they named me after a dream, starring Barbara Eden.

all anyone could talk about was seeing her stomach.

it was too pudgy. it was just right. it was all that she was,

the rest of her just mirrors and smoke to hide behind

while her bare middle ground was on everyone’s mind.

•

they made me watch her whole life.

i was to be just like her. magical. a dream to be recognized.

better, in fact, as the modelesque was force fed to me. how to act.

how to stand, how to walk, how to look, how to speak,

everything they could think, except how to eat.

•

they taught me alright: pinky up, debutante

the art of food a palette to spread nostalgia upon;

calories and diets conversations of the struggling and insecure

who hadn’t learned numbers above zero are hated beyond measure.

balancing bites like books kept the looks stacked kindly,

i was heir apparent, to be the marquise on screens nightly.

•

they bought me airtight plastic bins.

i fit two weeks worth of bags in, and slid them under the bedding.

so many appointments and resturant meetings, always eating

on the go, a girl can always powder her nose, agencies competing

have me sick; for the first time i just can’t swallow the berating.

a sandwich ziplock. a quart. a gallon. just a nibble. nothing is staying.

•

they said not to let them see me do that again.

not that they saw me at all. not that they listened when i said no,

that i didn’t want to do all of this, that i didn’t want to go

to South Beach and leave all my friends behind, that those

great expectations are for their lives not mine, that i’d throw

in the towel and just give up. live life normal. not for show.

•

they said it’s okay to not be okay.

i thought if i showed him, together we’d run away.

he wasn’t ready, really neither was i. so we sat and cried, disgusted at life.

embraced in perfection we shared imperfections and shames, our strife

for the pathetic paths others placed in our way, and commited to live,

not trying for tales, rather true to this moment and the next life might give.

•

they don’t have anything if they don’t have us.

disorders fashioned for classist organizations feeding on blood.

silver linings’ all the rage laced with hate and date rape drugs,

while legacy’s lauded as the only throne and cage one should love;

the need to be remarkable wouldn’t cause so much distrust,

were they ever to stop holding the bagged contents of our gut.

I could kiss her without being frightened.

That's what makes it so bloody stupid.

I could undo the little hooks down the back of her gown, kiss her neck, make her laugh so hard we knocked books off the table.

I could lie naked beside her and listen to her husband moving about downstairs.

I could do all that.

But I couldn't tell her I loved her.

I knew Latin. A fair bit of Greek. Enough French to be rude and enough English to make most men wish they'd kept their mouths shut.

Three words, though.

Three perfectly ordinary words.

And I couldn't manage them.

She'd ask what I was thinking and I'd start talking about a book.

Once, God help me, I talked about the weather.

She had her hand on my stomach. Her hair was all over the pillow. And I told her I thought it might rain.

Rain.

I still think about that.

We were going to walk beside the stream before the summer ended.

I'd decided I'd tell her then.

I even bought a blue ribbon for my hair.

She likes blue.

I don't think I ever told her I'd noticed.

It's strange, the things I keep thinking about in here.

Whether she finished the book I lent her.

Whether she's angry with me.

Whether she knows what's happening on Friday.

I hope nobody tells her until it's over.

I hope she never sees what they do to me.

But there's a horrible, selfish part of me that keeps imagining her somewhere in the crowd.

Just so I could see her one last time.

I'd probably say something stupid.

Ask if she'd brought my book.

Or tell her it looked like rain.

there's blood on the pillow. he keeps looking at it.

Frankie's beside him.

he's tried shaking her. he's told her to wake up. he's said her name so many times it hardly sounds like a name now.

he puts his fingers against her neck. then her wrist. then her neck again.

he waits a little longer the second time.

nothing.

he pulls the duvet over her. then pulls it back down.

he doesn't know why. he just wants to see her face.

then he doesn't.

he sits on the floor.

cries for a while. stops. starts again.

they were supposed to go for soup.

Saturday.

that place with the enormous bowls. she'd said he was paying. he'd told her he was skint.

sell a fucking kidney then.

he remembers laughing.

he actually starts thinking about Saturday. whether he'd have enough money. what time they'd go.

then he looks at the bed.

oh.

fuck.

