he is wearing lynx africa and i have a war playing out inside of me / i ring him / i tell him i have no money left / i say “i'm sorry you couldn’t **** the gay out of me” / he laughs like it’s his fault / i say it's fine and then i hang up / i think about how there will never be enough air in the atmosphere for me to breathe / my skin is infinite / i don’t have edges / it’s difficult to expect to not get touched when you live in endless skin / the air is hanging low tonight / lower than ever / i go to ring her / to tell her she is a gardener / a hospital-clean being / i don’t have her number anymore / i have to tell her about these hands / these old hands / how i think they caused chernobyl when i was someone else / i have to tell her that every word was a mistake / they were all just really bad spellings of her name.
Apr 27, 2020
Apr 27, 2020 at 6:13 AM UTC
wake up
there is silence outside
there is a song playing you don’t know the words to.
there are words, no, cameras on the walls
read them.
here is a microphone -
stop,
stand still,
shed your skin
we are spinning faster than your monkey brain can compute.
air thick with smoke, no —
suffocating planet shaking under plastic wrap.
did you know there are ammonia clouds on jupiter?
do you realise we are fighting over barrels of oil?
don’t touch me
because i don’t know if i want to die,
waiting for the end in the end times
Apr 1, 2020
Apr 1, 2020 at 3:24 PM UTC
a man is talking at a house party on the other side of the canal/ people are talking around him/ occasionally laughter erupts and rushes rather than drifts on the air/ a car tyre screeches and somewhere a washing machine or a hoover or a truck cleaning the streets is humming/ my pen on the page is a hollow drag / my hand sticks to the paper as it moves left to right/ the music playing outside is a song i can't identify/
Apr 1, 2020
Apr 1, 2020 at 1:15 PM UTC
go back to where it began:
trombone / cob nut / tadpole / violin /
you fell —
and i have not breathed it since
except that hot summer;
when we excavated
an entire roman village of chicken bones
from the soil
where now there are none
Apr 1, 2020
Apr 1, 2020 at 1:11 PM UTC
let’s play truth or dare.
so we can mouth a hundred hymns at each other then remember
that we
are the only things we believe in.
i want to whisper in your ear
say how i think
that the first person made a thousand sounds and called them gods
and named them all after you.
nobody has ever been so beginning.
tell me back.
how you love the ash you find in between the pages of my favourite books,
i want to know that i’m here, cigarette burns and all.
i know we are both missing and that’s okay because nothing is whole.
have you ever wanted to become a straight line?
have you ever wanted to learn every single freckle?
name them with your teeth?
taste them under your tongue?
i have never been more silhouette, more oil on water,
more ‘please don’t leave’.
i have tasted your smoke under my tongue.
i have wanted to turn myself into a whisper,
i have breathed your name at the back of my throat.
i tell you
a girl is a safe place you can make yourself to shake in.
a body is something you can grow into,
or out of.
when the door is closed and you say that you’re home,
i hope you know what that means.
i hope you hold that weight to your chest.
i say ”i hope you come back soon.”
she says “ring me when you’re home safe.”
Oct 6, 2014
Oct 6, 2014 at 2:00 PM UTC
“Woman does not emerge from man’s ribs. Not ever. It’s he who emerges from her womb.” Nizar Qabbani.
1. In the beginning
God asked himself a question and only made half the answer.
The Bible says
That when the Lord realised the world needed a woman
He searched through man, took a rib, and made her.
2. Eve, all apple and velvet.
I know you didn’t come kicking and screaming.
You, grafted onto man like a prize fruit
then cooked up like a red wine sauce all acid and hiss.
After the Bible took away the one thing it thought you were good for in the first place
it had you hold hands with the devil,
all flirtation and fashion,
made you sound like your body was empty of anything else.
Eve,
Mother of mothers.
Carved yourself from the rubble the same way David pulled himself from the stone.
Don’t tell me a woman is ever a safe place to rest.
Don’t think Eve ever let herself be an after thought.
3. On the third day
before the flood and the fire and the rubble,
God made himself a garden and called it Eden.
Or Eve.
Or something.
He stopped, closed his eyes and finally smiled because at last he had made something holier than himself.
He tried every fruit, spat the seeds like broken teeth.
Over the next few nights Eve kissed her life into Adam’s ribs,
told him it was
all good.
When The Lord finally moulded Adam from the clay of the garden, the wind whispered and knew.
4. People say that a great woman is just like a fine wine - full bodied and getting better with age.
Tell that to your mother.
Tell that to every woman who has ever fought for a cause.
A woman’s blood is worth so much more than communion but men just love a commodity.
5. I close my eyes and I am standing in a garden.
Her name is Eve:
her hands are ripe fruit;
head a forest fire;
body sinking under the weight of a great flood.
I say: “Eve how do I think myself into forest?
Will you show me how to become forest fire? All skin and bones and burning map.
You perfect absolute.”
6. So I turn back. Pull her name from my ribs like I was the first and I came from her.
And then my hands, gentle gravediggers.
And later I looked up and there was nothing except earth and light and earth and light and her
and it was over again.
So I sat down. Took a breath - the first real breath, hands shaking like the corners of pages.
7. I looked for the first time and I could see for miles.
I could see for miles.
Oct 5, 2014
Oct 5, 2014 at 5:22 AM UTC
You crystal ballroom, all windows and walls, sewing light like seed over everything you touch.
