You close your eyes and count to three
“Will I be alive if I go for five”, you ask me
I hold you in my arms like you’ve fallen asleep
As if I will carry you to bed like our da did
Your pale face shaking and looking through me
And I can see now the resemblance between you and me
Your breathing stops but you continue to bleed
Just close your eyes and count to three
Close your eyes and count to three
Found him lying in the middle of the road
Hot and confused and his past all loose
I knew then his story wasn’t over, a brutal end would come for him
And that one day it would come for me too
I wonder if they miss me
I wonder if they’re proud of me
Once I’d grown up I forgot all about them
Once I’d grown up I left the house and hoped to never see them
I miss how it felt to be within their strong embrace
They used to be strong and kept me hidden, kept me safe
Now they just seem so small when I’m around them
And frail when I touch them
Thin
They watched me lose all of my friends
Over and over and over again
Kept an unblinking eye on the road
When they knew I was out somewhere, and I was probably cold, and alone
The days I ran excitedly home
The days I was miserable, or irritable, or preferred my phone
I used to shout my hateful spit at them
They would never reprimand, nor react, which was what I needed, for them to understand
They never spoke but they always welcomed me home
They listened to me implore God to start
They listened to me implore God to stop
Somehow, I miss them a lot
Nobody knows me like the four walls of my childhood bedroom do
They are ancient tomes;
Moon and water,
Push and pull,
Yin and yang,
Harmony and discord.
Which bustle and bend within the spirit of the Gemini
Whom all know;
Every mind is a city
And we thirst to reside there;
In all of them, In all of you.
Our behaviour the balance of your mind,
We sway our hands dangerously holding the scales of your sanity,
Effervesce and fix.
You’ll know us in the crowds, by our eyes
Wicked side smile and insipid side step,
Narrowly avoiding what would destroy us-
After feeling the threatening tremble of it’s power,
How we wouldn’t have it any other way,
Pain and pleasure.
Addicted to the taste of our trauma,
We obsess over the identities of secrets,
We speak in whispers and reveal them but in a tongue you won’t understand
Plume and harden.
It’s being made of glass, with a dark past
It’s honey warm eyes, with a cold unbeating heart,
Of speaking code, the yes behind the no,
Of delivering soul, at a cost of everything you know
Hold and dislocate.
The Gemini, must survive in duality;
In constant confliction,
A mind unremittingly broken,
A mind relentlessly constructing.
Disintegrate and redintegrate.
Shoe-shinning gloss glimmers from those fangs,
Sweet-scented venom
Cut-throat,
Heart-stopping
Liquor,
Suckle at the teat while the Cobra sleeps
Because I’m a sinner for the drink,
That vicious sip –
The burn –
The rip –
So pure –
So rich –
Bleaches my heart
I hate my room
But I never leave it
I can’t hang up the flag but I decorate the walls with pictures of my friends because I can see the pride in them
I hate the town
My name has never escaped it
The walls that tell strangers I’m a faggot
I’ll never know who wrote it, or who knows it
Keep my head down
By, I, feeling of displacement
All in all, headlights on a rabbit
I can never move, I can never get out of it
It’s in my head now
Everything is rearranged around it
It’s tree sap sticky and elastic
It’s a virus – it’s a carrier, it’s a transit
It’s associated with my friends now
Likely the ones who wrote it
A carefully shoved knife in the back
From the people I trusted with it
I wonder who profited from it
Do they still get a surge each time I think about it
Are they happy about it
It’s a sinking feeling
Sinking back in
To the mud I had scraped clean
And the blood I had grated unseen
Since I was thirteen
Leo Grey 