I think I’m losing my poetry.
Not in some bleak, calamitous way,
Just – I don’t know how to start anymore.

Is that the problem?
That I’m caught up in my once-upon-a-times
And my dark-and-stormy-nights?
Maybe.

Or. I’m trapped in my metaphors.
Even – I’m tangled in my analogies.
Trying to tap the trees of every experience I’ve ever had and
Bleed them for all their meaning.
Picking up each imperfect seed of memory and desperately
Injecting their cores with GMO/Pesticide/Make this Matter/Juice.

This cyclical little life of mine is whirling too quickly,
My tail is tying knots in my intestines.
I can see the nape of my neck approaching in the distance,
Time taps her toes on my scaled sloping back and tsk-tsks not long now.

I keep on asking her what the countdown is for.
She checks her watch and smiles.

Even now,
no matter how meandering the path may be,
all my poetry
stumbles back
to
you.

This place still exists, it turns out. I didn't mean to find it, I just wanted to use this website for a project, and it redirected me here. I guess that's fate being herself once again, because this always was the place for deep secrets and darker thoughts.


You won't ever find this, I'm almost sure of it.


1. I said I wouldn't write about you anymore, I hope this doesn't break that rule.

2. I'm so happy you've moved on, I'm so grateful to the universe for giving you back love.

3. I've moved on too. It's been... slow... I feel like there's always something new to unpack, something else to remember, something more to forgive or repent. I'm not in a relationship in any kind of traditional sense, but I'm learning to love in a way that heals rather than hurts, and that's pretty immense.

4. sometimes I wish you sent me that email on valentines, sometimes I wonder what it would say and what it could have changed.

5. most of the time, I'm glad you didn't, and you found a love that seems so full of Good in the glimpses I've tangentially seen.

6. A lot of the time, I think about whether you read my email. I wonder if it helped or hurt, I wonder if you think of me at all.

7. Always, I hope for a future where we talk, catch up as friends, you let me cheer for you on the sidelines of your life as you grow into this amazing person you've always had the capacity to become.

8. Eternally, I'll love you. In the way of dog-eared books and well-loved movies. A finished kind of love, a sweet kind of loss.

9. whatever I am to you these days, be it villain or side character, or nothing at all, I hope I at least remain a lesson, to never accept anything less than the love you deserve ever again, no matter the reason  

10. Thanks for saving my life

I’ll always be left wondering if first love is just slang for a practice run

How many holes have I plugged with Sorry,

Where a Thank You would have cemented the cracks?

how do you come to terms with the best part of the worst part of your life

I don't regret it. but it hurts just the same

brainless shuffle
c r a w l i n g
nerveless

fog lifts.

tingling fingers
gut drop (you have one of those now)

look up,
knife to chest
the seasons passed without you.


and just like that you can mourn the end of love.

I started a new kind of therapy yesterday.
EMDR,
Trauma therapy.

I didn't even realise I had PTSD until I read the emergency referral form.

and when the therapist asked me to tell her about my safe place - real or imagined - how could I say it was within the arms of a girl I chose to say goodbye to?

why do i only feel alive when im toeing the line of death

when the anxiety of being around someone becomes so strong that your stutter blocks your words like it did when you were 7, its time to let go.

when a texting screen makes you run to the bathroom and spit out bile because every word that you want to type is wrong somehow; its time to let go.

when you realise that being with her has become a reason to welcome the hunger that's killing you (and when you have convinced yourself that that's the version of you she wants, despite having no evidence to back it up); its time to let go.

when the notes page on your phone has more drafted breakup messages than it does shopping lists; its time to let go.

when you've lost your poetry because every line inside of you has frozen in fear of no longer being a lyric of love; its time to let go.

when every thought of letting go is fuelled by external anxieties, its not the right time, it must be done in person, it will hurt her and that will be your fault, deal with the pain. deal with the fear. putting yourself first makes you abusive. makes you no better than the ones that hurt you; I'm sorry, but its time to let go.

it will hurt. it will teach you every intricacy of torture. you will know how it feels to be stabbed in the sternum and there will be no culprit to blame. but its time to let go.

He doesn't know if you can hear him,
doesn't know if he wants to be heard.
Can you see him?
He's right there. Right there in the chasm that used to be a forest, now
-
a crater
-
what remains after something detonates.
He isn't an explosion.
He's the dust that comes after,
the left-overs after everything living
evacuates.

the Ashes no longer burning.
Don't look too close. He doesn't want to be seen.

Was it not enough to be fighting my brain?
Now I’m fighting a body that’s giving up too.

It’s crazy to be pushing for survival when most of me has already been broken beyond repair.