Glass eyed stare, hands growing like they're getting away with something.
Everything you love is a trick of the light.
Everything it touches feels just like you.
Hiding heads under street-lamps like sin is some sort of choice we make, like growing is something to be done in silence.
They say that people in glasshouses shouldn't throw pebbles, but how can you expect to let people in if you can't even get out?
My grandmother looks straight though me, thoughts locked in, hands clamped around her bag of dead friends like holding them tight enough could bring them back.
She tells me how full of life I am. I want to tell her how we all carry echoes around in our pockets but I don't think she'd understand.
And I just want to call you. Hand you everything I have like:
'Here's the dirt from under my nails. Call it apology. I hope it finally makes something grow'
'Here's that poem I never finished. Here's to hallelujah. Here's to all your leaving'
'Here's my storm cloud. Here's my salt spray. Here's my window all dusted and bruised. I don't know how else to tell you that I have loved you in all four seasons'.
Everything you love will one day become sandstorm, cliff face, the blunt edge of a knife.
One day it won't be you holding the match.
Everything you love will turn back to dust
Everything you love will turn back to light
Jun 24, 2014
Jun 24, 2014 at 8:00 PM UTC
In 2005 The Piano Man was found wandering the streets of Sheerness in a soaking wet suit and tie
he didn't say a word.
When presented with pad and pen he simply drew a grand piano.
His nurses sat him in front of a beat up old upright
he played for four hours straight;
for four months his hands were the only things to break his silence.
Alexandre Dumas said "man will never be perfect until he learns to create and destroy."
Do you ever think about how Beethoven hacked the legs off his piano so he could feel the sounds he couldn't hear in his head, through his chest?
And Van Gogh heard the sounds his paintings made but kept going until his sanity
was just a memory floating on a distant river under a tired Milky Way.
And you see, like a Gaelic folk song blindness runs red through my family,
so I know it's not much but I'm here, still trying to mould my hands to say the right form of 'I love you'.
And did you know that the human heart beats over 30 million times a year, but we still have a hard time keeping our feet on the ground?
And did you know that the act of breaking in a horse is actually the act of breaking it's back?
Like we can't sit without sitting on broken things.
And did you know that every time a mobile phone sends out a GPS signal a bee loses it's way home, and every bee that doesn't reach it's hive dies?
So on nights when your pulse matches the beat of my favourite song
you don't have to wonder if it's me matching the syncopation of your silence --
and I wonder if you ever found what you were looking for.
And I wonder if you realise that on days you're not here I roll up my sleeves,
count the beats without you,
sit on the backseat and miss you.
And somewhere The Piano Man rolls up his sleeves
creates the Big Bang under his fingertips.
And in 2005 on an April morning in Sheerness, a suited piano man walks straight into the ocean,
begs the current to take him.
I send you a message
a bee loses it's way home.
I send you another
another bee dies.
My chest cavity is a bumble bee crypt,
my tongue a honeyed graveyard.
Another message.
The Big Bang.
The hive.
A suit.
That ocean.
Another back is broken.
Another message is sent.
I fear I am more honeycomb than heart.
To create is to destroy. To destroy is to succeed.
And would you just look at what these piano hands have finally done.
Apr 17, 2014
Apr 17, 2014 at 1:28 PM UTC
October, you are made of dust and I am a gun.
I killed men once.
When I lifted her veil I felt all of their features melt into one.
I smiled, it was all your storm in me.
October, you are a briefcase. You are six months long.
Tonight, there are tigers reaching out over my head
and I am your god out dancing on his weekend, say,
would you look at all your glass, bursting at the seams?
Would you ask him if I ever got there? Would you tell me why I keep pulling your explosive from my chest like a name label? Would you explain how metal peels as easy as skin with the right amount of madness?
October, I am no more than your casualties.
I am every sadness they ever said you would be.
Silver hands. I can carry these men but I cannot hold them up.
Mother, I thought I saw you standing there but it was just a bullet trail in the darkness.
I am buried in all of your letters, imprinting the both of us on the backbones of these papers;
they tell me I've become all the keys you sent.
October, you are a ballroom with all that break break break and I am falling but I haven't even left the ground yet.
When I rain down on you remember me, like the first sunset you ever wrapped yourself up in, and when they say
that I was never a stronghold, show them all the letters I tried to write you but never sent,
tell them about how the flesh ripped from my bones and left me a relic,
ask them if they can hear me breathing over all that storm.
October, you are confetti leaves falling under tyres on your wedding day,
and I can't be the light that catches them, I can't tell you that this world will wait long enough for you.
So tonight I am burning my name like it's the last thing I'll ever have.
And when they bring us home in our body bags,
remember that the choices we made were the choices we wanted to make.
October, you are a dust storm, and all your colour's left in me
Apr 3, 2014
Apr 3, 2014 at 7:58 AM UTC
In our house I am sin, and you are a window.
In our bedroom I am the rest of the house, I am a countdown from five and you are the lights which turn off, you are a rooftop, you are glowing haze on a nearly distant horizon.
In this house I cannot breathe you in anymore. Our bed is made from your sheet lightning.
In our room, under the bed, there are three square, white boxes.
In the first there is a small wooden elephant.
In the second there is a blank sheet of paper, folded in two.
The third is empty.
In this room I am alone. In this house I am sin. I don't think I'm here.
Dec 19, 2013
Dec 19, 2013 at 9:28 PM UTC