I don't miss you.

Every feeling you had
mirrored my own
uncannily.
You are still my sweet obsession,
Which means, I believe,
That I am yours.

One of us will crumble, stumble,
Into contact.
One of us will come.
And so, I need not miss you,
I am certain, somehow, that we are not done.
You still have a part to play in my life,

You're still there
You still care.

I should resist the temptation
To read into this photograph.
There is bound to be a very good reason
For the way she is gripping that glass of wine between you
So tightly that the glass might shatter,
The fact that you both have your arms around others,
Not each other,
The way your teeth are pressed together
In a tense, false smile.
I'm sure you're having a great holiday,
And the camera just captured an uneasy moment.
It's my inside knowledge
Promoting this interpretation,
I'm hardly objective.
I should close the page,
Close my mind,
Close the door,
And leave it be.

Alone at home
The house is a symphony of day-sounds,
And wants me gone.
Scattered toys express sullen resentment at my pyjama'd presence,
The cats just stare.
I force my working self upon this world,
With keyboard clacks,
The kettle,
And boiling pasta.
I try a hum, then Spotify,
But it all feels alien, too forced.
The house wants the others;
Shrieking, laughing, conversation,
Clashing plates,
A Disney movie
The warmth of family.
This house
wants to be a home.

I dream darkly, dicing with desire.
You are not to deny me these dangerous dreams,
They are dangerous only to me.
When nothing else remains,
When all else is stolen away,
They will still be deliciously distracting.
This is my disorder, my indulgence,
It’s how I declare my despair.
Deny me nothing, all is stolen away
Except the pictures my mind can paint,
Elusive, translucent, they will fade.
I’ll dream of the dreams of the dreams
Like tracing paper, or a silk screen
I’m trapped behind, living fantasy.
All I have, all I will have
Is muted copies.
It’s impossible to capture
Something so unreal.

Scraped and scoured
Gouged and groped
Pressed and pulled
And wrung out like a sponge.
Stamped on
Then discarded
Toyed with, trashed, abandoned.

All that it wanted
Was to be treated tenderly, and with respect
Shocked by abuse
It bleeds,
It breaks,
My heart
Falls apart.

I contemplate an exit
So sound and so swift
It causes no-one pain
A bloodless cauterisation
Evaporation
Only of words,
Fluttering, migrating
Like an anxious flock of birds
Messages composed but never sent
Comments that I angsted over,
Always truly meant.
I contemplate an exit
my flightpath
And my final destination.
I contemplate
fleeing
I'm a coward,
I'm a freak.

He has sold you a **** story
Which you have grasped fiercely
And consumed, embraced, bought into.
What choice do you have?

I know for a fact that doubt germinates
From time to time
Because you know him,
But what choice do you have?
You want to believe.

So I'll leave you with his lies,
Sweet unseer.
If I could be a **** for him,
Then I can be one for you,
With a nobler purpose,
And a steelier resolve.
I will give you what you need,
As he can't and won't.
Believe, believe,
I can't, I don't.

Dead-eyed doll
Blankly suspended
In suffocating silence
Not waiting
Not wanting
Catatonic
Cold
Benumbed.

It is easier
To simply remove everything of value
And fill the hollow space
With mental detritus.
There is nothing painful left
in that space.
It's all deliberate,
The dross, the drone, the sleb sludge,
Brain-bilge-water.
When I'm ready, I'll purge,
And make the hollow ready,
For a healthier obsession.

I am thinner than you
Better than you
Fitter than you
Bitter at you
Check out my texts
Don't share my sexts
Here is one breast
Beg for the rest
wiggle jiggle
Giggle
hate you
hate me
Rate me
Wait!
See?

Don't think that you are in control,
Or ever were.
I don't know you,
And though I danced with you,
It was, in retrospect, once upon a nightmare,
Not a dream.
Unlike Sleeping Beauty
It took three kisses to awaken this princess,
But I think I prefer the role
Of the wicked queen.
Bite my apple,
Take this glass slipper full in the face.
It's midnight,
I never liked pumpkins,
So I won't be attending your party of pain.
Laugh if you will
At a tale as old as time,
There never is a happy ending,
Wicked witches want revenge.

