Brooke Forbes

My body aches 

From a fractured dream

Where you appeared:

Disassociated, dislodged, disempowered. 

You appeared through excerpts of hand written words,

Where it all started to go wrong,

Your friends said,

As you scrawled anti-abortion slogans,

Phrases I would never compare to poetry. 

You appeared in the form of body modifications, of elongated noses and melted gold fused to skull,

Of distortions and ugliness, 

Layered over a face I once thought I knew. 

You appeared through reference to previous dreams,

Layers of love-knowledge and memory,

Tied to together,

So hesitantly, with string. 

Here, in a previous dream,

We once walked the night sky together,

At peace.

And in this dream you are not really you, but everything “you” symbolises – an otherness, a strangeness, and entity unobtainable yet undesirable, a repulsion layered with a memory – that said, once, before to rot set in, once you were also mine.