WILD FLOWERS

28/02/201616/08/2021 / deuxiemepeau / 1 Comment

We were flowers in a garden,
we were wild flowers,
we were weeds for the wasps
to suckle on,
to suck us off
to suck us dry.
We were unclear
out of focus,
a wash of colour
in the distance,
already extinct
never distinct,
ever changing
ever wilting
ever wanting
something more
something more lasting
someone more substantial.
We were flowers in a garden
beauty being stung
too soon
too shallow
too light
never quite right.
We were wild flowers
dying before we’d been plucked.

All Words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

CARRIED AWAY ON THE WATER

13/02/2016 / deuxiemepeau / 8 Comments

From the nightmare
we wake to the dream
before we open our eyes to reality

I fear I fret I freeze I forge I face I forget

I love you, he said
from the pages of the book
in her hand as she sat alone reading by the window

I am alone I am alive I am only I am everything I am enough

We yearn so much
be to adults as children
then perish ever after in the absence of youth

I want I wish I will I wasted I was I withered

We mourn so much
for what we’ve lost in death
because we ignored the chance to celebrate life

Too soon Too early Too busy Too far Too late

He kissed her lips
beneath the darkness
and remembered the light of another, long forgotten

I like I lust I love I lost I like I lust I love I linger in the longing

I walk out into the water and the reflection
that rises from the surface
is the face of a shadow now drowned
a reflection of what once was
a skin long since shed
a kiss long since settled
a curiosity quieted
a loss let go of
a fear long since faced
and folded and floated away
to wherever the water runs to
after it washes towards me
through me and past me
past

the past of me

All Words and Photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

Photographs taken in Stockholm on a foggy morning walk around the islands.

THE THINGS THAT LEAVE US COLD, PART 4

11/02/2016 / deuxiemepeau / 5 Comments

If you missed Part 1/2/3, please click on the links below:

https://deuxiemepeau.wordpress.com/2016/02/08/the-things-that-leave-us-cold-part-1/

https://deuxiemepeau.wordpress.com/2016/02/09/the-things-that-leave-us-cold-part-2/

https://deuxiemepeau.wordpress.com/2016/02/10/the-things-that-leave-us-cold-part-3/

The Things That Leave Us Cold

Part 4 of 4(Audio version available to listen to; link at the end of page)

We’d been living together, the monsieur and the boy, for almost 3 months in our apartment when he first witnessed the illusion he’d created for himself of me being this mysterious, aloof, guarded kind of guy disappear beneath a laundrette and a lot of money. The phrase laundering money was never mentioned so literally before and I saw the shock of who I really was hit him, like the balloon falling back down to earth, like the mask had dropped and the man beneath stood revealed in his humble state. Somehow he’d formed this misconception that being a writer meant that I had this air of introverted, introspective, subdued magnificence, that my clumsiness was a charm indicative of my mind being elsewhere, dreaming up characters, scenarios, novels in the planning, when in truth I was just hiding out, settling into shadows, comfortable behind the door instead of walking through one and facing people and their complicated realities. Jesus, you know me, I was happiest sitting in my armchair, in my boxers with a book, although you quickly changed the boxers for fitted briefs, house pants and that ridiculous antique artist’s over-shirt which you thought bestowed me with a certain creative look while I thought it to be the perfect cover for a cadaver in a coffin. And yet I still wear it and the boy always laughs at me when I do as if I’m about to make a study of him for a portrait and I get suddenly defensive, can you believe it? I’m finally defending your choice, your taste, your shirt that I only grew to love grew when you were gone, as if that could somehow bring us closer together. He thinks I bought it for myself. Of course he does, because I told him I did. It was easier telling him that than telling him I wear it because you gave it to me and whenever I wear it I feel like a part of you is wrapped around me. I don’t sleep in it. He likes huggable sleeping positions and I don’t want him to touch you through the shirt. I know, I can hear myself saying it, admitting it to you, of course, not to him, never to him. We are monsieur and boy, sharing a little light on the edge of a life. One of us thinks this is real life while the other is just waiting it out. It’s not all the time, but I still see shadows and wonder, now and then, if they will become you, in time, in hope.

