There was no plan.

It just happened.

All at once,
Paroxysms of emotion,
Violent,
Uncontrollable emotion.

You never crossed my mind,
Nobody did,
Until it was too late.

Lying in the cool bath water,
Self-medicating,
I told myself that it wouldn’t be long.

The voices on the other side of the door,
Assured me that everything would be the same,
Whether I lived or died.

Then,
Against my will,
My stomach flipped,
And the emotions that I swallowed,
Ended up on the floor.

I gave up,
Cleaned up,
And passed out.

When I was 11, my best friend told me that they were gay.


Their eyes were glazed with watery doubt and their voice quivered to the same pace as my trembling heart. I prayed for seven hours that evening, begging God to cleanse them of these sins that I didn’t quite understand to be wrong but that my mother and father and sister and aunt spat out like deadly poison.
When I was 11, my best friend told me that they were gay. And I screamed words that I learnt from my family, words that felt ***** and disfigured in my mouth, words that had no meaning that I could decipher.
When I was 11 years old, my best friend told me that when we watched Harry Potter together, when our friends drooled over Cedric Diggory, they

fell

in

love

with Hermione Granger

When I was 11, my best friend told me that they were gay… and I didn’t know what the word meant. Just that it was awful and demonic and that they were going to rot in hell. At the tender age of 11 my mother’s religion eviscerated a 7 year friendship.

When I was 12, I realised that it wasn’t God I worshipped, it was the feeling of belonging. I idolised my Father’s radiant smile and my Sister’s reverent voice, her face raised to the heavens and her song echoing across a stained glass chapel. When I was only 12 years old, I discovered that I was a slave of my family’s beliefs, and that I didn’t understand what my religion even was, only that my aunt liked it when we clasped hands around a dinner table and that my gran reminded me to recite the same words before bed every night. Pretty words like ‘glory’ and ‘heaven’ but also malicious words like ‘temptation’ and ‘evil’ and ‘sin’, words that I, with a shudder and an almighty stab of guilt, remembered saying to my best friend at 11 years old.

When I was 13, I was angry. A furious cloud of space-black smoke swirling in my stomach and pulling on my tongue, until I was a silent and malevolent storm. When I was 13, I realised that if this is what being close to god feels like, then I would rather burn in the raging pits hell, surrounded by the same billowing barrages of blackness as those inside of me. When I was 13, I found out what gay meant, and I sobbed and howled and screamed. Inside of my own head. When I was 13 I apologised to the person who was once my best friend, and with eyes glazed with watery defiance and a voice quivering with nothing but assuredness I told them ‘me too’.

And we clung onto each other promising to never let go.

friable alabaster bones huddle
in rugose rose wrapping,
words hanging pendulously in the air,
and I think this is where we fell in love –
somewhere in the Gehenna between
how-do-you-do and nice-to-meet-you
the moon thawed and
bled
into the crescents your fingernails left me with.

Je parle dans le langage de l'amour, mais ces mots me semblent toujours comme du poison couvrant ma langue

                                                    ~~~

­Never the romantic, Never the loving

I speak in the language of love, but these words always seem to me like poison covering my tongue

Remember remember the fifth of November.

Remember glistening fury and violent light, iridescent agony soaring into black abysses, orange green and blue mixes with stars in a display of panicked serenity.

Gunpowder treason and plot.

Light a fuse and set me ablaze, every fragile thought a shimmering time bomb ready to explode into dancing convulsions, let flames lick at my ribcage and let my heart smoulder. My words commit treason upon my heart. My brain spasms with busts of rainbow paroxysms and my fingers are blistering sparklers.

- Set my entire being afire and watch me implode in a beautiful display

when you fall in love with an angel, you must understand that there are things you will never understand.

- when you first go to run your hands through her hair, her halo will slice your palm. and it will hurt like hell. she will mend it with the touch of one golden finger, and leave so abruptly that she is gone almost before you even blink. the thing you will see is her at the doorway. terrified eyes, blood stained hair.

(later, she will tell you that she never realized how breakable humans could be. when she explains what it takes to make an angel bleed, you begin to understand )

- ask her about the sky, about stars and suns and galaxies light years away. ask her whether or not the universe looks like a blooming garden. never ask about lucifer - she will become a soldier before your eyes.

and not, do not, donot, ask about god.

do not ask about rebellious older brothers and absentee mothers.

(do not infer about a war you know nothing of)

- in a science class you are taking simply for extra credit, your teacher will be talking about quantum physics. he will explain galaxies and refer to stars as "celestial bodies," but you won't be listening. suddenly you will only be able to think of the way her mouth curls at the sides, of the way her golden skin glows, of all the puckered scars that crisscross her torso, of the graceful arch on the bottom of her foot. celestial bodies are certainly on your mind but they are so much more than gas and light and heat and touch and --- oh heavens ---

when the teacher asks if you are alright, you will flush an even deeper red. supernova.

(at times it is lovely to be in love with an angel. but at other times, it is not)
- beware when you fight, it is like the world is ending. her anger conjures a thunderstorm, and soon the entire country is three inches deep in water. you shatter a picture frame. a bolt of lightning catches the house across the street on fire. you are screaming at the top of your lungs – something about duty, something about god – and there is a crash of thunder that shakes the foundations. the weathermen talk about the storm for days. you flinch and change the channel.

(no matter how right she is, she will always let you win)

- there are times when she won't visit for months on end, and when she finally comes back to you, she is not herself. there are new scars across her chest, and she does not speak. she sits with you in her arms for hours, her nose buried in your hair, and her arms squeezed tight, so tight. she does not cry. you do not cry.

you do(not) cry.

(but you do remember the miles and miles of white scarring. you wonder if angels are as immortal and unbreakable as they think)

words are the essence of the soul.
but if i can't paint a dreamscape of my own emotion and instead sustain myself using half formed memories of poems long forgotten, do I still have the right to my spirit?