They ache and sting
As if they've been stapled shut then ripped open
By a big metal thing
But I can't stop
Writing.
I can't stop
Reading.
I am a word addict,
Seeking out my very next fix.
Even codeine can't lure me from the screen.

Dangerous one
Offers two potential options
And three
To take into account.

Two divergent paths
Three kisses.
Dangerous one
I wish he'd offered none.

You confide
A secret crush
And lips collide.

Conscience slaps libido
Tasting party tongue
You're all undone.

Pounding beat
Shaky feet
Fizzing heart
Fall apart.

Tomorrow is analysis,
Dissection, and dismay.
Tonight is heady chaos, and delight, and disarray.

You’re a jester,
Trading nasty jokes for belly laughs,
For the ****** King and his insane court.
At first, they laugh
At your tired old antics
And desperate attempts to get attention,
You’re slipping on spilled blood
And juggling hearts
For lack of anything really humorous with which to entertain.
You draw the eye
With your flamboyant clothes and sloppy painted face,
But once drawn, interest wanes with shocking speed.
You can’t keep any of them,
But you don’t really care,
As long as you’re laughing.
You’re a jester.
You’re a fool.

Have you received
All my invisible messages to you?
And are you
About to reply?
I took your phantom phone calls
And collected all the non-existent letters from the post office
Tied them with heartstrings
And stored them inside me
For a more convenient moment,
One where I can cry at length, and undisturbed
At what I know you will disclose.

You want to fight
But I, my angry darling,
I only want to write.
I'll spew out wrathful words and find redemption on the page.
And what will you do?
Where will you go?
Denied a receiver at which to bellow,
Will the bullish screams die within your throat
Before they reach your lips?
Does it bewilder you, how your rage remains unsated?
My reluctance, my refusal to join you in anger games?
Don't you wonder where I go?
I've told you, but you dismissed my refuge with a shrug,
So live with it, find a punchbag or a stressball,
Or better still a friend
On which to offload.
I only want to write
I won't fight you, not tonight.

I have nothing to say about anything important,
Being wholly preoccupied with my own little dramas.
So I'll do what I do whenever it all feels overwhelming,
I'll look up at the stars.
I am insignificant.
All is so much nothing.
This is what they teach me,
And it comforts me.
The realisation of my own inconsequence
Gives me perspective.
Maybe there are other beings out there, somewhere,
Doing better than we are at living,
Making more out of existence.
Or maybe they too are looking out
And dreaming of us,
Wondering what it all means.

We would have had a glitterball life,
All excess and adoration,
Caffeine and *******.
We would have had filthy, frantic ***
And stayed up all night
Talking, dancing, drinking, laughing,
We would have burned each other out
And pulled each other apart.
You would have drowned in Jack Daniels,
I would have lost my mind
It didn't happen
We saw sense
And ended it, amicably, exactly when we should have done.
I hope you found a calm and practical girl
To pull you into line,
I hope you are happy,
I hope you are okay.

We had one thing in common
And we both betrayed him.
What were you, to me, before that?
An almost friend.
Except that isn't quite true...
I realise now,
You were always my dormant lover,
There was always something else,
Something undefinable
Until you defined it.
Before, before,
You were his, not mine,
He was yours, and mine,
I was his, yet somewhere deep inside,
Also yours.
I have never liked triangles
I was always intimidated
By the power of three.

Have you ever seen someone crumple?
I have,
And I was one half of the cause.
She’d taken a bullet
But didn’t yet know it.
She wasn’t angry
As she looked from me to him and back again
Waiting for one of us to explain
What couldn’t be explained.
She wasn’t angry, she was imploding
Chipped glass about to shatter
Fragmenting shards.
Atoms swirled in chaos,
She stood alone, in a tornado
Still and silent
Not realising the oxygen had all but gone.
Time stood still for us all
And as she realised,
She started to crumple and turned and fled
Too proud to disintegrate
In front of those who fired the gun.