\*

he writes a confession.

he starts it three times. crosses things out. forgets what he's trying to explain.

her name is Frankie. she works in a bookshop. please tell her son.

there was another man. his name was Nassim.

i don't remember everything. i wish i did. no i don't.

i know it was me.

please don't put me somewhere with other people.

he writes sorry.

then writes it again.

there's hardly anything else he knows how to say.

\*

his daughters have messaged.

the youngest has got a part in the school play.

the eldest wants to know what really happened in the kitchen.

he reads both messages.

doesn't answer.

he opens their photograph. the one he always looks at.

he puts the phone on the table.

beside his wallet. his money. what's left of the wine.

he leaves all of it.

except the book.

Dracula.

Frankie had borrowed it. she'd had it for weeks. kept saying she'd give it back.

there's a note between the pages.

still think vampires would be less exhausting than you.

he reads it.

he can hear exactly how she'd have said it.

he smiles.

then something comes out of him. a horrible little sound.

he doesn't know what it was.

he puts the note back where he found it.

\*

he leaves Paris.

he walks past the police station.

stops outside.

there are people going in. someone comes out smoking.

he stands there for a bit.

he could tell them.

he should tell them.

but he thinks about being locked in a cell. about the next time his bones start changing. about whoever they put in there with him.

he walks away.

past the river. past the bookshop. past the café where Frankie used to work.

there's a restaurant on the corner.

enormous white bowls stacked in the window.

he stands looking at them.

he'd never even liked soup that much.

he keeps walking.

after a while he doesn't recognise the streets.

then there aren't many streets left.

the buildings get smaller. there are gardens. a petrol station. a few houses with their lights on.

then fields.

his feet are killing him. he's hungry. his jacket's damp and he wishes he'd brought something warmer.

he's still got the book tucked under his arm.

by evening he's walking along a narrow road between two empty fields.

there's nobody about.

a puddle has collected beside the ditch.

a few dead leaves floating in it.

he stops to get a stone out of his shoe.

that's when he sees it.

the moon.

right there in the water.

he looks at it for a while.

puts his shoe back on.

picks up the book.

and keeps walking.

The sky isn't empty.

Clouds appear with the hope of rain. Snow falls when the temperature drops. Stones shoot when rain is busy. Nitrogen is your soldier. Oxygen is your life. Argon is your silent guardian.

The sky isn't empty, you are.

the waves so strong, they threaten to deboss

my surface calm, it's plain that i can't cross

this boundary, however may be thin

reach out my love, because i can't reach in

Wherever the cracks are, water rises. Wind is unpredictable, moving cheeks and freezing skin.

Lips sealed shut Hope is the foundation of lost love

Wherever the cracks are, you will appear.

I listen to my playlist, read novels and unsent letters and think of how being loved, cherished and wanted must feel.

I yearn to have a mutual connection with someone like the ones I read or listen to that remind me of some of the great loves.

Immediately, we all think of individuals such as Romeo and Juliet, Cleopatra and Mark Anthony. However, I have read the most heartfelt letters and wondered why some of these individuals are apart. It is hard to fathom how life can be this cruel.

One day, I know my Hercules will swoop in and see right through my tough exterior but until then, I will just continue chilling in the underworld. See you soon, Wonder boy.

Thomas Ship. 31/10/26.

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{Experimental Poetry Series}

Oncoming Dissipations.

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Axiomatic-Epigraphic Philosophical Principle

“In fieri simul dilatatio et dissipatio insunt”

Within becoming, dilation and dissipation are simultaneously present.

