couldn’t keep
my finger off the photo
could never keep things in.
mourning is just having,
a lack of
trigger discipline.

take me taste me
you are the body
reset me satiate me
you are the body.

touch only
fragments of the full picture
nobody says
the taste would betray me
nobody says
the heart
is the first ***** to commit mutiny.

stabbed, wrecked
punctured, indented
wilt the words so
so my mouth
isn’t responsible anymore.
it cannot be held accountable
for the vowels, unroot my language
supplant love in favour of it

like an opener
                            I remember your laugh
like a close.

beat into me until i'm broken and the feelings
alight the layer of skin just below the outermost,
like the lining of a jacket, catching aflame.

scratch out the remaining worries with the spines of your teeth.
rake me upwards, shred the doubts like old sunburn peel, and peel and peel the layers of mistrust off of me till i'm raw, pink and ready.

never has this body not been scarred
without first feeling excitement.

since you pierced it, now you're responsible. I'll chase that ownership, mutually owed, to the end of all meaning. till the sensations are the only bits that still make sense, and then you can make up for everything else.

only after this, after everything else is spread across a blood splattered floor, can things start again. only once you make up for not returning the parts of me. only once my remaining organs, now calcified, have been cracked to their inner ichor, and you tip me gently into your thankless lungs.

only once the prostration, the words left since butchered into me, have been flayed by your regret, and raised to the height of saints.

hang me up.
swing by my legs and wrap around the root of me like you once would.
debase yourself inside of me again, learn to build something again. dig deeper than needed again, strike copper in my veins so I can oxidise again. watch me alight again, at your briefest touch.

am I more than a drink
taken per food group
swallowed by instinct.
you’re more to me than thirst.
sliced by feeling,
unpeeled heart wrenching
take from all and, Nothing.
I wait for you here,
so perhaps the taste of you
lights back stars, and starlight.
perhaps the taste of you
finds pathways in the back of legs, of knee.
you are permenent in the heat of love
but sliced in essence.
**** ME
and ask very little in return, ask of holding.
your **** as it grows limp in the moonlight,
all I miss is the taste of your absence
all I taste is the feeling of you
finished inside of me which laid the foundations of something larger than what this body can contain,
I love it, the hurt of your breaking into me.
and hurt of the love that remains.

i stood in my new flat today
counting the spins the fan
made in its centre.
an americanism, too out of body
for me to keep an eye on.
what now?
but to wait till the inertion sickness
crawls its way from the soles up to oesophagus.

tilt back till back flat against the black flat floor.
(i hated that sentence but it needed some air.)
wondering if i can melt beneath the new money wood,
can i stand upside down,
ankles halo’d in my space and my head in the neighbours.

the hallway to the bedroom where he sleeps a little more soundly
now i’m out the bed,
dares me to leave him alone.
“you’ve clawed this distance out” i murmur back.
“i can trace it in the skirting boards.”

sitting up i go to close the window
and lock it, unlock it and smile at the little piece of freedom
i can’t ever give back.