A Serenade to The Ghost.

This is just the beginning and beginnings are beautiful.

This poem is a meditation on what it means to be haunted by the physical and spiritual manifestation of your love.

A Serenade to the Ghost was born from a space I occupied two to three lifetimes ago. It was, at the time, an ambitious piece, a 17-verse epic on love, loss, and the way absence can feel heavier than presence. Yet, it is also about forgiveness and hope—that we are better because of the love we have experienced. Through loss we find a deeper version of ourselves.

A Serenade to The Ghost

I have always worked at the intersection of poetry and photography, using both to explore themes of impermanence, identity, and the unseen forces that shape us. My photographic process is deeply rooted in tradition—shot on black and white film, using a Hasselblad 500CM, often in natural light and intimate settings. I am drawn to texture, to grain, to the imperfections that only film can capture.

My images exist in the in-between, much like my words—neither fully of this world nor completely apart from it.

The photographs that accompany this piece are not illustrations of the poem but echoes of it. They were taken over the course of two years—some in abandoned asylums in Oslo, others in the winter forests of England, where time seems to fold in on itself, others in fleeting, intimate moments where light clings to the skin in the way memory clings to us.

They are fragments, much like the verses of this work, capturing the longing, the weight, the whispered presence of something that once was.

I never wrote it with the expectation that it would resonate beyond my own introspection, yet it found its way into the world in ways I could not have imagined. It was awarded the Special Prize at the Lagune Arte Prize in Venice, a moment that was both humbling and surreal.

Since I can remember, overcoming grief has been central to my art, and placing the protagonist in this situation helped me fall in, and out, of love.

Here, the central character loses his love, physically and emotionally. He has to let go of her, but the memory of their love exists and torments him but ultimately helps him grieve and grow.

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A Serenade to The Ghost

I.

This is just the beginning,
and beginnings are beautiful…

II.

We walked, hand-in-hand,
up the winding path,
to the unsighted cemetery.

The village steeple stretched towards Heaven.
Our hands clenched firmly,
gripped with emotion.

Inscription after inscription—
dead lovers now dust,
remnants of what has always been.

Face-to-face, we etched kisses onto lips.
Fragrant petals cascaded down our cheeks
as we promised never to forget this moment.

Through shaded lanes and snaking veins,
sirens pulsated in a mirrored life.
Valleys of sound pounded rhythms,
the steady hammer of remembrance
ringing out across the countryside.

I slipped a note into the folds of cloth and flesh,
between earth and air:

‘Forever in my mind, our love will live between gravestones and carrion.’

III.

I am haunted by the space within,
the gaps between our serenade.

A ghost of you—
empty and desolate—
walks past.

How have I come so far without this?

The hotel room quietens,
as your soft,
shaking palm
becomes still.

Your pulse (beats)
whilst we lay upon other people’s sheets.

IV.

Imagine my muse,
stained by the fingers of many men.
Their desire was ash
that fell from the heavens.

Shooting stars made imprints,
embedding a soft form of remembrance
through wishes and leaves.

Motioning towards a valley,
I cut a lone figure.
There is, of course, no one there.

Mauve embers light a runway.
Streaks of amber etch deep into the sky.
This solitude screams so loud.

We are just going through patterns and changes.
The lucid dawn of a new day breaks.

If I whisper this ever so silently
through water and valves,
in heart-shaped movements,
with cracked ribs and bruised cheeks,
then capillaries will burst purple,
impregnating the skin.

So I drown myself in grapes,
with sour scents of longing,
and reverse the order.

The ocean becomes gravity.
The moon pulls away,
giving space to breath.

The seabed cleanses.
Water becomes sulfur.
Air becomes hydrogen.

I have to express death with desire—
in fragments of love that has faded,
and an occasion to celebrate a renaissance.

I am nothing,
but it is my nothing.

V.

There is stillness in my movements.

My hands,
my poor, poor hands,
stretch out amidst sound waves.

My nails, bitten down to their bitter ends.
An itch, a scratch later,
and my wrist is on fire.

There is a quietness in my house—
of living alone,
of this idle existence.

My bird-caged chest shares rhythms that beat and start,
pounding over this city,
along the seafront,
to the pier, sinewy in its decay.

My eyelids draw over themselves.
Darkness engulfs, and I think of her.
In the smallest of moments,
I think of her.

Memorizing form
and tracing lost structures—
the arc of her body,
the curve of her back.

Hair dripping down spines,
entwined in porcelain sheets.
The moistness of the grove between her thighs,
this softness develops an aqueous womb inside.

I douse myself in opiates to heal,
to forget.

Umbilical moments are ripped untimely from my belly.
I’m desolate and alone.

She sleeps with lost men
lined up in military precision.
I’m left clutching at the night like carbon,
reaching out in the only way I know how—
with awkward sentences and demands.