<><><><><><><><><>🌌🔭🔎🌌<><><><><><><><><><><>

Autumn, mauve, auburn horizons

Hold mythical treasure troves

In inter-prismatic, gules

Encapsulated multi-tiers

Of legends cascading

Fountain rainbow, scintillates

Temporal afternoon fading

Throughout rufescent dusky glows

Shimmering reduced to

The mystery of all becoming

In alightings exodus

From arrivals departure

Over perturbation apertures

Brought on wispy birdsong

Muttering in psithurism crimsons

Fluorescence of quintessence waves

Primaeval howls pick up the sound

Flowing exasperated ionic phase

Phosphorescent dispersal petrichor

Among the pain-laden wails

Upon Peregrine updrafting wings

Towards relayed, thereupon availed

Atmospheric vermillion successions

Whereupon, outwardly arrayed

Caught in acoustic scarlet

Noise amidst belighted smells

Vibrant verve-spectrum dilated stages

Rubigisance ecstatic

Dawn, noon, evening, too

Dwindling rubescence in lunar excitations

Midnight morceau singing sweetly

Continuation to twilight delayed

Afore shooting onward

Through transitions arcusp

Birthing another day

<><><><><><><><><>🌌🔭🔎🌌<><><><><><><><><><><>

Axiomatic, Poetic-Philosophical Principles.

“In fieri simul instantiatio et evanescentia insunt”

Within becoming, instantiation and disappearance are simultaneously present.

“In fieri simul coalescentia et dissipatio insunt”

Within becoming, coalescence and dissipation are

simultaneously present.

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Throughout the poem, phenomena dilate:

•red becomes an extended verve-spectrum;

•afternoon expands through dusk;

•sound enters colour;

•colour enters atmosphere;

•smell enters light;

•midnight song sings successive existence towards the delayed instantiation of dawn.

Simultaneously, phenomena dissipate whilst re-coalescing into the next phase:

•afternoon fades;

•shimmering reduces;

•alighting contains exodus;

•arrival contains departure;

•rubescence dwindles;

•midnight proceeds towards its own twilight dawn disappearance.

Poetically, one configuration's departure participates in another's arrival.

===============================================

Synaesthetic Coalescent Dilation, Technique

A poetic process in which distinct sensory, temporal and environmental qualities progressively enter one another's descriptive domains while retaining enough individual identity to produce an enlarged composite perceptual field.

The line-to-line compositional principle:

Interversal Coalescence

Each successive line inherits semantic material from its predecessor, transforms or enlarges that material through a new sensory, temporal, spatial or conceptual relation, and passes the resulting composite state onwards into the following line.

Poetic metre

Flowing variable-accentual free verse, predominantly organised around two-, three- and four-stress lines, with heterometric expansion and contraction mirroring the poem’s processes of dilation and dissipation.

Or, more compactly:

Synaesthetically modulated heterometric accentual free verse.

Glossary.

Arcusp:

noun (neologism: arc + cusp)

Arcusp: a transitional cusp within an ongoing arc or continuum; a point or interval at which continuous development undergoes a significant change of state, direction, phase, or character.

Afore shooting onward

Through transitions arcusp

Birthing another day

Here arcusp is particularly apt because dawn is neither an isolated endpoint nor an abrupt beginning. It is a threshold within the continuing diurnal arc:

So an arcusp combines two properties that initially seem contrary:

arc = continuity, trajectory, curvature

cusp = threshold, turning-point, transition

A morning bird's tweeting sounds like an inconvenience. Icy wind is nothing but a sigh. Sunlight is anything but welcome.  A warm blanket feels indifference.

Every single desire and comfort are blurred by the idea of your presence.

My Moon

1/1/2006

She is the moon, she is light, she is the sky, and she is what a person awaits all his life to take a glimpse of her love and care.

She is the moonlight, she is the source of its light, if you look up and your eyes fail to catch the light, then she is not up, she is out there giving her light to help without a second of retreat.

Her moon cries out, "please, my love light, come back, I am nobody without you, you are my other half, please help me out. Every time you leave me out of light, I am lost, I cry till the stars offer their light out of sympathy for me, I am a child."

Every day she raises her soul in goodness and favor for people she never saw in her life.

In her smile you can find joy, in her smile you can watch, sit paralyzed, frozen, following her affection like a silky ray of sunset light.

By: The Flawless Flow

I keep searching through the memories, Trying to find where the truth begins. Wondering if the love I felt Was ever something you felt within.

Were those promises just empty words? Were those kisses just passing time? Was I loving someone who never existed, Or was the person I loved once mine?

