Exchanges

Poems involving an interaction between a "you" and an "I", in some form. May end up being a broad variety show.

Index

1. Vows and Wishes: Sand and Sea
2. 2024, Southern Hemisphere.
3. Screensaviour Complex
4. Reset
5. [some ruins]
6. Power is the Object of the Eye

Note: I might remove poems if I'm preparing them for submission anywhere, or if I'm otherwise heavily revising them c:

Vows and Wishes: Sand and Sea

I wish you wouldn’t let me hurt you.

A score dragged in the sand is still a score,
even if the grains silently sweep over it
and fill the crack. Who says the shore
has no memory? Land crust
takes its shape from what the sea
has done to it. Water is not soft.
Water is millennia, is suffering
the way it is life.

If you only made a sound,
a susurration at the tides,
even a whisper
my waves would not dare
to wash upon the beach.

I will not begin with a greeting.

After all, you began with summer’s end / and you kept going.

It’s not too harsh to say / you overstayed your welcome / eating all the food in my pantry / leaving bread crumbs on the metal countertops / and never cleaning up after yourself.

Through the cobweb-stained glass / I watched leaves turn from green to red / from red to yellow / and then to translucent ghosts / of where there once were leaves.

Fungal biomes sprouted from your mess / and I formed layers atop my own skin / enough to hide in / enough to survive.

I did my spring cleaning by refusing to clean / deciding again to begin at the end / to grow on top of the mould / to grow a garden / --

and I kept going.

Screensaviour Complex

Think positive – you tell me.
Look on the bright side
of every nuclear bomb,
at least we get a lightshow
before the end.

You spread out your arms
backlit by the sun
playing the part of someone
willing to withstand explosions
for the sake of fireworks.

But we live in the era
of screens and dying cinema.
Do not assume in the electric buzz
that I am a negative pole
for you to slide down, firewoman.

If I had free electrons
I would charge a subscription fee
for the way you use them
to fill your empty spaces,
the way you project a martyr
onto a blank screen.

Tell me: what happens
when the power goes out?

Spoiler

A rewrite of Screensaviour Syndrome from all the way back in 2018. I'm not super happy with the ending (it feels unfinished still) but I think the poem benefits from marking the transition between the explosives imagery and the electronics imagery, and I just felt like posting it, so here we go.

Edit: It now has an ending.

Reset

You and I are like enough
that we couldn’t survive the apocalypse.
We’d burn together,
we'd freeze together,
and you know we have
the same melting point.

You could never keep me warm enough –
smiles that vanished too soon,
barely taking shape, a droplet in the lake.

I could never cool you down –
a simmering temper,
always with sparks in my bones.

But shouldn’t we stay together anyway?
Shouldn’t we let the world hit the reset button
on its two most imperfect people?

Maybe through all of this
burning and freezing, our atoms
finally rearrange themselves
into an equilibrium.

[some ruins]

some ruins are the wind:
the grey fog blotches,
dust cast out into trembling meadows,
where the grass jackknifes to conceal its rubble,
where the two of us stand waiting to forget.

we wait for the golden memory
the bright stone castle
swimming in the heat
to be corroded away
by decades of storms,
by acid rain.

my echo wandered west looking for the sun –
dark shadows swallowed it
but i still hear its traces.

i still hear the light trickling
into the dungeon
the walls once cold, uncompromising
now soft and bloated
with pale yellow time
the pitch-darkness
eaten by memory.

you keep telling yourself otherwise.
you cannot believe some ruins
take on the myth of fluidity. disguise
their secret permanence. you pretend i have always
been echoless.

my love wandered west to drown with the sun;
the golden reflection sunk it –
can you hear it singing still?

is it a comfort or a curse?

Power is the Object of the Eye

My hands are not sun-kissed.
I have never held a golden sceptre.
You have light in your eyes that
colours everything the wrong way
so you see me brightened by dust and streaks of sunlight.

And you look through a veil,
diaphanous but dripping with glitter
and I would laugh if not for its opacity,
how you watch through a glass of your own design.

If you had to watch, I wish
you would do so without knowing
what the fog on the display was hiding.
I wish for too much.

Still you see through me, and around me,
choosing again and again
the highlights in my hair,
the blush on my shoulders
the sprinkle of gold dust,
building me up higher and higher,
crown upon robe upon sceptre,
puppet ruler of mirages,
sovereign of a phantom kingdom.

And I just wish pedestals
would collapse under their own weight.
I wish castles in the air
would bury me in the rubble, if
that’s what it took
to bury this illusion.