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.