It was as if the sunlight had been caught between your hands, as you weaved them to perform your intricate snipping, the morning flashing off the scissors – staring back at my reflection
My reflection staring back at me – as the shadows licked the desk and you cut away the edges, you tell me that this art is tasteless, I can only but agree.

There, right there! In the sweeping blades held the faintest glimmer of god.
Too far beyond the shore to swim back to the prison.
I just watch entranced at the precision of their incision as you carve away your gift, from a square to a ship.
‘To space!’ whisper I, ‘to the other side of the moon’ you reply.

Your eyes hungry for my reactions eating up every anxious movement. But, on your ready fingers, just some paper. Almost disappointed, no solar flares or all-consuming feelings, the world stayed on a tilted axis only my heart reeling. You tilted your head.
Should I pretend, as I gobble up a star to be grateful for its twinkle but to forget where we are?

It was just a piece of paper, I couldn’t write on it; your little paper was far too small, but I wrote, on it. Words stacked on words, on letters on rhymes, scratching at keys – they chime as I jingle their chains and you open the door.
Writing till the screen was black, understanding no more.
The world around me never caught fire but everything I knew burnt down, and I, the phoenix, headed only for the sky.
An hour later we were hang-gliding off stars, then you asked me why, why I lost my words. I didn’t speak, except to say – only but my name. Like speaking a foreign language it stumbled across my tongue, held itself unsteady on my lips as it tumbled into the air. I must have caught some of the syllables in the dust because you told me I was crying. Perhaps the ash of my past-life, a half-life was stuck on my eye.

I was just a piece of paper, balanced on your tongue, but words fell from that square like rain but ink, I a creator– and dropped out from beneath my fingers in steady streams of black on screens. As I sat on the bed with just you, and wrote story after story, in the darkness of my room.