Saturday Nights

Saturday nights

Saturday nights are cold

Feet strangled by fleece-lined socks that instigate cool sweat

Like a clammy fever

Dripping nose, lungs tight

Heavy breath

The thump thump thump of a heart, easily felt, provoked just from walking up a flight of stairs

But relax Safe

Ugly, oily, dirty, unclean

Tea to lips

Insides soothed with the heat of watered leaves

Hair unwashed, face untouched

Not painted, prodded, washed with chemicals that leave animals sick

Saturday nights

Where the world is partying in the sharp chill of winter’s foreboding

You are stuck cold, unwanted, but safe

Cosy

Saturday nights

Procrastinating, waiting for nothing

A black phone screen you wish to be filled with green light

But without stimulation

You’re unharmed

With trackies and $6 jumpers that are so big they touch your knees when you bend

Clothes strewn across the floor

Fur coating the carpet, the sheets

Fingertips kissed with warmth with every sip you swallow

The insulated porcelain, cooling quickly

With limited appreciation, your only choice is to refill

5 cups later

No work done

Harry Potter blaring on the television downstairs

Snapchats empty with week 11 madness

Sneezes sharp, satisfying

Drawing back in breaths of wet mucous through the nostrils to restrict dripping

Saturday nights

Roll toilet paper to sandpaper your nose

Blocked ears that pop

Dry lips, dry nose

Red, blotchy, ugly, unready for society

Empty bed

His silhouette lingers

Unseen by eyes but pestered through the mind

You could see it so clearly

Beer to his fat lips

Hair flattened with oils

Begging for you to swim under his arm

Ear nuzzled into sour armpit

But mind, you don’t

You count

You count the facial hairs

The lines on his forehead

The wrinkles in his knuckles

It these things you want to know

You love to know

On a Saturday night.

He sips

He burps

He laughs as you punch him

He makes sure his lips are lined with deliberate slober as he kisses your forehead You count

You feel

The seconds add up as you wait for his saliva to dry on your forehead

Guarded by thick makeup

On a Saturday night.

His music fills your room

With an unsettling tone

But you welcome it

Because he likes to listen to this

On a Saturday night

Your poetry is linked through his lyrics

You ask to hear

Because nothing is more pure than such writing

His words are personal

Lodged in the back of his mind

That no one cares to invade

For it’s the outside that people seek to fuck

On a Saturday night.

But you want to thrust into his mind

Fuck sweet words out of his lips

Feel his gentle emotion

Taste the wet purity

Kiss the uncensored truth

To undress his mind

Find your heart rippling with excitement to discover

What he seeks to hide

To only show

The people he truly trusts

On a Saturday night

It’s only when it’s exposed

That his smile sinks

His eyes shiver

Be a man, he tells himself

Get over it

He is vulnerable You wince and think this

But nothing is more vulnerable

Than the answers he returns

Because in that moment

Your clothes are ripped off you

His words penetrate your mind

Haunting it

Hurting it

Guilting it

But not on this Saturday night.

This Saturday night was the one you never had.

This Saturday night, your clothes are loose

And that’s okay

Straps slipping off shoulders

Elastic wearing out

Pants unnecessary

It’s sweet

It’s cute

It’s safe

And you’re together

Watching a movie in your filled bed

With chilled alcohol

Freezing your feet

Which are prodding each other’s hairy legs

You can choose where the night goes

But no matter what, it will be safe

He won’t leave you

On a Saturday night

Sadness may dawn on the both of you

Tears delivered into each other’s loose t-shirts

But that’s when the lights dim

The blue fairy lights twinkle overhead

Your hands are held tightly

Clammy

But comfortably

Reassuringly

You’re safe

Because you have each other

And you smile at him when his eyes can no longer bear to look into the artificially heated room surrounding you

It’s us against the world, you say

We are the coolest

It’s you and me

And nothing else matters

We’re superheroes for each other

Together, we take on the world

We hold each other in the darkest, most vulnerable hour

That humans used to be most weary of in the cold dark caves

Of the survival days

Those days still exist

But in a different way

I won’t let you be eaten alive

As I know you won’t let me be either

We’re safe and we’re held

Your lips on mine is a promise

That such a bond is only broken

When you leave

To kiss another girl

As you are probably doing right now

On this Saturday night.

But what I will miss most

Are the Saturday nights we will never have

You refused to have

That I still can’t understand why

Because it seems so perfect in my mind

To have half of our bodies threatened without clothes

With a heater refusing to climb higher than 19 degrees

But the heavy weight

Of sheets

Doonas

Quilts

Throwovers

My body against yours

Warming us

Opposed to the chilled alcohol tingling our throats

Building the gas in our bloated stomachs

Our laughter when our body functions naturally

Teasing each other

Watching each other

Your eyes scanning the trio of fake colour in a single strand of my hair

Analysing the redding skin that I’ve scratched on my exposed chest

Popping out of your loose t-shirt you let me wear

On a Saturday night.