I circle my fingers around my thighs,
touching myself with hardness.
My wrists drip crimson to the sheets,
as I close my eyes to try and find a way home—
to seek the path that leads me into the night.

VI.

I’ve stitched the moon
beneath her skin,
just to let some light in.

I’ve planted broken stars
in her belly
to grow poems as beautiful as meteors.

A trail of glitter streaks across this city,
guiding me in,
guiding me home.

VII.

Beyond winding corridors,
under wooden floorboards,
in strangled boxes,
beauty grows.

Folded away in a coffin of creases,
the dormant words of love
lay sleeping.

Delicate fingers
softly pull at worn edges.
Faded letters
flap their wings
and soar into the night.

VIII.

Dear Haunted,

I am floating above you now,
spinning around the heavens.
I dance inertly with the stars.

I am argon,
I am oxygen,
I am lithium.

I wasn’t always this way.
I was once part bone, part flesh.
I remember being full of love for you.

Now, I am part of the dust
that floats innately around this world.
In moments, you breathe me
down to the pit of your stomach.
I feel your joy,
your pain.

I am the breeze,
but I wasn’t always this way.
I was once tied down by the weight of failure.
I was once magnesium—
glowing bright, shining like a beacon
before I burnt out too quickly.

I was too fragile for this world.

I once was alive, like you.
But now I am a speck of dust in your eye,
molecules of space and time.

I am now the past.
My life is over.

The Ghost

IX.

Naked, I crucify myself before this.
Exposed in purity,
in the still of night, I am still life.

A beasty crawls in the middle distance.
A crow watches from attic beams.

My lover, I am humble before you.
The light here is softer than you think.
It is wistful wisteria, climbing around
this ribcage of mine.

It is the shifting pattern of rain against time.
The sunset exposes flaws upon her cavity.

“The cut,” you say,
“...is light,”
as crimson drip-drip-drips through floorboards.

“Answer me a question.
If you are an evil spirit,
then why can only I hear it?”

X.

These fingertips of mine stretch,
reaching out for The Ghost.
Wrinkled branches extend.
This decaying root
paints the night black.

Splintered nails grow rusty, twisting,
contorting in some kind of crazed trail
that leads outwards in.

How much time has passed since I last saw her?
Passages of moments,
of religious movements,
between clouds and sound.

The cold air burns the back of my throat.
My spine disintegrates as
The Ghost’s beauty strips breath from lungs.

I smash rocks against my ribcage,
to let this soft, beating muscle out.

I pull at hair and try to peel skin from flesh.
I cleanse this dirtiness that has grown.

I cut valleys into my arms to alleviate—
to alleviate,
to alleviate this pain—

the constant reminder that
I am nothing,
and nothing is at least something without her.

XI.

A spectre of light bursts through attic beams.
Dusty boxes stacked,
choking on green twine.

The past buried within.
Rows of coffins—
relationships sleeping on mortuary slabs.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

A gust of wind forces a window
to smash.
Her reflection dissolves in time
as the glass shard pierces my heart.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

XII.

The window crack lets the night in.
Blackness seeps through.
The cold, dark room engulfs my being.

I am carbon.

A chill flutters up my contorted spine
as The Ghost lights up these shadows.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

I move towards her center.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

XIII.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

I fell in love with The Ghost.
Her fingertips stain my body,
tattooing my skin forever.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

We caress each other with the slightest of movements,
as the smell of love haunts the bedroom.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

XIV.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

The sound of death drawing near.
Silent breaths.
The echoing noise reverberates through the night,
enveloping into ash.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

The constant orbiting of sound that resonates.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

The Ghost drags her feet slowly across laminated floorboards.
Her nails scrape against time,
her skin crawls over mine.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

XV.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Static erupts in a corner of the room.
The Ghost creeps ever closer.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

I cover my ears as this white noise becomes deafening.
The persistence of memory weighs me down.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

I pull at the fabric of my skin,
tightening myself around my neck.

I have become haunted by the lost.
The Ghost fades into the distance,
as I become ballast.

XVI.

I exist in a world of could be—
of maybes,
of endless untouchable possibilities.

A fleeting glimpse of something unobtainable.
The Ghost I yearn for disappears out of sight.

XVII.

I summoned the spirit one last time,
to see her face,
to feel her presence in my mouth.

Holding onto this weight,
I accepted goodbye.
I realized chasing ghosts leaves you haunted.

Closure permeated through the night,
evaporating into stars.

I pulled my knees closer into my chest,
held onto my center for fear of losing myself.
I gnawed at my knuckles until they bled,
pulled out clumps of hair.

My teeth chattered as the temperature dropped.

This was the end.

The only comfort I have is that it will all pass,
that these emotions never existed before.
Through this loss, I have gained.

I, at least, am still alive.
I still feel.

My skin shivers in the corner of a basement.
Tears of wax form to survive these visions,
and the realization that
with all endings come new beginnings.

And beginnings are beautiful…

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