annie-lang

This is charm: he waits faceless in the shadows so that you only recognise him when he appears and not before – there is no defence against the faceless until they have already breached the wall. This is lust: he hides in unexpected places and in the lines and smiles of unexpected faces – you may avoid the common markers, but lust himself has no face and there is no defence against the faceless. This is love: he lingers around the corners, digging his fingers into the pretty things that clichés are made of and if there is no defence against the faceless, then the face of love will ruin you. This is you: you don the

We will go when I am ready and not before. We will go south or west, or east or north, or wherever my thumb stabs on the map tucked in the front pocket of the jacket you haven't worn for a while now. And you will see the world as I do, without your rainbows bouncing off the walls of the waterfalls; you will see the leaves in the gutters and be sprayed by passing cars when it hasn't rained for months. You will leave your office shoes by the door and wrinkle your nose at country air fouler than the city. I will laugh and turn the car and bring you home. But mark, when that day comes, I will not stall the engine or traipse mud

My mother paid for painting classes for me. There were no artists in the family, and maybe by coincidence, there were no saints. I was only nine, and I don't know what she thought. In later years, she'd despair: ask where she'd gone wrong, and what hell was this she'd walked into. Painting classes were my hell. Endless hours, designing yellow oranges and blue hearts for a Valentine's Day I never knew existed. Ignorance is a bliss and a bore; and then something to cry over, when torn away. I stopped going when I was ten. My mother shouted, my father didn't care, and stayed silent behind his newspaper. There are no artists in the

I descartes my body: it's a verb now, because all that exists is my mind, and in my mind I can rule the world,  rule the language, rule the milling peopled chaos that doesn't exist at all. Open the window, my self escapes, drifting out of life and over the steel-windowed city. I am everywhere and everything as the city exists here and only in my mind; so if I descartes my body then the only option left for me is to be God. So I am god, creating lonely seas and skies in which to lose my mind. And if I could lose that mind, then I do not exist at all. I descartes myself and the atheist God is born.

The sky has fishbones – skeletons swimming across the plain and the city a coral reef, dead and rusty now. Perhaps the clouds are not bones but cuttlefish; a thousand rows of wispy bone and shell. I have the attic room. I sit in my wooden chair and all there is is an ocean above my head. Which do I fear – that the window seal is not watertight, or that if I open it, I will be the one to slip into the sky and drown?

The first was a firework. Exploding suns, tiny in their brilliance, in the pit of a night sky. The flash and bang, and if you stood too close, the earth rocked beneath your feet, like God's vengeance had returned. You could see your face: gold and red and purple, white and flash, and sometimes an eyesore blue in the moment. And a moment was all: the suns would die again, their brilliance snuffed out, and the silence would sweep back in. But the joy, the involuntary smile, the step back only after the burn, and the throwing of caution to the wildest winds of all. The second was a candle. Lit carefully, and to burn forever.

I won't tell you of the greater things; you'll find them out yourself. We've all learned where love and hate are, and when to cherish what we have; when to sit back and relax, and which battles to choose. I can tell you of the little things: the relationships where your biggest fights are where the salad cream belongs, and the friends you haven't spoken to in years but still call bests all the same. I ask you to remember that when the taxi costs too much, the rain outside would make you more miserable. Indulge the guilt of imported food, just once, to celebrate your meaningless promotion, and let yourself enjoy it when your b

It is nothing to do with time, thinks Aristotle: just like a geometric line is not made up of a series of points, time is not a series of nows. But let me ask you, Aristotle, things that I cannot. My now is not yours; my now is now and your now belonged to a world that does not exist. Your descendants are unknown and you would not know them if you could. Your name is a myth lost in the past and the streets you walked are long gone. If time is indivisible, then you were divided and fell like invisible dominoes to make a history that led to me. Some said that time was finite. You argued with Zino in the long ago and told him he

There is no heaven at the top of the sky because the world cannot be that small. A blue free-fall to end at a gate insults the black free-float beyond. And how do we dream of brushing our fingertips over the helium burn of the stars and the alien suns, if heaven hems us in to our goldfish bowl below?

The leaves are shivering. I do not know the type of tree, nor care, but the breeze is barely strong enough to ruffle my hair or disturb the sun-warmth on my face, or let me ignore the pop and fizz of champagne freckles beneath my eyes. The leaves are shivering, all the same, and I wonder what they are afraid of.