i will have stronger bones, exact

THOUGH: VARIATIONS ON A THEME. I AM ALWAYS SAYING I CANNOT SAY ANYTHING. I ACCEPT THAT. I WORRY. I ACCEPT THAT. I ACCEPT I AM ACCEPTING THAT AND HAVE AND WILL AND ARE AND AM.

THOUGH: VARIATIONS ON A THEME, SO.

THOUGH: it is hard to be who we are because we change so constantly, fucking, so that it all combusts, all confuses. the words catch inside this glass compartment, snaked beneath, yes, bone. a fire drum, they all are lit but and catching. i can't spit them fast enough off my tongue the tar. so it is like autumn leaves noised small gathering points of violence.

THOUGH: keep the song going and the film going, clenched white bitter nice.

(get it all out, these variations)

THOUGH: VARIATION. i'm not typing into a typewriter. i am mumbling into my phone in traffic in noise feeling stupid and lonely and not lonely and how my arms look like in mathematics and eyes. and my voice and the words and

THOUGH: that is the variation. i am always saying. i cannot say anything. it's shit wrong.

(we are human and not human milk-glasses halving into infinities)

THOUGH: i need to put all my words into a bottle i can't break.

(people made from cigarette ash the pilled skin from the corners of hands a little felt tip and cracked moss lime juice a final small heart carved from a christmas carol)

(half-dusk, pulling dry skin from your lips shaped like once heart, blue paint splashed out all across a pavement, girl with black eyes.)

And the story is mine but it isn't about me. I am a speck of gravity of breath upon which the lines of my life converge. In those words, they are my friends.

THOUGH: i can't tell the story what keeps me safe. i just can't but can tell you how it feels, the metallic taste of having an imaginary friend, every time he spoke it is finding a two dollar coin frozen to your icy pole your grandma's owl-fur smile, buying an electronic thesaurus to play hangman and loneliness and feeling very much like you are cool, shitting your pants at lunchtime and unable.

pushing over your best friend on a basketball court so his knees bleed and bleed and bleed and bleed and bleed and sitting by campfire walking through thick spiderweb, fishing for your dad's reason with five children together your brothers' friends, chlorine in your eyes and songs with every lit fuses, watercolours cigarettes smoke blood noses.

don't interrupt life as it obliterates you prettily.

THOUGH: i need to believe in more of what i capturetranslate and less of every single person in everything looking at me with skinny eyes and the things my brain does not participate in and plays defensive and why every word or beautiful every knife we bring into us. but i still feel. a bloodspark impossible itch on the side of your hand the rub of form. so i record as much as i can mess, to the start of my noise feels across my eyes. what i am under.

mistaken burnt taste of birthday candles gone, autumn leaves, for cigarette butts cold metal

lots of words aren't mine. and use them to try to anchor a story together throws me into these glitching tapes

all i am, known to only you always have.

too much, too soon

and no one know. my honest truths can't be shared they aren't

THOUGH GIVE THE FUCKING TRANSCRIPT:

standing lopsided, over the toilet, and this was another moment where i had to think that i was fiction. there were too many details here for this to be my kind of real life and there was nothing. the details were all the thoughts crashing about my head they were gold fish ran through static, sucking impossible from a fish bowl more like jam jar. sudden violent echolocation. just out of reach of being beautiful. never explain what it is that catches that sparks faulty gods from the world inside me

they scrape me and these attempts to describe them only throw me
i hate these thoughts for trying to tell their first names, the switch has already occurred i know. the thoughts are faster than i can exist here. i call them chemicals with no other understanding

do you know when you arrive home drunk and crumpled a little fizzing with quiet vapours? it is three a.m. and there is mud in your head and you smile like a kid and think you look quite attractive creased folded by the breathy night, origami shot in strange colours you are so many dogeared pages of ragged very earnest paperbacking

and you drove, well, blearyeyed through the hum of dawn takeaway papers, sticking about your fingers and your jeans and your shoes. first light and melted cheese and worker bees and sometimes thinking already dew of your front lawn spinning, and shivering filled with bravery and spasms of right fucking then it all in you.

and the hard excitement of at the slightest bit of attention every time someone almost sees fumbles the two embarassing drinks for colour, the mentally falling downstairs.

still: i do not exist except for by the most jarring penmanship typewritten ghosts or someone with bloody nails and fingers and missing half of the alphabet on your code

(and see, the pale hairs on the inside of my thighs in a light the bathroom hanging in the air around me.)

i don't recognise any sort of lightning bolt here nor markers that bring me back to life. this is any white tile bathroom glued to a planet and taken for granted overwhelms me. so it all just hangs softly and you look into yourself all with spiderwebbing and losing people you love and forming into quiet pools.

i feel like dogfood and a cold sweat of skies. the rain comes down all down. i feel like cigarette film, crushed beetles, autumn leaves digested to thick wet last copperrod bile. i am dull, unabled. i don't want paper animals to be more permanent than i am. or to hold to the day stronger.

but i rub at bursting blood vessels at my eyes, all the satisfaction of mosquito bites, find comfort, remain unsteady, belonging not breaking. but i am sweating in a raincoat upsetting myself. but then look up see just how fast the clouds move when you see them and i am a cloud moving i am going to be a cloud moving you will see.

be a part of "we" crack me open and burn away my tenses show true life of the sentences that press my bones altogether. i have spent my life yelling into things swearing i was trying to speak and met with only vapour. always white hot in my head, eclipsed, my scalp my cuticles my teeth.

(little birds building nests above liquor store neon signs drunks.)

the story is you. i wonder if that forces you into a corner. a certain form of you. an oddshaped tree a sadness for insects inside homes for little birds at the bottom of a subway your soundtrack spun into an armour of everything. for you.

the story is mine even when i am an unreliable narrator strip away everything but the patterns i hear in lowercase

or make into an uneven list or turn to flux or feel the lighting bolts that love my heart.

the story is mine, you might believe in my kind of shrapnel. i know your nights and i will know again. i know massive graffiti, crosswords in progress, red ink, clean shoes, spinning, always see the things, always remarking, loudlyquietly, guess on all the pages that you are, morning sun beautiful.

cannonball and a lack of context: i cannot introduce properly. when does a story begin?

(I hear saxophone watching a passing church steeple against a stormy breathy nightsky it is the kind of thing that makes me feel more tongue and steam than sky though. damp towel. static cling. mothfur.)

so i will feel the way i want to feel and tell the way i tell the safest place to be. the safest place i've found. i want only to show the fractures repeating through. i want you to see the warmth of your bruises the violence and the colour. jarring want. crippling kisses. hope.

pale filmscum, discarded guts, sloppy autumn bones. staccato-fresco of bird shit.

i am hunched over.

"i feel the effect."

(tape clicks over.)

thecolours (redux)

"Live with inspiration. Live for inspiration. Live inspired. Celebrate everything broken, everything bold. The rich black, where everything starts, eyes crawling outwards. The deepest blue of the milk carton, the old blanket where you no longer move, the floor that catches you. The vibrant purples of the beetle crushed underfoot. The violent reds of silence, the orange as days find themselves in dreams, the yellow in the moment that the trees follow. The green as the ocean falters, swells up, swims, drinking the sky. And the white movements of nothing, of never, of nowhere, of the question and the circle, the dance and the whisper. And you are new, an infant with broken bones, standing on the edge of the night, smiling."

—Ian William L.