Do Strangers Dream?

we tiptoe through oily reds

carmine-and-crimson-coated bottoms of feet

cautious where they fall

every step precise

we glance back

the unnatural cadence too perfectly spaced

and you look at me

those etheric blues not quipping or wild now

a brimful of considerations i linger at

ochre and tussled raw-sienna brushstrokes

falling into them as light shifts

the rembrandt shadows blown out suddenly

and you say this is not real

i smudge the lines

too neat i say sorry i say

around us colours drip trickle bleed together

the edges of you go first

i fumble to save them

make it worse

you frown and the browns take

the wrinkles around your eyes

i am not fickle i say swept up by beautiful stage faces

damaged troys and driven lorenzos

not so lonely to grasp at strangers

you smile at me

the sadness a vast wave

crashing brown all around us

I am uncomfortably cast out of sleep

awkwardly poured back into this jar of life.

And yet you linger.

The smell of you, linen and 3 a.m. skies,

the rhythm of your voice, raindrops collecting

in still-strange city streets beyond my window.

Do you dream of strangers too?

Are you restless, longing in misshapen places

within yourself?

No. I am awake. Returned to self.

And yet…

Do you vanish into the lines of books,

words carving vaults of collected stories

that call themselves by other names - loss, love, adventure?

Could I talk to you, all at once, about Naipal, Winterson & Marlowe?

Do the things that feed you, destroy you?

What colour is your joy? What flavour, your sorrow?

Can thunderstorms roll you up? Wash you away?

Would you play The Magnetic Fields for your neighbours at 1 a.m.?

Invite them over if they’re dancing in their windows?

Can I slide photographs of strangers into your pockets,

write stories on their backs -

she plants mango trees in backyards that children will know

the taste of sunshine

But for you, I might write chapters -

You are the salted-sea, sound like moonlight in the offing,

eat ice-cream on winter days and

find things you lost in empty rooms.

You have an easy laugh, lit full of brandy

And yet, there’s a shifting ache behind it

or perhaps, I imagine you direr than you are.

That bruised purple of tragedy making us kintsugi.

Do you love people who put themselves back together,

who Humpty-Dumpty their way into things?

Are you pulled by the darkness, trusting its truth?

Do you love the life you’ve made?

Is it easier to forgive others than it is to forgive yourself?

And,

can you forgive me

for stealing some part of you and making it other -

for casting you without your permission?

In this unplanned canvas of a life,

I have painted and repainted.

Layers buried gone unseen

but somewhere between all these brush strokes

are hands that never touch, lives that never arch towards the other;

so many strangers, surrounded by tapestry and sunlight

and you, slivered between vermillion and chartreuse,

sipping rich, hot, coffee in endless silence.

That I have learned to feel less strange in borrowed colours,

that the dreaming is a dappled texture for canvas.

That you, unknowable blue variable,

made of flesh and mortal things like stardust

can dance within the solar systems of a stranger’s mind,

and shift the subtle pewter of a soul.