I wanted my work to mean something. I guess everyone that creates something wants a person to look at it, read it, admire it, and wonder what life would have been like had they not come across it.
  Like a French film with no subtitles, but you see the woman in red, and you see the way she looks at him, from across the room, and you know, you just know that she is somewhere between being in lust and in love with him. And it is heavy, and powerful, and it is all red. You know they are going to ****, or make love, or marry each other and live till they are ninety. You know that glance means something, and maybe if you had not have noticed it, you would never know what an affair of love could look like.
  It matters.
  I want it to matter.

I’ve being looking through stained glass windows that remind me of your eyes.
All gold and hazel and pious
And I’m still trying to wash bloodstains from my shirt cuff
Because your crucifixion that night in the smoke and the winter
Has left all my clothes coloured in you.

Boy with teeth like a typewriter
And a tongue made of some saviour’s love
And one time it felt like heaven
And another time it felt like all hell was in your bottom lip

And I swear down,
Gracious God,
I never meant to **** nobody.
I swear, down to the underworld,
I never meant to **** myself.

I just wanted his lust like the strong spine of a hymn book
And I keep singing songs about something to do with
The way his chest rises and falls
as he breathes
As if my life ever had any purpose without his.

Oh Lord of lost lovers,
I know you hear me.
Make this pain in my palms go away.
I cannot nail myself into this.

He’s a beaten down bible,
And I need him alive.

Oh man,
Auden was right.
I don’t want the stars that work in dot to dot connections to make your bone structure anymore.
Put them out.
Dismantle the sun like every flat pack piece you ever bought and found something wrong with.
Take it back.
Oh Gemini,
You were never as warm as the month you were born into.
Find the receipts of faded love letters and take it all back.

Take me back to when Achilles was the most glorious **** up the world had ever known.
I reckon we could give him his money’s worth.
I’ve been running on cursed soles for years now
And you cannot heel this.
Feet like beat up peaches and boots laced up too tight,
Now all the blood has rushed to somewhere I can’t keep up with.

This ain’t no Greek tragedy.
This is just a messed up human telling another
That sometimes men are right
And love doesn’t last forever
But if you hold him tight
Enough
Maybe you don’t need to return each other.

You were not a breath of fresh air
you were the choking
of sadness infused
smoking
in every room
tabacco stained fingers
left marks on every table top
and top to bottom the house was so
dust filled
that you had killed
all ******* signs of life
the room was rife
with scents of her and no sense
of morality
you just turned to see
but choked every good growing gracious thing out of me
you don’t hear any noise anymore
lost my voice
somewhere on the floor with her
underwear and
everywhere there’s
another girl’s hair
strands and hair bands
and when I close my eyes it’s her hands
touching your shoulder blades
and the concaves
of your collar bones and
clean clothes
and it’s so clear that when I’m here
she gloats because her hands
have become your hands
and now they’re wrapped around my throat
And so when she chokes
You choke
And I-

My grandfather tells me I am too sensitive
He is sheltered in cardigans and sits in an old armchair,
A walking stick next to his feet.
He is not quite shipwrecked but people around him have already started drowning.

He says my heavy heart is wrapped too tightly in self-made bubble wrap,
that I’ve been so busy looking at my feet I didn’t realise the ‘Handle With Care’ sign has been ripped away from my collarbones.
And all I know is that the world is volatile
and when it storms, my god, I feel the wrath of it in anywhere I used to call home.

I think he forgets he was a soldier of the sea
And so now when he sees the fading scrapes on my wrists and
waves of old blood
He cannot understand me.

He is a tall man.
He spent his youth looking over gates into better places,
Seeing boys with parents who had colour in their faces.
Maybe we chase colours like forest covered streams to their final destination
And perhaps that is why he liked surfing oceans rather serving his mother her endless medication

I wonder if he found a piece of peace in the heart of the ocean
And if since then, solid ground seems so broken.
He is unstable on his leather soles and I think he still misses the kisses he once stole
But now, he is a soldier of solitude and talking without thinking
He is a captain of old bones and loved ones that won’t stop sinking.

My father tells me I have a kind heart.
A good heart.
I think it beats more softly than my grandfather’s.
I can be found in the shallow water, minding my step.
But if I ever look for Sailor George’s,
I know, far away in the distance, out where the sea meets its reflection, it will always be left.

My throat is full of untimely secrets
So many admissions I need to throw up
And paint his wooden floorboards with
Because that’s where I used to find my voice
Lying next to his stacks and stacks of paperbacks
And scrunched up t-shirts
And now the only time I talk loudly
is when he lets me sleep in his room surrounded by
Old rock and roll posters half torn down in adolescent rages
And his grandfather’s books with their fractured spines and ripped out pages.
It is in the early hours
When he says to me
‘There are too many holes pierced into your body.
I think if I poured my love into you
It would just seep right through’
For once, silence is crucial.
Because I do not own enough replies to explain the fragility of my blood vessels when they understood what he meant.
It sent an electric shock through my entire ****** system and that was how my throat stopped shaking.
The need to uproot every good bad cruel volatile imploding exploding loving frustrated string of sentences left me after that.
I can’t go back to the semi and collapse on his floor anymore.
Lying down there has become lying everywhere.
And my voice box is no longer prepared for it.

There is so much blood
It fills in the cracks of the rubble that covers the city like cement mixture.
It takes three shots for him to die.
They ask if there is any rope to throw to him as if he is a child on a lilo who cannot swim.
They cannot bring him back to shore.

It is four thirty in the morning
I am praying.
Please,
Stop killing them.
**** the war that lies in the ink of printed money.
Do not let it resurface.
You have made worms meat of that man who was searching for his son.
The children cannot find a home in either of your houses.

Now, father and son are turning into statistics on the other side of television screens
And I wonder how anyone can expect me to sleep.
We live in different time zones
But I can feel the pain in the oxygen I breathe
It has settled in the air of every nation.
My lungs are red.
There is so much blood.