Rubric

Rubric

The rubric was, 'Solve the puzzle'.
My task: to unscramble your heart,
your cube of a heart, regular,
three by three, eighties red, blue, green,
yellow, blue, white, each colour a feeling,
a quadratic to be lined up,
unmixed,
undone.

Unravelling the parallel, perpendicular contours
of your mathematical, athematical organ
wasn't easy for mine: rounded, unboundaried,
its linguistical, unlateral muscles melting
and moulding themselves over the hardsharp corners
of yours. But I pushed, I struggled, I took
the iron from my blood, melted, smelted in my chest
and galvanised my aching atriums,
and I tried to solve your riddle.

In fingerless gloves
I etched the patterns on my petalled valves,
the formulae strangely alien, archaic,
like something primeval, a cave painting
in the dust of my beating flesh.
I daubed algorithms along my arteries.
And I learnt them all by heart.

But when I moved your pieces,
rotating them around their even sphere
and I matched each emotion to an edge,
there was nothing but cold squares,
each just two dimensional, unreal, undecipherable,
just a ruse to confuse.
My rubik's cube.

Trouble sleeping

I'm lying in bed trying to feel my heart beating in my chest but I can't. It's pulsing in my gut where I'm hungry for you. It will be a while before I'll be able to sleep. Love, your insomniac.

Dear idiot

I missed you a lot these past few days. I don't know whether it was becasue of what happened at the weekend or simply the fact that you should have been there with us and everyone noticed your absence. We all missed you. I'm fairly sure I missed you the most. I ache constantly. It's hurt before but not like this. Maybe it's because this time feels more real. I know it's real because I care about you so much as a friend, and because it could have worked for us and it should have worked and I don't know what went wrong in your head but one day I'd like to know.

I'm torn between giving up on our friendship and saving myself more pain but that hasn't worked out so far because I'm missing you more than ever. You're on a knife edge and on the other side is the possiblity that we can put this behind us, that I can put this behind us and we can go back to normal on the condition that you never mention to me or to anyone else the way I feel about you, and that you never give me any reason to be jealous.

I though that the email would be more of a release than this. But what use is me telling you exactly how I feel if I don't get a response, even if it's a confirmation that you don't feel the same way. Yes, I do want you to tell me things I already know. It makes them more final, and let's face it, it's not as if I havn'e been wrong second guessing you before now. I'm still struggling, but I suppose I'm just going to have to tread water until the currents die down. I wish I knew when that would be.

You're so far away from me, and tomorrow it will be further. I wish I didn't love you, you idiot.

Memo

Dont let me forget, when I come and visit, I'll bring you an apple pie.

Thoughts on the aftermath

It's strange, this feeling of no hope. Earlier I was pacing the floor. I got up, sat down, on the floor on the bed. I cried intermittently. But now I feel oddly calm. It isn't relief because this isn't the kind of moment where I move on. Perhaps it's just the acceptance of the fact that these feeling are here to stay and I have to put up with them. It won't be easy. For two months I hoped that there was something there for you too, that maybe it was going to take me telling you how I feel for you to have the courage to do the same. Now you know everything and no response is forthcoming. Which I take to mean that you feel nothing. I don't regret telling you everything. It needed to be said and I'm still glad I said it. Perhaps if our friendship doesn't survive this I might come to wish I'd never done it but I very much doubt it.

I want to cry now. I have done ever since I lay down to try and sleep but I can't. If I could they would be tears of frustration and disappointment. But I seem to have run out of tears and after the week I've had that doesn't surprise me. I think I used up most of my tear quota on Friday night. When I heard you were in hospital, I got straight in a cab and went there. Of course it was two in the morning and you'd just had an operation so there was no way they were going to let me see you, but I didn't know that. I didn't even know what was wrong with you. It could have been something terrible for all I knew.

I just lied. I knew it was nothing that serious, but I panicked all the same. I wanted to be there all the same. What better way to make up having not spoken for two months that for you to wake up with me at your bedside? But of course when the nurse rang your ward and found out you were sound asleep I went home and probably seriously dehydrated myself instead. I didn't sleep well that night. In the morning I sent the email and tried to hide the fact that I had rushed to the hospital to see you. In the afternoon I found out that somehow you had found out anyway. Perhaps some well meaning nurse had been impressed by my dedication to you and thought you ought to know. They thought I was your girlfriend.

I do love you. I would never tell you that. It would sound false and melodramatic after everything that's happened. I loved you before I loved you like this but in the other way, the sisterly way. Now I love you in the way that makes me want you sleeping next to me. Not in the laugh at your jokes, smile at everything you say, you are perfect, won't last very long way. I love you in the way that I can hate you at the same time, that I can sometimes not like the person you are, find you irritating, frustrating, rude, will hold grudges against you, will tell you when you're wrong, will do pretty much anything to make you happy, will laugh at your stupidity and let you laugh at mine but love you anyway kind of way. That means much more to me.

tear

if you dont fix her shes just going to carry on breaking til theres nothing left but crumbs

Coding

I've lost an airway,
blown a pupil,
Train Wreck Code.

