Give me the sound of love Not the flesh, nor the bones But the tone Whisper it slow Let the words drift On the wind’s tide and Settle like snow
Roll them round Your chattering teeth Then echo it loud So all else is drowned Yell it out, burst a lung Oh give me your love til you bite off your tongue
let’s chill here for a thousand years lounge like Hollywood vampires who yearn light a candle to be dead romantic and not watch a second of its slow burn
let’s not talk or try to learn anything about anything, but be still as a stare go nowhere, see how long we can lay like this matted and tangled together like hair
let’s stretch out our limbs ’til we touch the wall finger the paintings until they all fall and imprint on our skin, then move the colours or we could stay still, and not move at all
but if one day we do want to go, get up slow drift together until the sun explodes, then float like poplar seeds, the summer snow – that might actually be nice, you know
She had wanted to listen to that new Phoebe Bridgers album on the drive home from school. Just shy of 41 minutes, she knew she would be home before the penultimate track, but was prepared to sit in the car until its finish, if the album proved worth it.
She waited until she had driven out of the area entirely, before connecting Bluetooth and pressing the play button on her phone. The car stereo came slowly to life. She allowed it all to fade into obscurity, rounding the corner onto Fairfield: the gates of the school, the bus stop, the manicured hedgerow, and the smattering of parked Audi parents in gilets and floaty dresses, waiting for their kids.
NME had promised a sonic palette – something close to ethereal – and she would give the album her full attention.
But it was not to be. Looming in the distance, four yellow roadworks signs, and a subsequent diversion, had already interrupted some of the finer dissonances in Track 4, and the experience had, all at once, been marred. She pressed the power button on the car stereo and stared through the windscreen, listening only to the beginnings of flat patter on the glass, and waiting for the lights to go green. She would have to take Hedley, and avoid the A road altogether.
I saw a dozen grey torpedoes hung, such monstrous baubles, in the depths of the ocean, motionless and unaltered by the heft of water surrounding them. Scattered indifferently, their fleshy tonnes suspended like great iron pendants, laid bare to the perils of foe and flow in a thalassic slumber.
We sat sipping tea in silent dread, to think of such cryptic bed.