when i outstretch my arms to you
from this finger, right out
here
to this finger
right out
here
and i say
“this is how much i love you”
i mean to say
“look at all this space i’m taking up —
this is the only space i’ll ever be able to take up, in fact.
just look at it. this 1.7 meter radius which
perceives — envelops — all this life
inside of it.
big warm house
me with my arms stretched out, saying:
from here — to here —
big warm house with all this fire in it.
big warm house with all this light in it,
big door open wide to let more in.
everything i ever touch
everything i make
everything i read, love, devour
each peach plum and pear
each kiss
forehead ones
big strawberry picnic ones
little dog snout ones
ones i do without lips at all:
looking at you
in your cool
orange shade magic
making me fizzy, for example.
little red cheek from crying, from kissing, from blushing
little duck swimming in
soda water.
all of that
all of this
fits within this 1.7 meter hug
and with it
from this finger
to this finger
i mean to say
“hello, please come in,
welcome home”
Jun 12, 2016
Jun 12, 2016 at 7:27 PM UTC
love you like cold wet macadamia hair
i love you like a boot itch
love you like the cucumber antidote
like licking you off my fingers and then sticking them down my throat
i love you like a caged and malting tiger
like i’m using this muzzle
to eat or kiss or both at once
love you like you love the blues
and how I just learned to sing
Mar 30, 2016
Mar 30, 2016 at 6:27 PM UTC
if she leaves you the day before your birthday
or on New Years Eve
start each tomorrow like this:
someone who was left, yes,
but someone
who starts the new year anyway
there are two ways to grow older:
to let time take you
and to
take
time
Feb 17, 2016
Feb 17, 2016 at 7:14 PM UTC
an offering of green
cream avocado meat
from lemon rind hands
which sour and wrinkle my fingers when i try to hold them.
“welcome home.
I love you.
have we met?”
the lick of the puppy tongue
on my skin like this:
I’m only warm when I’m treated warmly --
the fizzy boil of hot adrenaline
up and down my spine
like
it’s desperately never felt the heat before,
is not a kind of warmth.
hungry fingers here on my vertebrae
finding out where the loose links are
- is not an adventure.
it smells of cold food, or stale fire,
the way something smells when it isn’t quite right
isn’t quite for consumption --
--
but almost
a gold-leaf paper bowl – no –
a lime flavoured bubblegum.
here: blow me a bubble, wince,
and I’ll pop it for you.
your eyes ache and squeeze when you eat sour sweets
because they’re almost something delicious,
but depriving, just
inside this cake there is sour cherry jam:
you hold out your sandpaper fist
and I don’t know whether it means
“this is the shape of a heart”
or if dinner just went cold
May 11, 2015
May 11, 2015 at 6:18 PM UTC
i definitely told you at the right time
cold new lips i kissed you at the right time
two years on and i kissed the same place so many times
i lost count of how happy it made me.
i swallowed your tears in so many different lights
a waltzer of a moment, i heard **** jagger
i heard the melody of mens voices, i heard every key and every shift
dazzled and dizzy in light and dark and in mud and rain and
smudgy warmth
i heard a buzz so loud it turned into vision
and everything was a spinning top
i heard everything i’d ever heard and seen everything i’d ever seen
and i held your hand like i was about to get pulled away any second
in the avalanche
i saw your beautiful important face so many times
shouting at the sea, in the palm of my hand, in grass
in pillow, on the back of everybody i ever meet
in love i licked all the salt away every time
i couldn’t tell whether it was the rain or the sea spray or tears
and i thought about this every time we kissed
and i thought about how it didn’t matter to me at all
we lived in an electric moment that fizzled ultraviolet for half a second
and i painted that second
so i could prove to everybody i met
that it happened
that this is kind of how it looked
to be on the tip of a hurricane looking down at the chaos
and being happy just for the excuse
to hold hands
Nov 15, 2014
Nov 15, 2014 at 2:06 PM UTC
damien rice makes me think about you
damien rice sang my depression to sleep
today he told me
"you don’t love him at all anymore"
and i agreed
Nov 12, 2014
Nov 12, 2014 at 5:54 PM UTC
shiny boy
it’s never my turn
to be with you.
sometimes it is
and when it is
the seconds are so full i get sick
you’re my own homemade chocolate cake
and i purge you by sticking my fingers down my throat and throwing you up
all over the soft
get it out properly this time
come on you can do it, without whispering
get you out of me. take your hands
and put them down my throat
and then get out of me
get the hell out of me
i’ll
be clean
lose a stone
lay naked
you’re
either poisonous to me
or you make me sick to my core
whichever one it is
i can’t stand to be around you, anymore
i haven’t seen my doctor in a long time
i don’t know if i need to but in just in case
for old times sake
i still take my medicine
i still take my medicine
Nov 10, 2014
Nov 10, 2014 at 8:08 PM UTC
I saw the in-between of monday and tuesday
and it frowned at me for trespassing.
