If I can learn the way
to walk Belvedere, and
make one-way’s, wrong ways,
your rock t-shirt my best pillow,
a cats relentless meow
a joyous morning alarm.
Than I can find a way to
sleep soundly beside you,
hold hands without sweating,
and park under a sap-less tree.
Ones that shade our backyard dinners,
the fish and fudge left uneaten
and the lies left unlearned.

Why is it surprising?
That I can find love,
and still feel like dying.
Have you tried it?
The vacancy of living
underneath yourself.
Have they pushed you
in change rooms?
Left you half naked
to a party you threw.
I have played nice,
pressed his linens.
Gave my shoulders
for weights I can
now choose.
Even when I find
love again.
It’s not enough
to solve a labyrinth.
I’m only assured
by the consistent
accuracy of depression.
Four particular walls
I can depend on
crying behind.

To protect your laugh,
sacred gleaming subtleties.
Your pink flushed cheeks,
with dots too often observed.

The innocence of turquoise walls,
where do your bones lie?
Past reminiscent of a 1gb USB -
my closet is stuffed and cracked open,
their mixtapes in alphabetical order.

To protect your honour,
softly sharing my heavyweights.
Your pink flushed lips,
with softness never overlooked.

i wish i made you up in my mind,
instead of all the ink i spilled over tropes and trophies.
you’re much better than their tireless scripts -
only to be caught offside like the running red herring.
you’re not my cup of tea really either,
more like my morning blonde roast with too many substitutions -
but new things excite me and make me grow still.
and i have been stretching these pages longer,
taking up every inch of you that i can muster
hoping that i see an ending,
and not another oxford comma.

You reaped my moist soils,
my soft grounded earth bed,
a soul, in a place to rest your head.
Before I only asked for water,
and when the seasons changed,
I died, brown and wilted over.
When our sun got hotter,
I grew with it’s new placements,
turning pedals where they ought to,
in the centre of our pink garden,
opening up for another keen drought.

Skin fibres trace across us burning,
and all I can do is smirk at your shivers.
You know I’m an expert at *** and ex’s?
That’s why you find them in eachother.
Trained six years, broke three hearts.
Crossed a few seas and brown eyes
to find yours staring lonely in depths.
So ******* blue and yet so much softer -
would you ever hurt me like they do?
I can find all your secret soft spots too,
map the space our lips drew out.
Across Royal York to Jane? No Runnymede - where we ran to our bakery’s.
Where you loved me plainly,
if you think I didn’t know then here’s how:
I can see it in between takes, the ttc stops,
between breaths your forgetting to draw.
Like our map we are objectively real.
And you think I don’t see past you,
with a past like mine?

you love to kiss my stern mouth
when i rip up in passionate graces
but i am not a mistake, i promise
i am an awfully good learner

still i wait on your patient notices
any slight gesture to ask for more
a longer goodbye that lasts four hours
so you can kiss my smiles to form more