Prompt: Write about yourself when you were 7

I’m trying very hard to remember who I once was, who was ‘me’ before ‘me’ became ‘I’. It's a strange experience, rewinding time in your head, and trying to picture a child who is ‘me’ but also ‘her’. The ‘me’ who was seven doesnt exist any more. She didn’t die, nor did she change, she… shifted and morphed and eleven years went by and after ten of them, all of the cells that made her up were replaced entirely with new ones. Does that still make ‘her’ ‘me’? I don’t like not knowing.

What I do know is this, at seven years old there were almost as many different versions of ‘me’ as there are now.

The ‘me’ that is easiest to imagine is not the ‘me’ that ‘I’ remember. This is the me who exists in photos and in stories. My mother says,
"You were so loud"
"You wouldn't stop talking"
"You had happy eyes"
And she starts to cry, these great big bubbly tears "I want my baby back".
I don’t remember being much louder, chattier, or happier than any other kid. It’s like my mother forgot every unique feature I possessed, and was left with a gingerbread child. My mother’s ‘me’ could have been Gretel or Jill or Goldilocks

I don’t remember being talkative, but I do remember deciding to be quiet. I remember lying on the landing with breaths coming in big whooshing puffs, I remember my eyes stinging and my head thumping and no-one coming. I remember the house shaking with slamming doors and yelling so loud so-so-loud and my ears hurt from all the sound and my shoulder hurt from the fall and my throat hurt from the sobs and. No one was coming.

And so I put a hand to my mouth and muffled the cries until they went away and then my ears hurt a little less and I thought
'Alright then. There you go. That feels better than it did before. That's one less sound. '

'She'... 'me' stops existing in photos and stories after that. And though I don’t remember being her perfectly, I can feel her hiding in my chest now.

My mother doesn’t remember what my first word was, my sister’s was Socks.

I’m just not good enough for anything.  And not good enough for anyone either.

I've tried so hard but there's nothing left. There are no words left in me; none to write, and none to say. I don't think they're coming back this time. I don't think I want them to.
They hurt and bite and slash and claw and I'm more scared of them than I am of disappearing.

Im not scared of disappearing. Im not scared of the things I should be scared of anymore; and I'm not scared of what that means either.

maybe if I stay silent long enough it will minimise the damage of my pre-written ending.

When they broke me
Sorry, broke up with me
They renamed themself
Neo
New
Whole
Untainted

I've run out of words.

And that, I think, is the most frightening prospect of them all.

How do I explain

that sometimes, the night sky stops existing above my head and instead opens up like a gaping chasm in the bottom of my rib cage scraping my skin from the inside / i press my hand to my chest and for a flicker of a moment imagine ripping it open, watching inky black and Scarlett red pour out

that fear has found lodging in my larynx, trapping my words in a steel safe, my mind desperately works to puzzle out the code but it changes faster than I can input it / i raise my finger to my lips and imagine for a second what my words would look like if given physical form. blood blocks my airways and spills between the gaps of my teeth

that sadness circles around my wrists and fashions itself into a bracelet, locked and chafing, itching when the sadness grows and calling for relief/ i rub my wrists together and wear wristbands to distract the phantom feelings from the real ones.  It’s doesn’t take as much imagination as it should to picture how sadness looks when I pull it out of my skin

that exhaustion sits so heavily on my mind that it’s seeped down my spine and coated every vertibre with its tar-like embrace/ for a heartbeat i picture my gasoline-covered-bones burning like a sick science project

- How can I explain that oblivion lives in my chest and fear in my throat, sadness keeps me in cuffs and exhaustion cements my skeleton

I relived a moment once.  
It was only a few seconds, a puff of breath stolen from a machine and pumped into lungs that shouldn’t still be moving.
But I lived it and then relived it once more

It was not my first time drunk, not even close
but it was the first time that the floor span as a child's spinning top
and faces swam in my too-dark-too-bright-toomuch vision.
It was the first time I lost my footing and my back crashed into the wall sliding down until my knees hit my heaving chest and my palms pressed white against kitchen tile.
It was my first time crying into the shoulder of a boy I don't know, ripping my apple-bruised heart out of my retching throat and pushing it into his ***** numbed hands.

(after that my memories become manufactured by the later retellings of others)

something about the roof shingles being cold against my back but the stars being warmer than my smile ever was. Something about a phone call to a girl I once loved apologising over and overandover for falling for another. Something about a text at 1am that had my cheeks blushing and my stomach clenching convulsively around Gin and Guilt.  

(something more a little something more to drink)

Later, the boy who clumsily cradled my heart and my head in his lap, will tell me that I smiled at him through tingling teeth and told him that I would rather die than wake up in the morning.

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?