I was in the ocean though I did not swim, I caught the tide on my lips
and I waited there for it to one day drag you in again with the pebbles.
except
you never came to visit the sea again, I know because I waited
and at 2pm, in protest and in sadness
I drowned a boy, to prove I was powerful, too.
I put myself in the clouds
but you did not look up
and so I made it rain.
and then I watched as your hair got wet
and suddenly I was very sad
that the only way I could touch you was from so far away
and you did not want me there.
and then I put myself in your garden, and I tried to grow
but I was strange, I was pale, and I was dark and so I turned into nettles
and I hurt you every time we touched.
so I saw the meadows you stayed in when you were a child and I copied them to give you a sense of comfort
a mother’s fore-head kiss
I let my nettles die and I was a daisy nearby and I danced to get your attention, to prove to you
that daisies could grow where nettles did too.
but you did not pick me
I was a tiny flower and my colours were not bright enough
I was not a meadow; I was not a mother; I was only a metaphor
in a book you didn’t want to read.
and so I admired the things you did want:
sugar in your coffee
white bread and sleep. and
the shoulder which carried a flick of your hair.
made me angry like the curve of your spine; I could not own it like I had owned the ocean
and I had owned the sky
and I had owned nature
and it tortured me to know that with everything I had become it was not enough to put my hand on your stomach
and to tell you I love you.
the sky could not talk, I could not move as a daisy, I hurt relentlessly
and one day when I watched your eyelids as you were sleeping
it occurred to me that it was often the case that beauty was not to be touched, or to be owned
and so I left.
and quietly, calmly
without saying a word,
without owning anything
I loved you in silence.
still do.
May 5, 2014
May 5, 2014 at 4:34 PM UTC
i wanted the last thing I ever said to you to be
"nothing lasts forever
I think that is the worst shame"
but it wasn’t
instead it was “I’ll see you in a few weeks”
which now, in my sad dress
and in my 10th cup of coffee
I suppose said everything I was going to
with more eloquence and conviction
than words could ever manage
May 5, 2014
May 5, 2014 at 4:29 PM UTC
the walls of hospitals hear more prayers than the walls of churches
and it is this that tells me that prayer is not about god
but prayer is about sadness
and sadness is a sin
sadness is a sin
because i saw it in the face of my sister
6 levels on the coma scale, powdered nose, and pipes in her wrists she answered when asked about her drug habits
“when i was twelve my dad left home
and since then i felt i never really had a parent”
and how they replied that perhaps her baby daughter was going to be taken away within the week;
2 weeks old
and without a father.
sadness is a sin
because i heard it from the mouth of the cop who took my sixteen year old boy away
a knife buried 4 inches into in his thigh
from emotional abuse and torment, he was
asked to portray resentment for the public display
and his mother, the culprit and also the victim of psychological discontent
was given a sympathetic nod and he
was given a bandage
which of course relieved every ounce of pain in them both
as she drove him back home in silence, both bleary eyed in the desperate quiet
to where the knives were
sadness is a sin
because i touched it in my mother
as my fingers traced the scar on her forearm where she’d been
smashed through a glass door by a man who wanted her soul
and didn’t know how to get to it,
who was taught the best way into something you can’t open
is to destroy it whole.
i heard it in the way she couldn’t pronounce ****
and in the way she couldn’t pronounce his name
and the way that she recalled the lawyer’s response as
“how short was your skirt?”
not “how sharp are your weapons?”
sadness is a sin
and i know this because when i entered the doctors asking for a mental health check
for my post-traumatic stress
they told me i was in for a skin inspection, on my thighs, where i’d taken out
dissociative pain and the unease of watching a woman i love tear herself apart in front of me
from a crippling addiction.
and like her, the tension much like an elastic band causes me to spring back together with blood on my hands
and i explain
“it is my own blood, i am not starting a war, i just want to be happy”
but the doctor sees a **** and he is repulsed
and like an eye he won’t look at it until i make it prettier for him
and then he leaves me behind in the room
like many others in the past
to put my clothes back on;
as if it were nothing to close a door.
sadness is a sin
because people are afraid of that which they cannot understand
or fix
and so the prayers on the walls of hospital wards
aren’t asking for god at all
they’re asking for temporary forgiveness for a sin they didn’t mean to commit
one of ignorance
and indulgence
and for the fleeting amount of time wasted in between when someone is
living
and when someone is dying.
it is rejected, vilified, untended to because you can’t touch it, you can’t point at it and say
“i want this gone”
so, prodding at material signs of weakness and calling it the problem we’ve covered up the fact that
much more work needs to be done
though we’re running out of tools, and worse, we don’t know what tool we needed to start with
we’re panicked to the point where
darkness is reduced to a lack of light.
because an addict is not on a high
and **** is not provoked
one is not without home from desire of discomfort
and the razor is not the enemy;
but the darkness is.
the hole.
and you’re filling it, too,
you’ve just been too busy weeping by the side of death beds
and living bodies, eating too many pastries and watching too much television
humming quietly to yourself to fill the silence
and too busy preying
to Gods you’ve never seen
to realise it
yet
Mar 3, 2014
Mar 3, 2014 at 7:27 PM UTC