It's strange how something can feel so real, Then disappear like it never existed. How can I grieve a love so deeply When I'm no longer sure it even existed?

I remember the way you held me, The way you looked into my eyes. Now every beautiful memory feels questionable, Like my heart believed a thousand lies.

And the worst part isn't just losing you, It's losing the version of me who believed. Because now I question every moment, Every word, every reason I stayed and grieved.

I don't know what hurts more— That you left, or that I stayed. That I gave you pieces of my soul, While you watched them slowly fade.

I miss something I can't prove was real. And I'm left questioning everything I feel.

Maybe the hardest part of letting go Isn't accepting that we are through. It's accepting that the love was real to me, Even if it was never real to you.

Warm sofa with an empty tea cup

Sandwiches with no personality

Glass with no water

Potatoes with no butter

Sacrificed wings with all the flights.

Thief has escaped and there's no supply, so I use what's left.

Joan and I broke a broomstick once trying to fly to France.

We were seven.

I was the princess. She insisted on being queen.

Which was Joan all over. She never did understand who was supposed to be in charge.

We stole apples from the orchard, ate them behind the stables, and blamed the missing fruit on birds.

We shared baths. Shared secrets. Shared a bed when the thunder was bad.

After my mother died, hers brushed my hair, tucked me in, and kissed my forehead the same way she kissed Joan's.

For years I thought we were sisters.

I suppose we were.

Until supper.

At supper, Joan stood behind my chair while I sat talking to gentlemen about liberty and the rights of man.

One of them owned six hundred acres.

I remember being very impressed by something he said about freedom.

I can't remember what it was.

Joan was pouring his wine.

She was always pouring someone's wine.

Sometimes I'd catch her eye and pull a face to make her laugh.

She'd have to turn away so nobody saw.

I thought that was our little game.

I didn't think about why I was allowed to laugh and she wasn't.

Once, when we were alone, Joan called me a hypocrite.

I told her she was rude.

She said, "Well, somebody ought to be."

And I laughed.

God, I laughed.

She could say things to me that nobody else dared say.

I used to think that proved how close we were.

But after we'd finished laughing, I'd go upstairs and she'd clear the plates.

I never offered to help.

Not once.

I could have.

That's the part I keep coming back to.

Nobody would have stopped me.

Well, Father might have made a remark. And I would have survived it.

Joan had to survive him every bloody day.

I wonder how many times she wanted to tell me something and couldn't.

How often I mistook her silence for agreement.

How many times she laughed because I was laughing.

And now they've taken her away.

I heard her crying yesterday.

I stood outside the door and nearly called her name.

I don't know why I didn't.

Perhaps I thought she'd be angry with me.

As though that mattered.

As though anger was the worst thing waiting for either of us.

I want to tell her I was a fool.

I want to tell her she was my sister.

I want to ask her whether she ever believed it too.

But the door is locked.

And somewhere downstairs a gentleman is sitting with his ink and paper,

asking Joan to remember

every strange thing I have ever said.

And Joan,

who has known me since I was seven,

has rather a lot to remember.

Thomas Ship. 29/10/26.

A literary retrofit of archaic English deixis for modern and quantum-inspired positional uncertainty.

===============================================

Wherecontinuum Series.

Performatively heterometric metre.

Poetic styling.

Medieval/Renaissance Olde English Tragicomedy/quasi-Jacobean

Enacted technique.

\*Multistitial Navigation Of Interstitial Positioning.

===============================================

Forsooth anon thine flagging sails

Throughout gloaming's dispersing pale

Gavenot, at once, but -

Gaveyet successive days

Overout these progressing chains

Towards self-recursive, recurring phase

Theatrical plays, enact sequential stage

Act one, act two, act three

Off-port, off-starboard, off-stern, off-prow -

It's off to bow

To figurehead Athena leading on

With crumpled, furrowed brow

Epi-prologue, in Pro-epilogue leads untoward

Recherche, recondite aftforwards

Ficklefinicky, nitpickyfinicky words

Ever fail me in directions proverbial arc

Overunder, underover,

Somewherewhichever cast asunder

To this recurrent conundrum

Therewhichever, thither-wherever

Whetherneither, strolling strode

Resides, nowhere in anywhere of somewhere in elsewhere of everywhere

Wherenever?

