Almost Sober

You know those nights that feel like films: when you feel as though you’ve gone milky orange and black in the night light of an inner city photograph and when the song on the stereo is your soundtrack.

This was one of those nights; held up somewhere between a rock and a hard place on the highway back home.

 

The buildings we passed were skeletons still, without hearts. The ones that lived were deep asleep.

Sounds crunched and rattled and crawled out of the speakers as we passed car after car; tiny contained universes separate to our own.

 It was as if we were rocketing through an abandoned sound stage suspended in Thursday night lights.

Tyres on tar and eyes to window as the song played out.

More Than Blood (for my best friend)

If you go, those things in me will hide away and hibernate until you come back, because there is no one else who understands me when I speak about music like it is car rides and afternoons.

See the seasons as they creep across my face; autumn comes closer and things start to fall into place. 

And if you go for too long these secrets things that become songs and these secret parts of my heart will grow cold and my secret dreams will grow old…because you, my friend, are the only one who knows the whole way too my soul.

When it all comes crashing down, we'll hold each others hands and when the sun keeps shining we'll dance to our laughs.

In the quiet hours, when you are running on an empty brain I will hold you steady and say:

"The ink under my skin belongs to you, you held my course and got me through. We're bound by more than blood, so here's to you."

There's nothing that will ever be so true.

Bed Fellows

I stayed awake for a year to do nothing but breathe; shallow and grating across my ribs and up my spine.

I watched the dark weave its way into the sky and around the backs of my eyes. I watched the cracks appear behind it and its paint start to bubble and peel.

From behind my eyelids I saw the night pass into day and I shrank back. Back into the soft and warm as the light pressed up against the glass doors, searching for a way in.

Now sleep welcomes me again, so sleep I shall, and breathe easier.

And the dark and the light will come and go as they should, and time will move on minute by hour by day.