Livi Topley

...

...

So slow the minutes of the day,
Are etched in your hard wood floors.
In the charnel house, where your spirits lay,
Only resentment is something you adore.
...

Because we‘ll cross at crossing and talk of nothings, sucking on sucky sweets, wrapped in wrappings that we found at the back of your car.
And because we’ll sit in stillness as time washes through us, I’ll tune my bass and you’ll play your guitar.
Those couples that touch and rub, and make out their feelings are nothing but love, and we’ll just laugh because we can, because you put your hood up and cried into the lining of your coat.
Waiting for buses to stop at plastic posts and pretending we’re the type of folks that live in high places and know all the faces, because we can and we do.
...

Her hair is just a combination of cheap blondes, slung across cold shoulders; she’s just waiting, so sick of waiting for something she knew would never happen.
And she’s stuck in white stilettos followed in broken buckles. She’s caught in a black and blue dress that swings on its own to a song that doesn’t make sense in a place that knots her up.
And there’s tears falling down her face that cut through her make-up and dribble off her chin.
And now the music’s pumping and she’s got her head in the clouds, sometimes that’s better then getting lost in the crowds.
...

Ode to the boy with chocolate coloured hair,
Though views are sometimes ignored, his heart will never be shut out.
For the memories and moments locked away in golden seams,
They will never be tarnished, they will never be fractured.
...

Again and again he cut the air with parts that splintered heroes that broke the fall of the dead, the wounded and the living.
He choked himself with his actions.
And now he see’s a blade disappear in the harsh, cold mud of war.
Oh reality, you bitter thing, you constant reminder of it all.
...

And there is a perfect moment, when we sit at the bottom and be,
There are no words to complicate, there is only you and there is only me.
By your feet there is confetti, that symbolises nothing, it is just there.
There is just an impulse that throbs like a heart beat, the constancy of reality.
...

By candle light we wait, for the meaning of her gun to make sense,
For the pictures in her head to publish.
Forgive me lord, I have sinned.
And this time the pieces don’t fit together,
...

And we feel these constant things,
these pieces, perfect pieces,
all arranged across the canvas in seperate rows and columns.
And self consciously we word our thoughts to a page,
...

My darling is cradeled in cotton,
though between empty breaths she's sorry,
for reasons that have stumbled away.
But my darling isn't sad anymore.
...

It's four and a half words on the back of a hand,
chewed down nails to the core and a hangover.
There's no sleep behind these eyes,
there's no beauty to this face cause I only look pretty in my shadow.
...

Tonight I do not deserve you, you and all your perfect truths,
I breathe forgive me.
Holding on to some type of dignity just isn’t me anymore.
I looked at you as if through thick opaque lens, marvelled at your compulsions.
...

I wake from early morning rise
with no hesitation of happiness.
My smile is stitched across broadened cheeks.
Soft pillows. Crumpled quilts.
...

I waited behind the curtains with my hands around the waist of some guy that I hated. We used to sit in the downstairs lobby avoiding eye contact and awkward conversation, but now we stood in victorian dresses and shirts, trying to forget our past.
It was late. The intolerance of fatigue. And he smelt of his car and that made things just a little bit more difficult.
Had I been polite, I would of wished him good luck, that was the person I had become.
He was good looking, of coarse, athletic build and a broken smile that every now and again he fixed. And beneath all his make up, the stage lights and the nerves I saw the way he bit his lip. The way he used to.
...

I cannot see past the intersection where we met,
where i am twenty years prettier and always laughing,
where the shops are boarded up with our confrontation and horrible cursed words.
I cannot see and only stand at the turning between past and present, wanting to lose myself in the marks in the stone.
...

Sit with me, she breathes, and we’ll play that game of truth or dare, that the kids play when they are bored and have nothing better to do.
She leant back to cut the air with her ribs. They stuck out all across her chest and down her side.
And she is laughing. And I am watching.
Can’t say I remember what she was wearing on that day. So hot all the colours of fabric ran into one big smear.
...

The same can be said for the woman,
who we undoubtedly found asleep on
the floor of our bathroom.
She had toothpaste in her hair, the colour
...

Will you buy me a cottage,
where the windows and doors lead to my dreams,
where the highest room feasts on my regrets like a junkie.
Will the walls be painted or papered,
...

I used to think of you,
when we would walk across the beach looking for shiny things,
or the nights illuminated by blue light that you said meant we were under the sea,
I used to think of you then.
...