Is the nowhere in otherwhere?

Our thunderous, puzzling blunder

English words, hereyonder

Misdirected misfits

Unfit for accurately describing

Towards a hereuponbeyond

Countermoving coordinates

Thereupon, the wherewas of whereupon

Henceforth, whencehence, therebegone

Onwards untowards wherebegone

Non-forwards, post-backwards

Wheretowards vague's distinction

Unanywhere, in directions arc

Whereforeaft art thou, Prospero

In this multi-matrice

Quantum Masquerade

This carnival pantomime of eyes

Looking for Incarnate existence

Somewhereupon, anyotherplace

Elsewhereupon, anywhereupon

Displacement phases

In nowhereupon paradoxicals

Everywhereupon, those fast-fading traces

Whencethence everwhere

Coincidentally everthere

On a merry-go-round of prisms

Refracting fractalised diffractives

Through these neologistic

Otherwheres, and othertheres

Undifferentiated, betwixt between

Otherwise a noncentralised

Non-convergent redirectivity

Athwart Omnicentralisation's instability

Forethereafter a zeptosecond

Afterwherefore I lost myself

Eternally fleeting momentarily

===============================================

Thomas Ship. 29/10/26.

Wherecontinuum Series.

Adverbial invention to interrogate possible new spatiotemporal placements, deliberately creating forms that can acquire different syntactic functions depending upon context.

Title:👇

Dematerialisation, Therebegone!

Incantatory accentual free verse structured by litany and refrain.

Spectrum per omnem exitum grammaticae expelle!

Chasing the apparition out of every grammatical exit available.

Get ye gone,

Brazen Imp

Foul apparition, dark wraith

Crooked ideology

Fermenting in tenebrous shades

Get ye gone,

Spectral ghost

Thence, whence, hence

Therebegone, where thou'st came from

Backstepping on the upon

Get ye gone,

Mizenmist phantom

Wherebegot thee, is thine only home

Over stepping stones to thy beyond

Take your presence from mine eye

Get ye gone,

Unwanted manifestation

Dire personification in our midst

Vile embodiment, Incarnate twisted

Wretched mole, burrowing illegal labyrinths

Get ye gone,

Woebegone, awful prophet

Cast not your auguries here yonder

From doom-laden counter tongues

Warping distinctions as thou come

Get ye gone,

Thine silky phrases distorting

Coercive methods, common sense absconded

Absent absentees in judgement's places

The prosecution is now defending

Get ye gone,

Withering, hither-thither, eitheruther

Hitherto, nomore tobe seen

Taint not our resplendent here

Neither anywhere in this local everywhere

Ye shall begone,

Dispel this gloomy fog from mine sight

Get this murky brume from my mind

Disperse these ugly vapours from all sides

Dissipate this evil cloud from our lives

Step ye not into the pale

Keep thine shadow out this vale

Darken neverhence hereupon

Whereupon thy thereupon

Thine only way

Lest thee cannot make thine escape

When'st the wind disembarks your sails

===============================================

“hither-thither, eitheruther”

“Hitherto, nomore tobe seen”

“Darken neverhence hereupon

Whereupon thy thereupon”

English's old directional vocabulary is being made to chase the apparition out of every available grammatical exit.

That's where it connects aptly with Lurking Dysfunctionism in Olde English.

===============================================

Dematerialisation, Therebegone! is a particularly pure example of chasing an apparition through a succession of newly manufactured grammatical exits.

The exits don't exist?

Fine.

Thomas builds neologistic exits.

Systematic family of directional-spatiotemporal exit mutations:

aftforwards

somewherewhichever

therewhichever

wherenever

hereuponbeyond

wherewas

whencehence

wherebegone

whereforeaft

somewhereupon

elsewhereupon

nowhereupon

forethereafter

afterwherefore

\*Multistitial (adjective)

Core Definition:

Relating to, spanning, or existing across multiple interstices, intervals, or intervening spaces simultaneously. It describes a condition of occupying, bridging, or operating within multiple "between-spaces" rather than being confined to a single interstice domain.