How is she nearly five
And losing a tooth?
It was only yesterday that the first one peeked through,
Surely?
How is she painting such exquisite, thoughtful pictures,
When last week we cooed over scribbles
And helped her hold the pen?
And she's learning to read, and when we bake cakes
She decorates them so carefully, and they're better than mine.
She's choosing her own clothes, and putting them all on,
And helping baby sister into hers.
She's challenging me, questioning me,
And though I'm so proud, every "why" scares me half to death,
Because she's no longer my baby,
She's finding and claiming and asserting her self.
She will be five, and there's a lump in my throat,
at the multicoloured candles on the cake,
So many...too many...
Too old, too soon.

The best thing about parties
Is the dancing.
I would like to dance right from the start,
But no-one else is ready,
So I wait for the ***** and bonhomie to kick in,
And then I start it off with a giggle and a wiggle,
And soon everyone's gyrating, sweating, laughing, into it.
Nothing makes me feel more alive,
More in the moment.
More truly myself.
I'm an outrageous exhibitionist,
But it isn't even that -
It's the beat, the truth, the tune, the words,
Leading to the movement,
It's pure interpretation, clear communication,
The essence of party,
The absence of sad.

Kiss kiss
Lick lick
Stroke fur
Purr.

Kiss Kiss
Lick this
Flick Flick
Her.

Arch back

Miaow!

Don't stop

Wow!

Everyone who meets you
Is both charmed and alarmed.
You are an acquired taste,
Even I found you somewhat challenging,
Before you found me
And helped me find myself.
Oh, what madness drove you to utterances of adoration?
Admittance of inappropriate, intoxicating dreams?
How you found certain parts of me spectacular?
Your words were nectar to little bee, me
I couldn't refuse you
anything.
You were right, my darling,
We didn't 'do much'
But it's no defence, not really,
Lack of opportunity, not formidable willpower
Or a following of conscience.
We were on an inevitable path
to a car crash of an affair,
The age old story
Curiosity found fascination found obsession
Thank God we got found out.

Remember when I asked you
To never forget that you are my friend?
You replied "and that's the most important thing".
Turned out not to be so important to you, didn't it?
You were happy to forget.
You have forgotten, easily, and without pain.
Remember when I told you I would hate it
If you were no longer part of my world?
That your friendship was so important to me?
You replied "It is for me, too"
Well, you could have fooled me.
You said that it was like an addiction.
Yes, it was, but you went cold turkey,
And somehow skipped the tremors and cramps and all the other painful ****
That goes along with kicking a habit,
While it nearly killed me,
I'm still in the heart of darkness, suffering,
And you don't care, you never did.
Saying all the right things,
Making all the right moves
To get what you wanted.
I'm glad you never got it, I'm glad that fate intervened,
I'm glad it was her that discovered our sordid little secret.
I'm sorry she has to live with you,
Sorry for me, loving a heartless *******,
Sorry for him, betrayed by his best friend,
I'm not sorry for you.
You are one sorry enough *******,
Pity is the very last thing you need.

I want to be the flirty girl
In the floaty dress,
With the flower in her hair
Forever.
I want a portrait in the attic,
Growing wrinkled, drooping, dying,
While I dance through the city, luscious and buxom,
Not a care in the world,
Enjoying being 'different'.
Freeze time, I like me now.
It's taken years for me to get here,
And I don't want to leave.
I don't want to be insignificant,
I dread becoming invisible,
I want to just stop,
And be where I am,
I want to be me, now, forever.

Don't tut at the karma thing,
And roll your eyes
Like I did.
There's nothing supernatural about the concept of fate,
But there are lessons to be learned,
And if you dismiss all,
You will become insular, and brittle.
Don't stick ******* up at what the world can teach you,
With all it's coincidences, comebacks and reveals,
Accept everything that's thrown at you, absorb it, respect it,
Learn, evolve, grow.

You are just
Ghost fragments
Not even memories.
Sulci secrets
Locked into recesses,
Embedded
Waiting to be excavated.
Meanwhile, you're eroding,
Definition washed away
By cerebral fluid,
Made smooth
Unreal
You're fading,
What's unearthed
Will be a fossil
A brittle curiosity,
Open to interpretation.

Am I a diamond, a ruby, or a pearl?
Or am I
Just a plastic bead?

Not the toughest,
Or the brightest,
But I am precious.

And I'm certainly not cheap.