The battle was lost with the war.

It's not often I would dare to sing your pretty praises. There is no wonder left in you. You merely exist trying to tap into an illusion that fits nicely with derision muttered from acid tongues and laughing cheeks.

When you leave me (and you will), you'll leave with nothing more than the fragments of a shattered little dream and I shall go on, nursing a vessel that beat steadily to a rhythm you couldn't manage, no matter how many gulps of drink you took.

It was your ignorance for my existence, your lack of perception, the eyes you laid on others, the inabilty to think and feel and grow. You wilted me in your efforts, or your lack of efforts. The moments that cannot be redeemed no matter what soldiers and beggars you send my way.

Perhaps I am bitter, unstuck and prepared to take a tumble rather than root down and brave you. Perhaps, it really doesn't matter anymore.

For anyone with knowledge of the depths of the heart will surely know that time wounds all heals, and perceptively, nothing cures the broken like slow, patient, fresh love and still warm baked treats.

Commitment

Up above, preening and grooming in a cascade of deep green leaves, the birds were almost clicking with excitement. I liked to watch them, their skinny yellow legs. The sun was half falling on my face. There was an arm under my neck and insects tickling my shins. I was sure babies were staring from mother's laps.

Not even lobsters could get in the way of an answered question.

Palm Lines

There's something amazingly victorious about when your hand goes limp, stops fighting mine as it swirls towards your belly button. The conceding of my victory. I'm nearly always sure that you'll give in, stop fighting me after awhile and leave me free to roam, and the protesting hand will fall away. It is a jolting, beautiful relief to the tenseness normally reserved, the small balls we make of our hands.

Guiding hands is never the same. Well some hands. They don't understand patterns and motion and gentleness, and they ruin the intention in their unsteady tremors. They lose track and not even rough pulling can make them curl their fingers into the right shape. They are taken away from the overall picture.

Hands navigate shapes. Curves, corners, grooves and points - dips and crevices and tiny ledges. The barely perceptable raises from something smooth. The parallel lines inscribed across the thick raises of blood tunnels that were put there by angry hands, those that navigated mental discontent in physical perspective. Soothing hands try to run over them.

In the depths, coated and salty, hands experience, protect and nurture the textures of cleaning and sweeping and immersing and changing.

Support the babies' head.

She'd watched German cinema till noon and felt tormented by the dancing chicken. It's companion was making SOS notes instead of musical notes. She was still confused by the glass bowl television and a volt meter.

Out on the street she gathered up the cloud waste in her wool skirt and shoes and settled into a red skinned cow covering to stroke out women with disproportionate thighs or arms. Sweet chilli settled on her tongue for the duration of the afternoon; and in the cold, delayed evening with a four-layered glass window, she shifted impatiently across rumbling train rows.

She discussed ways to fill calendar pages, a washing dance of hot and cold water with powder, and whether the stitches held together the dog's wound. The pencil written response had arrived in the mail and had a similar taste to the cooking. The clock's ticking could no longer be heard over the reverberations of condemnation for the un-enlightened.

When she settled into bed, the air was carrying ghosts' body heat and she counted fire engines with rabbits driving to turn out the light.

Grand Blood

Everytime her nostrils move she can almost feel the blood about to explode down her nose. She hasn't stopped listening to opera music all day. Someone had said to her they disliked opera because the arias were too long, but she loved it, as she pressed an embroidered hanky against her face.

In the mirror occasionally, a white space, her face. She wants to put on her old shoes and glide across the floorboards to the music. Instead she is solitary on a bed, tucked in, with an empty tea cup awaiting more hot water.

Beat beat! The drum declares to her heart. She always related this bit with heartbreak and first kisses. Why, she wasn't sure.

Blood. Her head down. No more tea. Just ice stacked against her spasmed neck while the music went on and rose red spilled into ink blots on a towel.

The Wooden Staircase

I am standing here, watching this moment from behind a willowly tree. You're climbing, high and higher, and tumbling down with an 'ooophf!' and rolling over to get back on again. High and higher. You want that last branch, you want to swing your leg over and keep a godly view over the park.

Godly, because, like God, you seem up there and we down here and not intervening. But you are intervening, you're 'ooophf-ing' down onto mounds of leaves and climbing back up. God doesn't shake the crunchy buildings below. He stays in his branch, making clouds from his cigarette smoke. Which is sort of like you, too. You're halfway up, you've fumbled with the lighter. It slips from tongue licked fingers - for grip, I think. You swear. Guess it's not going to be overcast today.

You look up. Fiddle with your cap, sunlight in your eyes. Swing, pull. So you're up one more. Your sneakers on the bark seems slippery. Slide, slide, slide, like your feet trying to go up the down escalator. Don't go very far, but your hands are strong. Heave. One more down, or is it up? You spit. Are the masses fleeing a tsunami, or just a freak downpour?

You look down. I'm fairly certain you didn't realise the miles and miles and miles between your throne and 'ooophf'. You seem unperturbed. How courageous. You pull your hand back. You don't really like spiders, all fangs and legs and it seems they got you with a pitchfork, didn't they? You're shaking your hand. What a nasty web of surprise! You're really looking down. A foot slides towards the lower branch, stretching you out wide. Reaching for the ground. So big and wide.

There's another branch, Atlas, above you. Don't drop the world!

But down you jump - I'm afraid for a moment you might break your kneecaps, but you know you won't - and you retreive your lighter, pocket it, run off covered in bits of crunched up leaves.

Once you're gone, I grin; my turn to be God.

Head Bone: connected to the Foot Bone

She says not to be ashamed of crying. It's not shame, it's that I've shed enough over the years, enough tears to fill cups and saucers and tea spoons and pots. I've sprinkled them from shakers onto meals. Dipped them into the flour of my cakes and let them dint the garden beds.

The sympathy has run cold. The ice river and the barren tongue. You want my mental diary and some post addressed to you from my heart. There are no post boxes at my hip or near my collar bone. You can't telephone through my belly button with your fingers and your nails, and you can't trek my secrets by clamouring over my hair.

Little light flairs in your eyes, from reignited fumes of smouldering corpses. The emotions you thought you buried with sweat and pacing. Tastebuds that fizzled away over dizzying pink drinks. The groove where you pressed your tongue when you tried to pull on my shoulderblades to keep me by your grazed elbows and your bruised knees. The shake, the grasp, the swallow to keep you down in the pit of my stomach to protect you from the hearth flames of hatred and blackmail.

Cracks in the floor tiles, scaling the rift that your emotions left in the carvern of my lungs. Those that fell got burnt in the acid of my stomach, eating up the minutes that stung and flocked into momentary bright action. Those that made it clung to my bones, in the tiny microscopic dints, to be my immunity and my disease. My fibre and my musical strings for every joint. The hollow centre of gravity that keeps regurgitating organic patterns and toppling over into your shins and your chin by the stairs to your door bell.

The chord that runs from spine to toes tugs away, in a morse code pattern, letting you know that under the sheets there's still hope that you can peel back the sunburn and the lipstick messages on my calf. The rapid screech of neurons in distress from the tiny sounds of your breath in my ear, and the marching of armies of tingles over my ribcage in time to your heart beat, swelling and fading with my own breathing.

You've travelled only as far with me as the creases in my hands.