Anyway, back to the boy losing faith in my mystery. The washing machine broke. Saturday afternoon and you know how I like my routine, fresh bread from the bakery on the corner, newspaper, clean the house, do the laundry and head out while it spins to avoid the vibrations. So I went to the laundrette instead, Madame China was setting out her goods on front of her shop and laughed at me which was her way of saying hello. She’s still utterly incapable of speaking french so she just smiles and laughs, well, more like giggles but it still makes me uncomfortable. What do you say to a giggle?
Laundry loaded and left, I headed back to the apartment where the boy was waiting for a promised shopping spree for his birthday. I never have cash on me, these days no one does, its pin this, pin that but for some reason I’d taken out 500 euros the day before thinking it would be easier and fun to shop with cash. I was halfway into the bedroom when I realised, in the rush to grab the dirty clothes for the laundrette, I’d also grabbed my jeans. The jeans I’d worn the day before. The jeans I’d been wearing when I took out the money. The jeans which held my wallet. The jeans which were probably in the last stages of a rinse cycle, in the washing machine, in the laundrette, next to the laughing China woman. And in one single moment, everything changed.
He saw me that day, the real me, a mess of a man on top of a machine, looking more like I was trying to mount it than rid it of money, my money, now laundered money. He saw me and just laughed. I thought he would have panicked, turned and run but he just laughed. He laughed while I cried. The back at the apartment, our old home, his new one, he held me while I sobbed and then he listened while I spoke, broke down, broke it all out, told him everything. Can you believe it? I swear, if the machine hadn’t laundered all my money that day, that ordinary Saturday, I would have stayed, for the rest of my life in the shadows, waiting and wondering. Waiting for you, wondering if you’d ever come back.

But you never could, never would. It’s not possible. So, finally, I find myself here, standing on front of you. Finally back at the last place I left you. We were beautiful, sometimes a mess, sometimes a disaster, it’s true, but we were beautiful all the same. He knows me now. I let him in, can you believe it? I let him into the world I’d kept prisoner in the shadows and strangely, he, the boy, this creature has found a way to let the light in.
I’ll still think of you, I’ll still wear that shirt, sit in your chair, I gave him mine. But I might not think of you all the time.
Well, that’s it, that’s me. I hope you like the roses I brought you. They are white, they are in memory of the light that you once brought to me in a dimly lit bar. I gotta go now, Alex is waiting for me. It feels good to say that. To say that someone is waiting for me now. Alex, that’s his name. He now has a name.

“Au revoir,” he said as he turned and slowly made his way down the sweeping hill and out of the cemetery, feeling a weight lifted off him. Weight, wait, the waiting was over. Death would come for him one day too, just as it came for the others, even those we love and can’t let go of, but for the moment, death would be the one who had to wait because there was still more life to live.

All Words and Photographs of Paris by Damien B. Donnelly

https://soundcloud.com/damien-donnelly-2/the-things-that-leave-us-2

THE THINGS THAT LEAVE US COLD, PART 2

09/02/2016 / deuxiemepeau / 2 Comments

If you missed Part 1 you can link on the link here:

https://deuxiemepeau.wordpress.com/2016/02/08/the-things-that-leave-us-cold-part-1/

The Things That Leave Us Cold

Part 2 of 4 (Audio version available to listen to; link at the end of page)

I didn’t go looking for him, if that’s what you’re thinking. It wasn’t like that, well, you know me. I’m not what you’d call the outgoing sort, as I’m sure you remember. It was you who’d found me all those years ago. God, it seems like a lifetime and not just a few years that have whittled away. You’d seen me while standing by the bar with your beer, perusing the evenings prey while I sat, tucked away at the back, blocked in by a group of lively fashionistas, a timid dog feeling older than I should have, trapped and probably terrified.
But you came to save me. You, with those blond curls. You, in that brown sweater. You, with those pale blue eyes. You, with that look, that brazened determination to push your way through the dimly lit bar, the crowded tables and floor filled tote bags. But you were never one to let anything stop you, you never minded being looked at, being seen, being heard. You remember that time on the metro, someone got on and sang a dreadful rendition of La Vie en Rose, the one song that every beggar, talented or not, thinks every tourist wants to hear and they’re probably right but do the rest of us, the ones who were born here or the ones, like me, who came here looking for a new life, need to hear it also, day in, day out? It was the fourth time we’d heard it that day and it was by far the worst attempt so you stood up and sang it, full voice, full force, trying your best to drown out the accompaniment, much to the applause of the tourists on our carriage and to the dismay and utter horror of every frenchman on board.

