1) We f*cked to be less lonely.
2) In unbroken silence, lips slowly fuse.
3) Strings at my wrists, tied inescapably.
4) Without speaking, I turned to stone.
5) Left ribboned, abandoned on the floor.
6) Behind glass, bulletproof, subject to unreality.

You ask me questions,
as if your curiosity itself entitled you to the answers.
Secrets,
which in the simple act of their existence engender in us a fierce protectiveness;
We want to shelter them.
answers,
which before you no one even knew to ask for.
“Do I think you’ll judge me for them?”
you ask.
And of course
of course I do.
But,
how could that be it?
Your curiosity doesn’t earn you the right of entry.

I wanna write about you.
And I do.
You drip off the end of my pen,
Off the blinking line of my cursor,
And fill up white space
With the nebulousness of what you are to me;
Your cumulonimbus formlessness.
Enter.
Pause.
A moment of consideration.
I am constantly unsure of what this all means.
I love you.
You’re bad for me.
I might be bad for you in return.
I want you.
I don’t want anything and I burn for you,
I write for you,
I pine when I am a creature of pragmatism and action.
You don’t want me the same in return, if you do at all.
The absence of you is terrifying.
The absence of you was a relief.
With you I am elated.
With you I feel as though you slowly pull my heart apart,
As though you forcefeed me hope,
For I am unable to do anything else but wish for—
Change
—when we are together,
Though I know it is impossible,
Unlikely enough to deserve the word.
I can see the planes of your skin, feel
Them beneath my fingers
I can trace their lines with my mind’s
Tongue.
Wishing is pointless with you.
I know this and still cry for the moon.

It is in moments like these that I dream of you.

Why is it that I miss you most

When we are together?

You are like the edges of a broken bottle;

I want to pick you up,

And think that I can see through you.

But you slice through the pad of my finger

So blood beads, salty and warm

Sliding down skin

And falling into nothing.

I know you.
Sometimes you say things, expecting that I won’t understand, and I think it’s strange because
I know you.
That’s what this is. I know you,
And I want you,
And I care about you
Anyway.
I want no one else.
You might not know me,
The stanchions you use to prop yourself up eating all that I have fed you,
In the darkness,
In the night,
But I know you.
And I want you anyway.

Sick with the stars that shine in the sky
The sky you could be looking into
The stars I handed to you, fingers broken and trembling
With pain and rage and hope
Sick with the winds and the rain
Howling around me, lashing into my skin
Wind that whips long wet strands of black hair to cover my eyes and renders me as blind as I willed myself to be.
It wasn’t you who plucked out my eyes but my own treacherous fingers,
Driving into vulnerable ocular orbs, fingers cutting into the tender cells making up flesh before tearing the organs free.
Rain slicks down my skin, renders my clothes too wet to move, heavy and frozen in the night.
What is there to miss?
What is there to rage over?
What about you could have possibly left me bereft?
You are a dragon guarding the last of its hoard of treasure, nothing there but a few measly coins.
I am a traveller starving, fistfuls of air all I have won from you.
And I gave you the stars, though they burned my mortal eyes.
And I gave you the sky, though its weight cracked my shoulders.
But giving can’t be regretted without becoming a judgment on the giver.
So I gave to you and I would give again.
I suppose regret comes in around the edges of the wound —
Closing, praise to god it is closing —
And goes something like this:
“I still wish you had wanted to give to me in return”.
But life is so little about our wants.
I want you to be happy.

She loves you more than I will,
And Lord knows but you don’t love me.
Her circular curves –
Filled with such verve –
Blind so you can’t hardly see.
You could try to escape,
You tail-eating snake,
But your own misery
Is such better company
Than us mere mortals can provide.
You stew in your own **** unhappiness –
And I could be wrong,
To hate you for it,
But **** being right anyway.

I want to be above myself.

I want to be beyond myself.

I push off from the ground, one skip, two,

Desperation behind the grate of my sneakers scraping against the pavement,

And then it takes and I heave myself into the air, flying.

I am above the clouds, above the swirl and eddies of white condensation forming mountains, forming rivers, mimicking the ground below,

But still the pink stripe of the setting sun is higher,

Still the sun is higher.

Still immolation is beyond my reach,

And flight fails me as I fall back to the earth.