The world is happening out there, you say

And here we are

Like lazy fucks

Wasting our time

Watching it on a screen

I smile

Just this once Just this Saturday night

No, you reply

This is real.

Adventures take place with the sun’s watchful eye

Watching us sing terribly, skimming across the curved mountains of the Great Ocean Road

To find solitude in an empty beach

To swim in our plain, boring underwear

Laughing through the chill of the splashing waves

To grab me and push me under

Kiss me in a world without oxygen, without words

Without evil humans

Just the pumping of our minds Louder than the wind howling above the surface

We kiss until we can’t breathe

When we erupt to the break of day

Coughing out salty water

Thick, gross mucous dripping from our noses

That was a terrible idea, you heave

But you knew I’ve always wanted to have another’s lips touch mine

Under a surface so dangerous

Yet so safe from human contact

And I can’t help but cling onto you

Kiss your cheek

For acknowledging that I wanted such an experience

And you wanted to give it to me.

We swim to depths where our feet can’t kiss the grains of the earth

We both panic as waves threaten

Fat speedbumps of water slowly creeping towards us

In vulnerable depths.

But we lean back

Refuse to look Hold our breath

Clamp our eyes shut

Our bodies rise beside each other

We panic

We laugh

We swear

And then we are gently swept behind it

As it crashes in the sand forcefully

As though Mother Nature is nodding at us

No worries, she says, I won’t ruin this day for you.

The hands of the water drip free from us

The cotton in our undies sag

Which then crusts with the ocean’s salt

As we dry through the heat of a dying sun

You chase me

You race me

You almost let me win

We play volleyball

We dive for the ball

We chase it

We race each other to keep it up

Laughing as best friends

You push me over and hit it far away

I growl at you, lying in the sand, refusing to move

You get it

But still laughing

You run

You return it

You pull me back up

Tickle the smile out of me

My fake frown is killed

All fakeness is murdered because together, we’re real.

We lie down

We sleep

We keep to ourselves

I read

You listen to music

Your fingers twitch in time with instruments

My lips move with my scratching pen, words scanning through my brain

Words like these

That I am writing On a lonely Saturday night.

The night sky erupts with stars

But slowly

But unnoticeable

One star becomes six

Where did that one come from?

The wind chills

Your arm heated around my neck

Towels becoming blankets

I ask about your childhood

Of a boy long dead

But thriving in the body of a new one

You smile As if such a boy is nothing more than a character existing as fiction

As your stories brighten my mind

Like the nightlights across the ocean’s border

And then you ask me

You ask me everything

Everything you’ve ever wanted to ask

You ask me what my favourite colour is

What words please my mind

How did the freckles erupt across my skin as years added to my age?

How did my nose bleed so much?

How I taught myself to deal with it?

I tell you my methods

I tell you the rights and wrong

You frown, but your smirk is genuine You tell me I’m silly

That my mind focuses on all things unimportant

That’s not true, I say

Because you’re trapped in there all the time

We have to kiss

Because we have no other choice

But our lips shiver

Our snickers louden

That’s the corniest crap I’ve ever heard, you say when you pull away

And I agree

As we lie on the cooling beach

With stars as our witness On a Saturday night

I snooze gently

As your tough fingers

Hardened with manual labour

Smooth my hair around the curve of my ear

And despite laughing about it earlier

And though parts of us are laughing still, deep in our minds

We remind each other

Of all the corny things we feel

Not the: I love yous

Not the: you’re perfects

Not the: I’ll never leave you

Just this moment

What’s happening How we’re feeling

In this moment

It’s this moment right now, you say, that will have me smiling when I think about you next

Not in fifteen years

When we’re in love with other people

Perhaps married

Making babies with strangers we haven’t met yet

We’re not soul mates

But right now

This feels right

To feel no one else but you beside me

On this Saturday night

Our stomachs ache with hunger

Our skin leaves patches of cold sweat on each other whenever we readjust our position

The sand coats the skin on our face

Mixing in with my freckles

Your eyebrows flaking with grains of sand and sunburnt skin

Hours push the limited clouds across the sky

Brighten the atoms spotted in space

Our lips dry

Our throats beg for moisture

But we can’t move

From this safety

This relaxation

This corniness

This perfection that you made me feel

To want no one else to waste your time with than me

On this Saturday night

On this Saturday night

I sit alone

In an empty bed

In the spot where he used to sleep

On past Saturday nights

I sit next to my quiet phone

Which used to be shoved hard up against my ear for hours

Listening to his indiscernible words

That lit up with his photo

His name

On past Saturday nights

The room is quiet without his music

His shows

His movies

His burps

His alcohol swimming down through his lips

His stories

His tears

His lips kissing mine

I sit alone

Listening to the world happening outside

On this Saturday night

Alone

Fearful of hearing about him

In the happening

Outside

Not wasting his time

For wasting my time with him

Was the best-wasted time I ever got to experience

On such Saturday nights.