I’m left in static,
Unable to tune into anything
Without you on my frequency.
Days distort as I search
For the comfort
You always wanted me to find,
I keep looking for you
Just as you would reach for me
Keeping me in your orbit
With a glance of
Unflinching empathy.

There’s a piece of me missing,
A hole, only action and memory
Can move through.
You’re alive in my lifeblood,
You’ll touch everything I love;
A conduit of something
Beyond my understanding.
I’ll pour you into poetry
Break the fourth wall of mortality
To honour you and how much
I grew beside you.  

You cast your eyes over me
As I cut my teeth on words
Balancing my deadlines
And lifeline, bathed
In the resonance
Of the ebb and flow
Of our energy.

You were my arsenal
Of mutually assured affection
Watching over me as I slept
Through the hostility
Of a world warped through
Self-obsession and manipulation.

You taught me how to love
Unconditionally without anxiety
As you tore down my barricades
To saunter inside and find a home.
After appearing as a spectre of connection
We nurtured symbiotic salvation into fruition.
From a sick creature with nothing to offer
into the lifeforce you became
In the freedom of this space
Fated to echo hollow without you.

I’ll never forget what you gave me
The pain is confirmation
We’re still inseparable,
Beyond family, sentimentality
And material reality.

Regression parading as tradition
Modernity rejected in culture at the end of history.

Echoes of innovation only linger in the technology
Of subscribed self-adulation,
Quench the thirst trap.

Drink until you drown in the sound of static.
The revolution won’t be televised
Everything’s a repeat, an omnibus of Section 25;
They’re gunning after the enemies of hegemony; 

Fight it, resist it; the truth will be twisted

In the teeth of lobbied grins
So sing the populist nationalism anthem -
The only hit in the charts
That sustains the sycophancy of sentimentality.


Everything old, nothing new
To sedate the disenfranchised 

Who can’t wait to see the day 

Asylum seekers never know sanctuary.

Lie back and think of England; it’s going down too,
under the weight of visceral addiction, the vice of realism.
Antagonist activists; wolves in sheep’s loathing
in the generation defined by degradation.

Sparks fly between taut tensions;
as modern maladies devour rationality.
Why think when you can react
why take the boot off your neck
when you can bruise the most convenient minority.

Death threats, the new love letter
As silence falls on the din of dim culture
where scapegoats are led to slaughter.

We’re too bankrupt to be cheap
too weak to stand for what we stand for
in the Brexit towns punching down.

Nihilated from naivety, only you
could prove despair isn’t the only truth,
and remedy everything that cheapened me.

Every empty fill of vacuous desire
ebbed away sentimentality
until idealism was an affliction,
a coerced condition.

Stripped of venom as armour
reposed in your words,
romanticism is no longer an abject territory.

You’re the memory
I silently ached to make;
the expectation too unrealistic to hold
until your arms became the sanctuary
I could deconstruct my defences for.

I could sentimentalise,
throw flowers on your memory
agonise the opportunity to part with any gratuity,
wish you could see every success
through meaningless desire to conjure what never was
what never will be.

As you ebbed away to degeneration,
every strip of dignity
was a drop in the temperature of your cold stare
that epitomised our tenuous connection.

Even if truth be told,
would there be anyone to understand
how you created something so arbitrarily
only to derivatively destroy it?

if truth be told, I’ll recount every lie ever sold
in a body so weak it can barely stand itself.

I twist on a knife-edge with perfect composure
with a scar tissue backbone
mind a chamber of torture,
heart beating the rhythm of promised departure
forever delayed, scarcely in sync
you taught me to think in verses of fragility
after you watched me grow into regression

and you thought you knew the epitome of suffering.

nothing could ever be relative to your fatality
your ghost will never haunt me
as much as your living memory
I hope every recollection rots
with my hope of ever feeling safe in my skin.

in death, I see you in life
every minefield you left behind
as post-humous reminders
of your wounded mentality
that bred a burden
and made you the ultimate victim.  
I’ll die before I surrender
to what you made me
by weaponizing my vulnerability
and putting me in the firing line.

They will never see the full picture
they’ve already reduced you
to little more than a vessel to pour their slack self-worth into.
They just see just the negative as proof
you’re ready to reel into the predatory pantomime of illusory superiority.

In their minds that will never stretch to encompassed yours,
they’re the catch
in ours,
they’re the bait we don’t want to take
because we know that catch
is the spring of a mousetrap,
the hook on a line,
the cage waiting to close around us,
the expectation of something more from someone less.
You get what you pay for,
and what you never invited to come creeping in
from behind blue light
that depicts your portrait in grainy resolution
and dumbs you down
til your own knuckles are causing friction in fetid minds.