Lauren on the knoll, hiding in the mountains, sliding down the basin. Lauren far from the airport and high in the trees, watching the aeroplanes, the vipers in the baby sky and so willing and able, so full to the brim with potential, Lauren standing before the pin prick lights in the night. Buzzing in her beehive. Lauren.
Through the long stare, on the dirt track, with the lights like icing on a cake, glistening an electrical happy birthday, Lauren reaches out to touch only the air. And down there are homes and in some of them people lighting candles on cakes, and blowing so breezily blowing away the last year. The slight smoke that lingers in the air, another Ash Wednesday prayed away, and may this never ever happen again, not on a day when someone is celebrating their birthday.
Lauren, drawn back out to the lights shivering in the cold, almost in anticipation to explode and in their hover joining to form crystallised snakes, swimming down freeways. Lauren surrounded by the quiet of God in the trees, where their rough bark was burnt and turned to what looked like tar. When Lauren was a child and watched the furious flames steal the mountains face. The fire, finally, saving grace in Laurens arms. From the glowing box of a wood heater to a flaming Venus, burning down the house she once humbly worked to warm.
Lauren on the knoll, hiding in the mountains, sliding down the basin from here can feel the moving of trains in the earths plates. And hear from here can Lauren, can listen to the transporting of bodies, entering and exiting the town. Closing her eyes against the cool breeze. Eyes expelling liquid, down her cheeks. Lauren far from the lighthouse and the sea, where the rock pools, once wandered across, now rest in waiting before the caves old mouth. Upside down and sleeping, bats in their holes stirring from their dreaming of Lauren wandering in and out of their home, with a sea shell in the shape of a girl and the last wave, paddling about her heels.
With the sun in the water uncovering the seahorses who, coy and fragile, blush against the glow. Water warming, turning salt into summer, recalling how that Jesus fellow turned water into wine and could he change the volcano within the deep, and seed it with grass in replace of lava? Thinks Lauren. So many birds eating fish. The whales and dolphins sending telegrams through kinetics. Telegrams of ways in which to heed the whalers and sharks. And what of Walsh, thinks Lauren, across the bay of lights in a rip of traffic and 24 hour supermarkets. Walsh in his cream room with cupboard spilling old news upon his shirts, crumpled and worn in, with the scent of his skin locked within. With scent of a new spring fading to old against the tree outside, nameless and growing fruits he can not eat. Fruits that, when touched, leave pungent scents of sap against his fingers.
Walsh searching in the dark for the light switch, so hopeful and smiling. Socks pulled up and fly undone. Recalling the day he fell in the street, the white denim suit his mother cut at the knees. And so cold against his pokey bones was the English air, so excited was Walsh to see a friend so special and now so long remembered and yet, forgotten. 'Who is that boy, now a man?' Asked Walsh to Lauren on a night that she, now, can barely trace her memory back to.
As their hands slid beneath the wire fence, so soft and warm, beneath feathers, where fleshy chickens slept. Wings in baskets before the universe, and ginger foxes, whose tails frisked bushes that whispered cries, in return, to warn off Walsh and Lauren. And as they prayed together that they could hold onto everything, hold onto everyone as if they were in the water, treading, preparing to drown. And giggling in the merry go-round of wine and private property, they listened so intently to the muttered clucks and sung, 'Where did all those everyones flee to?'
Now the morning rising from beneath that licorice strap of a horizon and, still alone and woken Lauren, full to the brim with spite for the sea who stole so much of what felt granted within her. Within the labyrinth of her chest bed, and smeared paint of her heart that Lauren, so careless and courageous, a raisin amongst the grain, threw her fish back before the sea could lure him away with her undulating, always coldly tactful embraces. And straying from tears but falling to long logged pauses, Lauren calls a final coo to the colours that, since a child, had forever been before her.