I test the nib of the fountain pen against my finger,
Testing its sharpness, its edges.
Then I place the point against the pale moonlight of my flesh,
And push it slowly between two ribs, skin parting reluctantly.
I carefully work it deeper into the hole created by the head, the nib disappearing into the red secrets of my insides,
Rivulets of blood running past the smooth black edges, designed to be gripped comfortably, ergonomically while writing,
Red falling down past the grasping circle of my white skin.
The tip ****** my heart, still beating too slowly, too wounded, and with a twist blood fills the compartment made for ink.
I am made of paper white and ink black anyway.

I am a tangle of wild keyed up emotion that roars beneath my skin.

You could be forgiven for thinking restraints held me down as I sit here in the dark,
for thinking I was strapped into this chair.

Nails digging into --

flesh

-- the wood of the armrests.

Muscles straining and perfectly still.

If I don’t move, maybe it will quiet.

If I don’t move, maybe it will leave me alone;

No longer lashing into my brain,

Self-flagellation demanding more,

Harder, faster, more

More pain to feed the craving for escape, to punish for the regrets and failure, to show that there is striving, progress, as I strain to be else.

Maybe if I hold still this need for pain, punishment, this urgent desire to outpace myself will rest.

It is louder than my own thoughts, but not the ragged breaths pulled from my chest when I have exhausted my own ability to tear one step further down the street

I wish I could tear a hole in the fabric of the world and disappear somewhere new, somewhere the hornets’ nest of my own thoughts would be unable to follow me.

I am so proud, so indefatigable in defence of myself.
You bring me down, down to my knees, hard enough to make me bleed, grit in the wounds and
I will kneel here, while you circle, show you my devotion if you would but look;
I am little more to you than a supplicant.
Oh feel my hands clasped together in prayer, whispered words that wind their way round you;
Feel my wanting, feel my wine drunk breath, holy communion is so close at hand.
You could take me palm to palm,
Kisses just like saints have done,
Know that I burn for you, on my hands and knees.
I’ve never begged before, but for you I’d pray
For you I’d wait forever, in sanctity and ablution till my skin grew cold beneath holy waters.

You are right next to me
I can’t touch you though I want to
You don’t understand
What I’m risking letting you so close
How few people can say they’ve seen me
Like this

Vices, circling tighter.
I have slid back into them like a hand into a dish glove,
Only to find lingering soapy water in the fingers.
They don’t do what I want them to do,
Don’t relieve my misery as I had hoped.
And I burn burn burn like a circle of hell,
While trapped in my own ring of fire.
I think about you.
But that’s not enough either.
What is?
The chains get a better hold of me.
I take a deep breath
and let myself be pulled under.

I saw your skittles earlier.
Wasn’t planning on thinking about you,
The whole **** day through,
But if I’m honest —
And I am —
That was going to happen anyway.
Want you back.
Back here with me.
Still waiting for you to be somewhere I can watch your *******.
Counting the days,
Till you fly back to me,
And if you have an objection to the phrasing of that —
You can stuff it.

Don’t pick apart what I feel for you.
No, there has never been anyone before you.
But, I am not an emotional *******.
I know myself, and my mind.
Am capable of recognising what it is I feel.
Love you. Kind of. Maybe. By half.
I am on the way to love, at least.
You vacillate in the doldrums, a land of grey uncertainty, rather than travelling in either direction.
I’ll wait. Not forever.
It’s like having a part of my body outside of itself.
Vulnerable and full of the absence of something divided.
Something that was previously mine given to you.
I knew love would be hard when it came.
Not this sad, or this sort of hard.
I expected modest love, and humdrum hard.
This is like being the wife of a sailor gone out to sea.  
Interminable longing and painful waiting.
My heart pulls in my chest, the steady drumbeat too loud, loud enough to feel in my fingers, feel in my legs.
It tightens in discomfort, and sends me spiralling.
I wish I could hold you.
I wish I could heal you.
But neither is possible without you.
And I’m still waiting.

Yes, I love you.
It is tentative and new, sea foam lingering on the shore, waiting to be washed away.
So what?

Love you.
Love you?
The **** is love anyway?
I care about you.
My fear for you makes me cry sometimes,
when you                   can’t see.
You have to be here.
You have to be here.
I don’t need anything from you but that you’re here, walking this earth.
I want you, all of you, every flawed thing that makes you who you are.
I want you in my arms where I can keep you safe, protect you from the world that makes you unable to breathe.
“I love you.”
The words sound true,
Even if I don’t know what they mean.
Do they form an anchor, holding you to this plane?
Then they might actually mean
Something.