But that was so you, right there and then, just like it was you back then in that bar, The Open Cafe, mecca to all Parisian men of our persuasion. You, coming towards me, sipping your beer as if nothing stood in your way between you and I, and me, helpless to do anything but be mesmerised by your stare and then, as you came closer, your perfume, but again, it wasn’t the perfume you wore but the scent you oozed all by yourself.
I met him also in Le Marais, of course, where else do gay men go. I wasn’t looking for anyone, like I said. I wasn’t looking for anything lasting at all. I was looking for something that was nothing. Something that was temporary, no, shorter than that, minuscule, momentary, forgetful. It had been so long since anyone had touched me, caressed me, kissed me, that I was almost choking. Like I was becoming a frozen form of what used to be. A body deserted of all tenderness. I know what you’d say, I can hear you staying it, I’m skirting the issue, trying to make something dirty seem more romantic, less sexual, more visceral but acceptable. I know, I haven’t changed at all it would seem. I went looking for sex. Is that better, does that make you happy? Can that make you happy? I can’t even believe I am here telling you all this. I tell you I’ve come back for you and, in the next breath, I seem to be this sex starved old man willing to find whatever he needs under the cover of night.

Okay, anyway, I’m telling you what I’m telling you. He was there. This time he was in the back of the bar, another bar, that other seedier bar, with the staircase that I hadn’t been able to bring myself over to yet and if I’d had anymore to drink I probably wouldn’t have made it up those steps anyway, so it was probably a good thing that he touched my arm just as I took the first step and stopped me from going any further. He started to talk and tell me things about himself, I have no idea what it was at the time. I was thrown. I was touched, literally. His hand had not left my arm since that first touch and I realised that it was all I needed. Not just to be touched, as exciting and arousing as that was, but, more than that, I’d been seen. Someone had seen me. Do you know what I mean? Christ you have no idea what I mean, do you? You were never, not for a single day, never seen, not by me, not by anybody. Everyone saw you, no one could ever miss you or want to. But I wasn’t like that, ever. I was more a reflection at times than an actual living person. Not with you, of course, Jesus, not, never with you. But before you and certainly after you when friends stopped dropping by, at first just to give me space and then later it felt like they’d just forgotten that I existed. We had existed to them and then we stopped existing for them and then afterwards, well afterwards I think they put me into the non existent box too. But suddenly on the verge of finding a moment of nothingness, fast friction in a dark room, someone reached out and took my arm and I couldn’t move, could hardly breath in case it all disappeared too quickly. I wanted to remember the moment for as long as possible so I could recall it again when it had vanished.
I know he was speaking to me because I saw his lips move, lips a touch fuller than yours, eyes a shade of blue darker. He wasn’t blond though, dark hair, slightly receding which was surprising as he seemed so young. Your height, give or take, slimmer though, not that you were in any way fat, I just mean he was less built, less muscle, less gym I guess, a bit more of a bookworm, not geek but not far from it either. I think I suggested we go upstairs but he wanted to talk, I didn’t want to talk but I didn’t want him to take his hand away from my arm so I let him tell me what he wanted to but the words never sunk in, only the touch, only that tenderness he’d placed on my right arm until eventually I felt it leave me and I shivered, actually shivered. It was august, I’d been back in Paris for over a year, the entire city had taken its usual month long vacation and it was almost midnight and still 30 degrees and that was just outside the bar and yet, when he took his hand off my arm, I shivered. Funny that, the things that leave us cold in the middle of so much heat.

But he didn’t leave me. He came back with a drink, two drinks actually, one for him and one for me and suddenly I heard him speak for the very first time. And I listened and he asked me questions and I found myself replying and, as I spoke, he put his hand on my leg and I shivered again. It’s silly, I know, silly, trivial, tiny. I don’t think in all the time we spoke that first night that he had any idea what it meant when his body connected with mine, how beautiful it felt to be touched once again and how painful that it wasn’t you.

