A war is a house key misplaced
It’s a light bulb somebody forgot to switch off
It’s a pile of dishes unwashed
It’s always been more common than a bullet aimed between
scrunched eyebrows
And if we walk backwards with necks rotated at around 100
degrees
The ache stretched would conjure up accusations instead
You, you, and you - must’ve forgot!
For the ink and blood that have splattered could have
smudged itself an oasis
And that hole of an oasis would’ve been a nice change
compared to the hole in
The hearts of forgotten lovers that have died with not much
to blame
Maybe it was never the death of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo,
Maybe it started with a burnt Sudžuk or an overstuffed
Filovane Paprike for breakfast,
From a nagging mother in the outskirts of Herzegovina, or
even further in the ringing of a door bell as it creaks open in a small pizza
business in Italy just waiting to bloom,
Never mind the alliances, the whos and whats that are in
cahoots
Shall the dominos fall to capture instead a Euphaedra Janetta
butterfly that may have laid an egg in Sierra Leone on the wrong Cotton Tree at
the most inconvenient of times?
From what I’ve seen when I was 6,
It might have rolled back to shattering white ceramics and
coffee stains on the pale beige wall
With so much to say, a lot to feel, yet dumbed down with too
many shebang
With wrists that have swung, held by forced, and caressed in
an apology overdue
With locked doors, cutters, and scattered pills left to pump
Heat surges that are too fast it deserves tickets for moving
in the speed of light
It has been said that erupting volcanoes were never meant to
be as one
And as the magma in most would brew to burst, yours was
forced to hush
Denial was a vicious predator scavenging in still seas, its
prey came in flocks that was left to cower
Eyes sting when underwater but the blur stops you from
crying
The temperature drops down below and falls off a ladder, but
nothing was ever solved
It gets darker 1001 M under the sea, more in mum and not as
upbeat as Little Mermaid pictured it
With quick changes in your Celsius comes the breaking of
glasses
Such pressure is only made best with the popping of
champagnes, in which there was never
Shivering was a better option and bubbles there are made
instead when you can’t tell a soul,
And it’s been said that you can’t ever, ever be angry… while
saying the word “Bubbles”.
It has always been your lack of warmth and comfort
Uncharted waters doesn’t come with blankets
It doesn’t come with the luxury to combust
And it never came with caps locked sentences
Your tears might as well be the pearls they can
choke on
After years of putting that forefinger on your upper lip
Fingers that were never used to intertwine, but instead
It wags at you, and points out flaws like the tails of
Whippets
Life jogs past you, and many have passed on
Yet you’re still not used to the jolt, it’s like your first
time going into a highway tunnel once again where everyone else knew that it was
temporary and not worth a single wail – but you screamed anyway.
And in between rigid corals placed too deep, none may hear.
And whilst you flip the coin, watching it tumble like a trapeze act
It has always been a particle too many in me, sparking
For it started with twists and shouts, and with it we worked
it all out
We string up words and knit them like sweaters for one
another to wear
For one another to rip and fix as we punch walls, and then attack
with hugs
And the minute i knew what a 'cancer' was growing up
I was explained that it’s the consequences of bottling it
all up
Like molds and cobwebs in the confined house of a
traumatised cat lady
The only death I’ve yet to seen up until now was my Grandpa’s when I
was eight
Everyone bundled up and held each other’s hands, forming the seas with their tears as i stood confused...
If my family represents every single volcano in
the Hawaiian Archipelago, there will be no such thing as “Alohas!” for the a,
l, and o has been burnt and the ‘has’ within possessions are no longer there - all
else is mixed up into ‘ash’
These tires are tired, and they have tried
For how can calm waters burst, and how can mountains move
Wars that ended in blame started with something to prove
With us, it has always been a knot in the strings of the
phones we made out of cans or a branch that fell between our separate tree
houses. Tree houses with uncombed roots that has trampled us to where we are now.
We promised to not retrace a single more, but if only wars were
settled this easy.
