Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Scrap that, you thought, I’ll go one better
You remind me of a storm.
Heaven on your lips, you wrote
With rhythmic sway and purpose,
Lines you scribed to excise your mind
The parts where I still lingered.

10 things I hate about you in prose
Though you only made it to eight
I’ll forgive you for the missing two
Cause we both know they were there.

Still I come back here often
To a place where love is shown
And even though it hurts to touch
I just can’t leave it alone.

We were young and dumb and hurtful
Or at least that’s my excuse
For why I requested your soul
And left us to misuse.

So I was, sitting there
Watching it on the screen
The expressions
Of pain, of love, of wonder
And my heart felt for them
Each moment swelling in my chest
Rising to my eyes
This reflection of humanity
Or someone’s interpretation of it
Because the screen is all fake.
Faked, channelled, pulled from real experience
So maybe real in some way.
Someone’s art
“Life imitates art
Far more than art imitates life”
Or so said Wilde.
That idea, I think about it often.
The more years that go by
The more I wonder
If all the culture I consumed when I was young
That seemed so far removed from my life at the time
Increasingly becomes reality around me
No longer outlandish
Dramatic
But relatable.
I wonder, is this my natural life?
Or like Wilde suggested, have I become what I saw?
Am I the imitation
The fake.
Life found it’s expression through what was offered
Would I have found the fog so pretty if someone had not suggested it first?
Would love and life hurt so much, be so complicated if that was not what art told me?
Am I the artist or the art?

I’m getting too thin again
I said as I looked in the mirror
The outline of each rib stretched against my skin.
I like it when you’re thin
You look appreciatively up and down
It’s ****, came your reply
I can squeeze you like a cat
And so you did, hands wrapped round my torso
I smiled and laughed

It came on slowly
At first amused and then frustrated
At how often I wanted to eat.
I got hungry and I got thin, too easily
It was a struggle to maintain it
To be in the healthy limit
And then it became a nuisance to you
This need for regular sustenance
You who could go on cigarettes and coffee alone.
So I stopped pushing
For us to eat together
For us to eat often
And so I didn’t.

Then once I was there again
The place I had worked so hard to get out of
You praised me
And I knew it wasn’t healthy
And I scoffed at your insistence
But a small part of me glowed
And so I did nothing.

When I moved out, I worked at it again
I gained it back and I felt beautiful
No more worried looks or comments
I felt free of you, healthy
But your small voice in my head
Was I somehow less appealing?

Fast forward almost a year
I’m back in your arms, this place I find comfort
And I hear those words again.
I reject them but still, I skip meals
Unthinkingly, distractedly, I was busy…
And there they are again
The cutting bones of hips and ribs
You smile
I cry

Sometimes when I think of you, I only feel an overwhelming sense of love.
For all those little things that meant so much, that showed you cared.
That thoughtful, tender heart that saw into and beyond.
But it doesn’t take much for memories to come and rebalance my rose-tinted view.

Sometimes when I think of you, I just want to cry, the sadness overwhelming. Sometimes for me, often for you.
I think of all the things that formed you, experiences beyond your control. Those things that have given you a cavalier attitude to the should-be serious.
How did you cope?
I can see why you wrapped yourself up this way, pulling that which you could control into a tight sphere around yourself.
Your need to control.
And when I think of all that, I don’t cry for me at all.
And I know you would hate that. The thought of any pity repulsive and rejected.

But it’s more than that, it is overwhelming love.
I love the person that you are underneath that,
The little boy inside who still catches butterflies on the tips of his fingers to release outside and makes friends with the rabbits and magpies.
The man that cries at the fictional plight.
That tender hearted soul who loves and cares so deeply it hurts. Too deeply to feel, better to drown it out.
Better to throw yourself from planes, surrender to the water, hurtle forwards at 140ks per hour.
Better to drink until it’s numb, take whatever substance is on offer to stem the tide of thoughts that would otherwise bleed out, leaving you weak and vulnerable.

But these things make up a part of you too.
You can’t love parts of a person, you take the whole thing. The completed package.
For all your cracks and bruises I loved you too.
But my bandaids increasingly proved useless
And your cracks were catching.

One man, you said, you wrote.
Completely separated from his world.
Just one man.