To be continued…

All Words and Photographs of Paris by Damien B. Donnelly

https://soundcloud.com/damien-donnelly-2/the-things-that-leave-us

PERFUME

01/02/201616/08/2021 / deuxiemepeau / 8 Comments

Hungry again
to taste you
like candy
on my tongue
tingling
like sherbet
dips, dipping.
Longing
to be left
immersed
in your perfume
like I was in your arms
intoxicated
by the fumes
of our fever,
to be left
covered,
candy covered
with your essence
perfectly preserved
on my fingers
where I dipped,
on my shirt
which you ripped,
on my chest
still pounding,
on my lips
still burning.
Hungry again…

All Words and Photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

NOT QUITE RIGHT

31/01/201625/01/2018 / deuxiemepeau / 2 Comments

You swept into the shadows
of all that once was, last night,
like a blur upon the light,
not quite right,
not quite.
I’d slept beneath his covers
after he’d taken off, one night
and you’d caught me in your sight
hoping that I might
well, quite.
You’d found me in a rainstorm
as Christmas day became christmas night
and I the gift that you could bite
as anybody might
and you were right.
I fucked you in his absence
as if to be alone would not be right
and who was I to fight
the stranger in the night,
all right.
You watched me as I slumbered
tangled up beside you, that night
as if you’d somehow seen the light
of all that wasn’t right,
well, not quite.
I left you in the morning
before attachments grew too tight,
before the morning shed its light
on all that wasn’t right,
not quite right.
I left you in the morning
but wondered what occurred that night
when he was back in your embrace, behind the light,
I wondered if you made it back to right,
like you’d felt with me that night
when everything seemed right,
well, not quite.

All Words and Drawing by Damien B. Donnelly

UNDER, ONWARDS & OVER

30/01/2016 / deuxiemepeau / 4 Comments

Washed over
in whiskey and rum
and falling, on a street,
by a bridge in the lamplight
as the river rushed under us
onwards and out of sight,
falling into each other
in foreign lands
into foreign hands
sliding along foreign bodies,
lean and slender,
twists and thrusts
of bodies curious
to what they’d not yet tasted.
You danced around me
on stages, in my head
in stages, on my bed
above the water
that never stopped moving
under us, onwards and off.
Falling into you,
our own echoes
reverberating into a dance
we were generating,
a tale of three acts;
the fall,
the fairytale
and the future unfolding
more fierce than we’d foreseen
and those hours,
always the hours,
slipping in between,
splitting the space around us
like the water that night
beneath the bridge where we kissed
rushing under us, onwards and over us,
dissolving us without consideration
a gradual obliteration
and yet my lip still tingles
from all we thought we were
in the moment the movement made us,
falling through time, through a space we couldn’t name,
stretching skin and bending bone into a structure unstable, insubstantial,
kissing and courting and covering up the parts that could never be,
trying to be what we never were and ignoring the bits that we didn’t want to see.

All Words and Photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

Photograph of the Blauwbrug bridge on the Amstel Canal in Amsterdam, The Netherlands

CONNECTIONS

29/01/201616/08/2021 / deuxiemepeau / 4 Comments

Water
Silent
Stillness
Reflection . Connection
Make the connection
Elements
Water Earth Air
I can be fire
The fire

I walk on water
I dream I walk on water
I see stillness
I dream I walk on the stillness of the water
I hear the silence
I am the silence dreaming of the stillness that walks on the water
I am the reflection
I am the silent reflection of the dream that once walked on the stillness of the water.

All Words and Photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

THE TRUTH IN THE WATER

21/01/201616/08/2021 / deuxiemepeau / 7 Comments

I see you, this morning
in sweeping reflections
in the waters, reflected
in the sleeping stillness
of the morning’s silence

as if the world was looking up
as if the sky had fallen down.

I see a tree, a weeping
sea of a tree, leaning,
reflected in the waters,
reflecting its reflection
into milky mists of morning

and I wonder if the world is truly what I see
or if my reflection is the truth
staring up
at me.

All Words and Photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

CARVED IN

05/12/201516/08/2021 / deuxiemepeau / 7 Comments

You are carved upon the lines, carved upon the seat, carved upon the branches
and the roots and the shoots of the tree that stood before you,
carved upon the life, carved upon the heart, carved upon the tears
and the tissue and the memory of the mind that holds you,
your scent is still within the garden, still upon the chair,
is wrapped around the branches and the bushes and the buildings
that stood before you, your scent is sealed upon the body,
teases still the tongue, smelt still on the hands,
beneath the nose and on this skin that used to touch you,
there are knots within this wood, on this bench, on this tree,
on these buildings, along this body that can never be undone.
There are shadows in this garden, on this seat, beneath the branches,
in the sunlight, shadows in the sunlight, on this body that can never be erased.
There is an echo of what was, resounding in this garden, in this seat, in this tree,