O2 stat dropping,
abdomen distended,
need a Lavage.

Need a crash cart,
bag her,
run the fluids Wide Open.

Dopamine,
a pacing wire,
No Pulse.

I am coding,
crashing,
burning.

The opposite of sinister

It all began with the strangest few days she had ever had. One bottle of whisky, two of vodka, three of wine and four mararitas on friday night had led to a moment of madness where kissing Stuart Etheridge had seemed like a good idea and brought on a headache the size of Jupiter the next morning. The Etheridge incident had reached the ears of everyone who knew them both by precisely twenty past eleven which meant a day of epic embarrassment for Lucy and of obvious jokes for everyone else. Not only did Lucy quite openly dislike Etheridge, for various reasons, namely his distinctly more dexter position on the politcal compass and the fact that he irritated everyone he met, but the last thing she needed was another man to worry about. At least refusing his lunch invitation wasn't going to be a problem as she didn't have to worry about bruising his ego. It could take it.

But it wasn't because of Etheridge that she decided to top up her already rocketing blood alchohol levels on the Saturday. She liked to think that it was just out of politeness that she had to get spectacularly drunk at her own house party, but she had an aweful suspicion that the other he had something to do with it. The decision to consume massive quantities of unmixed spirits had certainly coincided with his decision to leave, his cliched reason for the early departure and his unfeasible excuse for not having made time for the talk that he finally suggested should happen. In fact the more she thought about it, the need to reapply eye make up had occurred then as well. Thats when she first thought up the plan to drink straight from the spirit bottles rather than have the inconvenience of having to use a glass. She wasn't quite sure when the cigarettes got thrown into the mix, nor when the cigarettes began to be replaced by joints, but exhaustion, alcohol and pot were proving to be a pretty damaging mix. Perhaps this could be construed as a good thing, as when people started doing coke of the kitchen worksurface, the various narcotics in her system changed this potentially quite worrying act into an object of she amusement as she wantched stoned drunks try and roll fivers straight.

For me, attacking her.

For me, attacking her.


I did see you
out there in front, just to the right, ruining my sightline.
You were away from your lover.
Ruined her maybe. Spat down from above her.
It wouldn't be the first time.
She was to the left.
Ten o'clock bitch.
Two o'clock witch.
Actual witch.

I walked home,
taught
tense
warped.
My step quickened at the thought
of you and what you did and how you probably never knew
and if you did it makes it worse.
You are the curse of womankind, you are.

My fists tightened in my pockets like cliches.
My nails scratched my palms as yours probably scratched his back
I'll scratch you back. Your face, your eyes.
It will probably be the only way you'll ever see.

Antiochus

Antoichus loved a woman, way back in ancient Greece.
The woman was a beauty and her name was Berenice.
He was a king, and here's the thing,
He could have married anyone.
He wanted Berenice.

Their friendship grew in Palestine, at first it was enough.
Antiochus felt for Berenice, she felt for him
but Berenice she knew that this new feeling
was was fond but not in love.
Antiochus, he had a little trouble dealing
with a woman who was more, much more
to him than any woman quite before.

Perhaps he should have told her, and there was once he did.
He told her that he knew that this new feeling
was more, so much more than what he ever had before.
She hid.

So he shut his mouth and didn't speak no more
about the love that smothered anything before,
And they slipped into the phase, that terribubble phase,
where friends come first. And oh my days,
did poor Antiochus hate each minute that his Berenice
wasn't his but passed from kiss to kiss with other men.
But get this, she came to him with man troubles,
with sighs and tears and rants and weary confusion:
he said this, what does that mean?
He said that, what does that mean?
Loves me? Loves me not?
Thinls I'm ugly? Thinks I'm hot?
And desperate she clung to his robe,
whilst inside he never gave up hope.

You may feel cheated, as this tale, it has no end.
He loved her forever; they were never more than friends.
I wonder if he'd told her, whether she would take him in,
like a puppy on the pavement with a love endearing grin.
So there's the story, siyanora, das vidanya, peace.
I have been your Antiochus, you have been my Berenice.

...

...in fact it was you...

For him, in apology for her

For him, in apology for her.

If I ever see you again, I can't think what I'd do.
I can't see how you could
tear and
rent and
break like that and not regret
the fact that you begat that heartache.
Yes all that 'heartache'.
Fact.

I'd like to think I would break and tear you too,
to rend anew,
but the feeling persists: it ain't my battle,
resist.

He has a voice you know.
Did you know?
Probably not. No.
It was your voice, you know, secret voice,
I heard it too.
By accident.
It was probably meant for you.