PARA ESCAPAR, 2018
A set of seven love letters that were pinned up around Lisbon over the summer of 2017, and then compiled into a publication
THIS is a love letter
written from a misplaced sense of
duty // lack // inspiration // calm,
an intermingled sense of guilt that seems to
overpower all other forms: existence
and its milky sweaty bile
THIS morning
I woke up, remembered how
you’d told me I was like a person from a novel, except you used a different word and it wasn't the first time I have chosen to forget ---
sometimes when I wake I want it to be
raining so I don't have to get out of bed;
describe my eyes half closed and not half open.
my sheets need washing
they are green not blue.
I think of you now at the airport;
you buy overpriced coffee
in an irate manner
even though you know
in advance
that this will happen every time you fly
are you wearing socks today
and what colour is your soul
You used to imagine a lifetime project award for
destroying all instruments
held in student bedsit hoards while we
affected languor
sipping whisky or maybe other
unidentifiable sedimented forms,
brown liquor and yet however
whatever drink the sentiment
persists.
at the time I found this cruel
and didn’t comprehend the mizzle-shinned
demise of etiquette or why it
mattered to the figures dressed in linen
but apparently you hate bonfires and
techniques for washing faces never change. THIS
is a love letter intended to incite,
excite the cells with sense of misplaced
longing for the sea, abandoned in a
rock pool somewhere analogue, unspecified and digital:
another summer by the beach.
It was/ is cold and hot and there’s a faded towel striped in white and green
wrapped loosely round your frame -- protruding skinny knees -- fingers tightly grip the shaft,
third plastic spade you break this week and
you throw everything away
almost like you know regret will come,
and tears so many tears
but do it anyway.
That summer you got bitten
by a clam and this expiration
set its teeth so early that it’s
almost doing time.
Boilersuit
clad supervisor snatches, cracks of glee amidst the treacle grind and bestial moans from which your lungs are made.
This weekend I lied.
***