Scientists estimate that you will fall in love seven times before you get married.
That 42% of these marriages will end in divorce.
That lesbians get their sexuality from their fathers inability to
Maintain a platonic relationship with a woman
Pram pushing into bedrooms whilst our mothers clean
With wine stained pinafores and nicotine laced lips.
They remove their motherhood camise
And hang it on the banister one day after school,
Her fatal attraction to the bottle and mine to the silk touch of a woman’s fabric being the perfect childhood cliché for a
chronic homosexual.
My mothers is still there like a scare crow to heterosexuality,
warning off all my seven deadly loves that could have come from man but now come from the caress of a woman’s cheek but still,
I am afraid of wearing my heart on my sleeve
In case I shrink it in the wash so I place it in my rib cage
Captive to the beat of my own heart grieving.
You are my second love and according to science
I am therefore chasing something that cannot be caught,
Something that has an expiry date before I can even co-create this thing called love
So when I sip seduction from your navel,
When I unwrap you like the present at Christmas I never got,
Untying the ribbon as I undo your jeans,
Just know the only I do I will say is when you ask me if I think you look pretty.
Or if I want a brew when we are lying in bed puffing smoke rings
Around our impending sighs that float over us like rainclouds,
Drips of fate falling from these skies dampening my desire.
So forgive me if the only aisle I will see you up is the biscuit aisle, Pulling the fabric of my non-wedding dress around my slipping tights.
Forgive me if I trade in the sweat on your neck
For the salt side of a tequila
As sometimes I like to use the wool from over my eyes to knit me telescope so I can look at the stars between your thighs,
But what no one ever tells you is that when you wish upon a star,
That star has surely died.
Because I want to fall in and out of love 7 times.
Correction: I want to fall in and out of love with you 7 times.
I want to press you, not in a book, but against me.
Imprint the lines of your fingertips on my ******* like maps of Atlantis because I want to go places with you I never knew existed.
I want your nails engraved on my back like constellations of stars
So I can always find my way back to now. To then.
The present. The past. That very moment where Greenwich meantime got it wrong:
Those seconds were longer than any before,
And my life has been full of seconds.
Second child. Second best. Second chances. Second love.
The third the forth, the fifth the sixth but the 7th, the 7th time you tell me is no longer reserved for you.
You tell me the 7th time is for me to fall inexplicably, uncontrollably in love with myself.
So when I walk myself up a different kind of aisle I can do it with you by my side.
And I’ll stand there, lifting the veil from over my eyes and I will tell you, Darling, second love, science is colourblind.
It doesn’t see the colours of the rainbow like I do.
Because yes, I do.
spoken poetry