all eyes are ice

This back aches from slouching at a screen

whilst these eyes glassed-over speak to the invisible blurs

in front of this skull, volatile and spilling

curses into a camera - it snaps a photo and tells me:

you lost again.

...and yet everyone tells me I won.

ii

The freak accident of my nature with a rope

tied across my waist, pulling me into a Tolstoy novel where I might

- jump -

into train tracks

or break from my shackles

and disappear into a new world

where nobody can falsely point to me anymore.

iii

Show your passion, they say to me whilst I hang myself around

my own neck - keys dropping to the floor.

But my passion just walked out, slumped into her jacket

her shoulders above her head

as she looked to the ground -

all eyes are ice.

iv

I sit in an office looking at the clock knowing

there should be another place for me right now.

I disappear into my mind and yet all I find

are lines from my last recitation of Kerouac to myself

at 4am.

v

Moments of despair fleet across my vision in the hope that

maybe,

like Clarissa Dalloway

I could buy the flowers myself.

But the petals will curl up and die like

the coriander in my kitchen

that made me doubt I had a sense of smell left

when it dried up against all odds

under the spotlights of my sink.

vi

My back still hurts

and I'm slouched in front of a screen

with the scream of blue light hitting my face,

the words on the page like a cheese grater on my hands

bleeding the passion out from my fingers,

into this space

and my eyes are ice.