Dubai Workers
2017
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Oil Paints on Plywood, Scaffolding, Wire and Found Materials
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Dubai Workers
2017
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Oil Paints on Plywood, Scaffolding, Wire and Found Materials
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Ode to Ash
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This is a digital treasure chest.
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“Perhaps they expect me to wail and moan about ‘how much I suffer,’ living with a man like Diego. But I don’t think that the banks of a river suffer by letting it flow…” - Frida Kahlo
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I don’t mourn losing you, how could I? I mourn for what we could have blossomed into. Within two full botanical garden visits you gouged out the lover in me.
When I am in love I am my best self. This is when I eat less and my tummy feels hollow. Instead, I am nourished by the endless daydreaming of wonderment, to feel adored, to have an outlet in which I can pour myself into. When I am empty I feel most alive. I don’t fret from past pains, instead it makes me courageous, want to push further into a connection, let myself go further, intoxicated by another. I retreat into corners far within myself, where the only sunlight to give my own longing clarity is by my lover, guiding me. When I am in love, I am in pain, I can recognise myself.
When I am in love, I have desperation for a home to hide in, I am iridescent, sparkling, because I have to be in order to attract. When I am looking for a partner, there is a purpose. I like the trajectory of finding out whether I am wanted by my subject of desire or not. I love the excuse for self-loathing. The reasoning behind a glass of wine and pouring myself into a notebook, I couldn’t possibly do that just for me. My goal to love pulls me through the slippage of bad habits, it harnesses them, keeping me feverishly close to the cliff edge.
To love, is to ask all of me.
How rude of me to demand so much from this, they only wanted an momentary object, an angel to hang on their wall. Yet for me I wanted a muse, or a resolution? For them, it was a one shot release. For me, I looked into their green-blue eyes and cupped their long hair into my clay dry hands. I was pathetically willing to let them possess me. I long for a songbird to fill my days with music.
Dear Ashton:
You remain a grain of an unknown shore,
Tossing, gasping for a realisation…
Finally we converge in physical sea-form.
The corals of your reef are bleached with my poison.
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Tainted weeds dance overhead,
A lizard scurries in a dry riverbed.
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Here we’ll sleep as skeletons,
After allowing fireworks
To wipe out wasted time.
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Shackled in neon cords,
We unwind worries,
Heaping them and letting flames feast
Skies of youth paint a different world
Aqua tides line the spaces
Between us.
A grey, metallic, electric box,
A brain of dust desert.
Synthesizing sushi saturdays,
Where yager jangles in the confines of your dune buggy.
Underground in the lockets of heart,
Money shrivels up and adventure takes its place.
Your markings in the sand
Still feel like caresses on my skin
Your absence feels like a drought in the tides of my expectations.
Yet,
You are the core.
You are molten.
You will explode.
We will explode.
A Lesson - 2015
Every time I want to write to you I write a poem instead;
Consequently this is one of them.
You rubbed me like lead,
across a canvas and I bled.
Everybody warned me.
Yet I saw beyond this foreboding,
for your body and for your mind.
We entwined in every way, connected spiritually,
I loved you more than reality.
Our love was lava lamps,
street lights and late nights,
with star eyed mornings.
It was beach trips, sushi cravings,
psychedelic music and go-karting.
Far out in the cosmos my mind was drifting.
I believed he loved me with all his essence;
roaming the world whilst yearning his presence.
Life is saturated with bright hues,
however I’ve realised, I’m without you.
Rippled in foreboding,
Darting warning pixels
Skinny form
Screens sheen with discipline
Mother mourners
Morning fortune cards,
Only shards glint,
Or lakes and lilies could?
For we will move like a compass,
Through all the spinning spaces.
You can’t be replaced,
They’re all faceless,
Nameless.
Suggesting tales of complacence,
You’re real, you are really there,
Right?
Surrender I must.
Surrender I know I will.
Diving into daggers,
Feasting on favours,
You as a fantasy lick my neck
Incessantly.
I tangle with impulse
You pull me away from here.
Currents care none but bone,
Shockwaves make rubble this flippant field.
My rooting system stifled,
Cut to be bonsai,
Cut to see one eye blind.
We can’t escape,
Growing in a pot too small,
My seed stripped back,
Left to display,
Deadly sins,
A nightshade overhead,
A lizard in a dry riverbed,
Where we lie,
While we lie.
Descent
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Prickly pear,
hair of the hound on end, loose threads.
We both know it will never work, yet we are too afraid to not try.
Being with you is being able to fly.
Being without you, a lifeless lullaby.
Growing up, feeling like life is a fist fight, as that was my first sight.
