, she can raise the shining will. Who'll to know her. A familiar mantra.
In order to be saved, it has to be given a name.
8. what you are to whom
The moment before it! The wash and pull. She's steeped in water: gray rivulets, gray rivers, churning with her teeth and tears.
Ah, those children, clear and slippery. Limned with homemade fire.
9. this is volcano rock, and she is frozen lava
She caches it behind the thin white idea of a body. She knows no squirrel will scratch her nuthatch, think a secret's under way. The sleeping knocker: granite-born, and heavy as an ocean's pull. No shipping tides to wake her.
A single petal. (Let's not waste time showing.)
You know she's got a mountain of it.
10. and you'll get none of never
Will alone won't butter bread, or make it; some limp slack proverb floating by the neon whore. Neat knack. Trip lack. Shut the curtains and come over here.
Keep busy. Tug the phonelines. Sweet lark, shading.
11. don't moan your love like that
A wish and a quiver. Dark hair, dark tongue, tuned to the taste of oranges and chocolate, leather. I could wear you like a jacket. I could have told you. Effective batter, beating dart pin, fleeting hart. A map's a flattened flipped-up frenzy, just another name for lies.
But some are out in the whirlpool, zipping past babies, making amends.
12. behind her back
Who flashes sheet-white with the strain of willing. Cool wraiths, past inhalations wreathing themselves all around her bed. You know it's a quick cut to the weed's small fingers. Extra escape-route.
Taller than that, but even she knows what it must taste like. Flooding herself with sweet, weak tea.
13. you lick the surface frozen flat
And what about her? No voice to lap around her ankles. Iron bills and street-girls, pastel flowers limp in ice. You just wanted her to hurt her. You couldn't wait to see that jerking body, that pant and wrap of wail, the waiting figure, another moment's loosened trick and trail. You had your memory deep inside her, all of the signposts pointing empty, all the teases tolling twice.
14. she won't wait to make her motions
It's easier to say it now, make it flat and distanced, cursed-out, pale. Who she thought she was.
And turned up waterier. Shirk one's signals, says an accent in her ear; she's so used to wanting everyone, she has a necklace of fresh bite-marks, she has no stopper, ending slide.
15. your loose kite-string's looking longer
You have to start it where you broke it. Where the shaking started.
Another body waits and exhales, swill and sad trust, musty care. (Green shoots, springs let to clawing.) Conversation dawning. Leaving just her listening, dove, trailing its red streamers behind it in the air.
16. she went deep into this waiting well
Don't think you know what routes I'm trawling, hissed or muttered. Snaky flair. She must talk like winter leaflets, break or smaller shifting wicker. Close show, your second gold-ringed mouth; your jackrabbit pulse; your sweet droll heart moving its concentric circles. Fly in darkness, dearth of tarts and tripping where.
17. you'll not ask another favor
Something rings through. Plaiting slow her days with strips of night? You can slip it where you left it. Wanting the rub lost, cowl to mark it, mapping bodies by their torn-scarf scars. Breathing green clouds, steamy vapor; silvered with the dried-out light.
18. just until your body's through
And for once, rosy opal in the oyster-shell. Squinting into salty winds. (Ignore the seagull's jealous markings.) Cool piece of paper, on her private sand-dune yellow, blank square rising into dark.
19. you treat blank and still expect to tell
She leans through it sometimes sideways. Cat-dark body, eyes like splinters of old lust. When he hits and wrings out, she slits over, doubling it up with the strain. Willing jackknife. Folds the wall. A whole landscape made of smokestacks, factory-workers building nests. Black's what soft and under someone, carpet slicing up her heels.
20. up until, what sheds a month of yours
Down another locking footstep. She ricochets through endless hallways unfolding out of every mirror, every door. But it being water monsters, green and veined with lily rings. She starts to swing in dear dusk nears.
Into what red want you're saying. Bars and windows falling into place.
21. these movements make her mine
Her fingers paw the slick black rock for purchase. This isn't a pardon, neither a test; but sometimes it opens her to easy asking. When she feels him touching-- when he's in her, as alien as ice or magma, as familiar as the first breath-- one quick realization. She never gets it as she wanted, and when she does it tricks itself straight inside out and shows her its strange undersides. No one likes to touch their own desire. No one wants it made too soon.
It's natural still to grow again the flower; and over, over; and cut its stem with every gasp.
22. she wants another someone
Strung with lace and banners, retrieving posters, walking rail. Here's that word again. Months and minutes stretch before her; puddles walk across her gaze. Creeping tendrils. Let her loosen. Let her say she's over with it, let her count how much she gave.