When I was seventeen
I met a boy named Alexander
He was an awkward sweet sixteen
Angsty teenage dreamer
Who wrote bad puns
And poetry
In my textbooks
When he sat next to me
In philosophy.
We crashed into each other
Like only teenagers do
Like a car crash,
100% fatal.
We became those little parts
Hidden inside each other,
Those secret
Persecution complex
Pieces
That we could never share
Outside of our
Two-person canvas.
Over the days and weeks
And years and tears
And tears,
The moves the changes
The discoveries of love and life and art
We didn’t grow apart
But so much closer,
Despite the fact he kept getting further
Away from me;
With his star bright ambitions
Shining and shimmering
revealing
His talent for talentedness.
Our lives now seemingly
Headed in directions
So far removed from
Where we started,
He tore himself out of me
And left dreary Canberra
For the evocative placenames
Of London.
He didn’t actually leave me
Not really,
At least not completely
Because in all my empty places
He left me tomes of poetry.
And if words were memories
He left me with overproof rum
And Blackadder.
He left me with Russian Spy
Satellites disguised as black swans.
He left me walking the street of Sydney
At 3am
After watching Amanda Fucking Palmer
Make love to her ukulele
On our table
In her underwear.
If words were blankets
Then he left me with enough
To last me
(And the people sleeping
In Civic)
The biting winter
Of Canberra weather.
If words were flowers
I would have enough
To fill the Arboretum
And cover this city
In petals for the next
Hundred years.
If words were steel
My friend would be a master armourer.
Hammering his paper anvil
With the keys of his typewriter.
Forging fantasy in the flames,
Austenized with dreams
And quenched in spilled ink.
Creating worlds worth wearing
Into the battle of life.