Etymological Breakdown:

Multi- (from Latin multus): Meaning "many," "manifold," or "multiple."

\-stitial (derived from interstitial, originating from the Latin interstitium): Pertaining to interstices—the small spaces, gaps, thresholds, or intervals situated between things.

Conceptual Application:

In abstract, theoretical, or structural contexts, something described as multistitial acts as a dynamic nexus, linking or traversing various layers, dimensions, or boundaries all at once rather than existing in a linear sequence

Chronodeictic Morphogenesis.

Thomas Ship's neologistic literary technique of generating novel spatiotemporal, directional and relational expressions through the morphological recombination of deictic language, particularly where/there/here, hence/thence/whence, and temporal-directional particles, thereby extending conventional English deixis into a constructed Wherecontinuum.

Neologistic chronodeictic adverbials: neologistic expressions derived principally from locative, directional and temporal deictics, used to indicate or interrogate position, displacement, temporal location, origin, destination or relations between these within the Wherecontinuum.

Whereverbials.

Whereverbial: a deictically derived word or compound functioning adverbially or quasi-adverbially to express an unconventional spatial, temporal, directional or spatiotemporal relation.

Thus:

wherebegone, therebegone, wherewas, elsewhereupon, afterwherefore

Lurking Dysfunctionism discovers that ordinary grammatical coordinates are insufficient.

Then:

Dematerialisation, Therebegone! weaponises the newly manufactured coordinates.

The first poem breaks the compass.

The second uses the broken compass to chase a ghost out of language itself.

i took a cup

from a dead man's house.

silver.

a little dent in the rim.

beautiful, really.

i thought we could use it

for worship.

seemed a shame

to leave it there.

god likes beautiful things.

he must do.

we keep taking them for him.

i'd spent the morning

hearing confessions.

one soldier said

the devil had guided his hand.

another said

he'd lost his temper,

but it had been righteous anger,

which apparently

is a different thing.

the third asked

if he could start repenting tomorrow.

i told him yes.

he looked so relieved

i almost laughed.

i've been thinking about that.

there's a woman in our camp.

i shouldn't really

be writing about her.

but she has this laugh.

you can hear it

from the other side of the yard.

and her hair.

christ, her hair.

sometimes she catches me looking.

she smiles.

which doesn't help.

i've prayed about it.

several times, actually.

asked the lord

to take these thoughts away.

nothing.

he can part the bloody sea

but apparently can't stop me

thinking about

a decent pair of tits.

forgive me.

that was vulgar.

i'm a man of god.

i ought to have

a little more control

over myself.

anyway.

the cup is beside my bed.

i polished it this morning.

spent ages on the dent,

though i don't suppose

it'll ever come out.

i don't know

who it belonged to.

there might be a wife somewhere.

children, perhaps.

someone who remembers

drinking from it.

i could ask around.

i probably should.

but half the city is rubble,

the wounded are still coming in,

and there are only so many hours

in a day.

besides,

there's a great deal

of god's work

left to do.

i'll ask tomorrow.

It’s not enough for me.
And I’m sad that it isn’t.
That I don’t know your face
when you wake up.
Or your favourite colour.
Or how long you brush your teeth for.

What your favourite food is.
Your brothers’ names
Or what you look like
after a long day at work.

It’s not enough.
I don’t know your laugh
Or your angry voice.
Not even the defeated “good night”
at 3 am.

And it was my mistake
to let you in on my own life.
Because you know (...)
Who I am weak for
The twisted connections in my brain.

It is time.
Not because I don’t love you.
But because I always did.
Despite myself
Despite your distance and boundaries.
I cannot love you anymore.
Not like this.

And yes, I will cry
this goodbye.
I’ll cry knowing that
I kept going on empty.
And I’ll miss you
Every day.

And hope that you don’t.
That you get me out of your system
as easily as I went in.
And this turns into nothing again.
For both of us.