Memories, lost toys at a dump, scraping at dislodged words to piece together… scream, bin-bag, falling, burnt things.
When Mum strived to leave, you hurled all of her things into a plastic sack and flung them at my toddler legs, I flew,
as did her youth in pieces, collapsing at the bottom of the stairs,
as shards of glass.
Maybe when you gathered the mess, you also set me alight.
Maybe that’s why I love Ash, because I was made to be dust at age three. It’s how mean men like you clean messes quick, bundle, gasoline, flick a flame and all shall wither away.
At least with fire, there’s no remains to remind you of swingset, car door, bloody plaster, prawn claw.
Yet, this Ash that you are fails to flutter away, an ever-fixed pierce through my lungs, you are the ash that I breathe.
We touched each others bodies like tending to a fire using hands, mouths and movement to grow the biggest flame.
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Limbly the embers collected and Ash drifted into my struck lungs, that fill with your words and breathe out our wishes, shapeshifting your ideas into spells.
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Poetry etched into spearheads.
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Use your thumb to fumble through borders,
let your movements line the motorways, even though concrete crushes our soles.
We’re used to soft earth, beneath the stream licking the land towards the lake.
While holding our branches limply, slicing through cities where nature suffocates,
we feel the worries being chipped away by our conversations,
the soft sediment dissolving in puddles.
Each rising sun unseen,
Will beam in the one you just so happen to reach.
Thursday 26th September 2021
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Now, I am moments away from landing and touching the same ground as you after seven years.
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After, seven years of being divided by specimen filled oceans, we will breathe the same air.
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You are endless disappointments, many miles of longing, unravelling like an empty scroll.
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Simply, do you want to take a stroll?
Do you want to take more?
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Watch me open this final door.
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As many disappointments as you are blue, you are emblazoned in embroidered sunbeams too.
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How I long to look into you, in real time, in the safari of our worlds colliding, not at the absent zoo.
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Entangle into me. I'm sure I can unravel after straightening out the cords,
and I'll watch you rise beyond the flames my lord.
Reaching into muck,
cracked palms soak up,
all my luck.
Dizzied delerium dreamscape,
sap trickled
down
your
nape.
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Tumbling underfoot to where graveyards
laugh aloof,
I transcend fear into fortune.
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Remembering the sweetness of taste
glinting from the pool,
my form recoils in distress,
upon exit I acted the fool.
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Reaching for a cord,
according to your lord
is diminishing as we fail to speak,
my health senses it's weak,
yet I fling my flailing self,
cracking youth on the shelf,
where unread books disintegrate
and intrigue migrates.
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Remembering the way your eyes would flick to
mine,
you excavated my concrete,
crumbling underneath,
to slick sediment,
slipping at the sight,
safety slides away,
seize the clay, and let our love dance today.
Let's play catch with lost time,
climb with wine, as we chimb,
and let our worries be ants to our shapeshifting,
entwined minds.
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We gathered scraps.
We gathered past mishaps.
We slathered gasoline.
We made a toast to bees, trees and honey.
We erected the fire like amber.
We allowed our minds to entwine and gander.
We sunk into each other,
like the damp wood smothered.
We locked lips without dissonance.
We finally closed the distance.
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We were so close I travelled through him.
He became all I was,
all I'd been holding in.
His crystal orbs would collect light,
sprinkled like fingers,
gifting memory markings on our necks.
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We kissed like crescent moons.
You moved so deep within,
the oceans wept.
Your beauty shon in your ability to encapsulate me.
Your hands ropes.
Your lips petals.
Your body my robe.
Our intimacy fragile,
like gunpowder,
like porcelain,
like a bull rampaging Rodin's Garden.
You shattered each and every hoarded demon,
every statue collecting dust,
in the confines of my dune swept mind.
Our minds ven diagrams,
in the middle where the fireworks core exploded as we explored,
all that we lost, all that we recovered,
like ancient Mayan Ruins revealed after a storm dislodges foliage.
We lay pounding
in pulses,
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collected leaves, natures non-mess of a mess,
sprinkled and caressed as we lay, oh just laying undressed.
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My trembling hands that you hold so tight were yours. My lines a frantic heart rate,
a tune as bursting as a balloon.
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We didn't lay as skeletons.
Your reef is not poisoned.
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We are seeds,
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finally feeding on the moistures that will resurrect the ecosystem of our ancestors.
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The ancestors of our past-lives entwined,
as unknown beings,
we are beams bursting at the seems,
and sprouting in finally converging dreams.
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Seemingly enough, we drank the Californian Cherry wine, and it felt like summertime,
I danced pressed to you ,
you cupped me in the orange hue...
I sure as heck, never stopped loving you.
