My third grade teacher called me a word miser,
I suppose not much has changed.
Maybe I’ve just become selective,
or maybe you force words to
stay lodged inside my throat.
But maybe words really don’t say that much.
Because I see more letters in those
forest eyes than all the books I’ve buried myself in,
and your lips could write pages with
all the softness that they hold.
So we live in emptiness together
like we never want to leave.
They will have to drag us out,
if they can find us first.
I know you won’t ever let them find us,
because you grasp time within your fingers
and hold stillness in your bones.
It’s okay if you’re scared.
I’m sure it’s for the same reason I am,
and for the same reason you
place a napkin on your lap when you eat:
you don’t trust yourself.
But that’s okay,
you only need to trust me.

I found you.
Amidst distant humming grasshoppers
and humid evening air,
I found you.
Or maybe you found me.
Maybe you’re finding me.
2 am came early last night;
our words far too honest,
our eyes far too tired.
Maybe our bones too.
Ignoring time’s mandates you
ripped my heart straight from my chest
with bare hands
(living)
(pulsing)
(messy)
and laid it on the table next to yours.
I’m still not sure how to put it back,
so I’ll carry it around with both hands
until you’re there to examine it again.
And I’ll spend all the time apart wondering
why it feels better
outside of my ribcage.

She was told from
an age so young
that she indeed possessed all
the magic she needed
within herself
to set
the worlds
to right.

She placed daisies in
her long black hair
and skipped to the beat of her
own made songs she sang to
herself each
and every
day she
was alive.

She was often alone
rarely with friends as
she found comfort in the faeries
she spoke and sang to while
the swing
blew her
hair in
her face.

She giggled when with her
only little sister to whom
she adored more than
each breath she took
each and
every day
even more.

She stood firm at home
never allowing her fathers
drunken words of pain
penetrate her self made wall
of anger, hatred and despair
inside her
mind there
stood angels.

She closed her eyes at night
wishing the demons to
disperse into the heavy winds
that howled through the rafters
reminding her
she was
infact alive.

© Sia Jane

You will not tame this sea
either by humility or rapture.
But you can laugh
in its face.

Laughter
was invented by those
who live briefly
as a burst of laughter.

The eternal sea
will never learn to laugh.

Look in the mirror. Let us both look.
Here is my naked body.
Apparently you like it,
I have no reason to.
Who bound us, me and my body?
Why must I die
together with it?
I have the right to know where the borderline  
between us is drawn.
Where am I, I, I myself.

Belly, am I in the belly? In the intestines?  
In the hollow of the ***? In a toe?
Apparently in the brain. I do not see it.
Take my brain out of my skull. I have the right  
to see myself. Don’t laugh.
That’s macabre, you say.

It’s not me who made
my body.
I wear the used rags of my family,  
an alien brain, fruit of chance, hair  
after my grandmother, the nose
glued together from a few dead noses.  
What do I have in common with all that?  
What do I have in common with you, who like  
my knee, what is my knee to me?

Surely
I would have chosen a different model.

I will leave both of you here,
my knee and you.
Don’t make a wry face, I will leave you all my body  
to play with.
And I will go.
There is no place for me here,
in this blind darkness waiting for
corruption.
I will run out, I will race
away from myself.
I will look for myself  
running
like crazy
till my last breath.

One must hurry
before death comes. For by then  
like a dog ****** by its chain
I will have to return
into this stridently suffering body.  
To go through the last
most strident ceremony of the body.

Defeated by the body,
slowly annihilated because of the body

I will become kidney failure
or the gangrene of the large intestine.  
And I will expire in shame.

And the universe will expire with me,  
reduced as it is
to a kidney failure
and the gangrene of the large intestine.

I made small talk
with your ex-lover at a train station.
I reminisced about dinner,
and I gave him advice on shoes
because he was barefoot.
He kept moving a pen
from pocket to pocket,
the pen being a nice one,
perhaps a gift from his father.
He spoke of sparrows
pecking at him in nightmares.
I commented that the 5:15 was late,
and it disturbed his thoughts,
his face like a geezer startled from a nap.
He never asked about you.
I did mention autumn,
which reminds me of you,
the bare trees trembling
like your legs
on the night you left me.
But before I could complete my thought
the birds had already diminished him.

We drift
on the winter sun’s glints,
where the horizon is a musician’s lips
pressed tight on a horn
repeating a note in 12/8 time.
When I met you
I thought you said you were a parasol,
and I imagined you
spinning upward in a painter’s daydream.
At this moment
we find each other where things are lost,
or—let me put this better—
where we’ll never find each other again.
We’re caught in the memory of shade
as we drift
beneath the ligatures of nimbus,
or in your words a mean-loooking sky.
All bliss drips into each of us
at this moment
when we don’t feel lonely.
But I won’t share what I protect.
These confessions
are for someone else I haven’t met.