HippieHebe

Together, we had become sculptors carving our affairs into the mortar and listening to the convoluted banter through paper thin walls. Our poverty became romantic and perhaps, deluded as we lived by candlelight and danced to the neighbours' Beatles album. In reality we lived like cockroaches - a pair of many in a big city our dreams diverted amongst the morning commute, and the last sips, of the day's first brew Paul McCartney sang Blackbird and I watched bleary eyed at the winter sun, smoulder, as my belly grew with hope and joyful fear.

My body creaks like old floorboards; worn but still loved for its timelessness - perhaps I wish. I'm not as laissez-faire as I make out, my tousled waves and smudged eyes are all I know but you call me Parisian, anyway, as we sip coffee, under cold, high ceilings and minimal prints. We've made our poverty glamorous with romantic words; minimalism, bohemian, rustic and you called me a hipster when I painted the room burgundy and put up tapestries to give the illusion of warmth. It's only our own delusion that keeps us off the failing generation census that and entitlement.

Your kicks are sporadic. I'm nesting, building with twigs of anxiety and joy. I let exhaustion devour me with jagged teeth and when I wake I'm wrapped in a cocoon of silk - imported, swaddled together, lullabies of the past having travelled, escaped Thought Police Convicts lead me astray. I hope you take after the Moon unafraid, constant, no anomaly. You move unfaltered.

With the moon beneath my feet and the sun somewhere in slumber, I fell asleep between you and our unborn love.

I stumble. I pause. I cough. When spoken, words are hurdles - and I trip. I choke. I fall.

Our bed was made from desert sand, soft as whispers; I wonder how many lovers lay upon the sheets - the ones you brought, stumbled and delved between fleshy thighs, pink with lust. I bet you could name every broken spring, every notch, knot, that dug into my back, that curved my spine. Or was it only her? Her name still lingers between the sheets. The walls are worn from lies and the paint peels from affection. Smoke rings filtered from both your lips, stain the ceiling and when your friends visit; they rest on my persian rug and gossip tales of melancholy.

We had met in the heart of England; the middle of fucking nowhere. His voice was this deep, aged whiskey. I wanted to drown in the amber - drink myself to the bottom of his larynx. When we were twenty-four, he'd promised the big city was where I wanted to be - where we wanted to be. When the sun went down and orange flames licked the sky, we'd worked in bars and stayed up till dawn. The casinos did the best breakfasts, at 4am. We'd licked the plates clean and gambled our money away through his poker face and my cocktail dress - a sequined dogs dinner. At twenty-seven, we'd moved to the outskirts. The night skies were so clear we'd g

Gulping at the tide, she sinks; the siren with copper hair. Fathomless, this is where the mermaids sleep; the sunken city where her father is king and the world is all sky whales, leviathan waiting under beds its staring, black eyes of the unknown keeping secrets during its somnolent slumber.

We first met when I was a scholar you a philosopher I dreamt so hard the stars bruised above me and you breathed this weighty happiness into verse. We met again in the lost land, Lumeria. You were a hunter, and I of no significance but you found me draped across vines, wildflowers in my hair watching languidly as you shot down the moon for me and in the darkness, people whispered about secret lovers. But let us not forget the poet and the mathmatecian we exchanged love notes in our own languages- sanskrit. binary. Translating them at dusk, we hid beneath the swell of tides watching the overhanging sky swirl before our eyes.