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Jul 2021 · 167
Poem 48
Emma Jul 2021
I want you.
And wanting is heavy,
Breaking in waves and never drifting apart.
I want you inside me;
*** is the only way I know how to form connections.
Cheap and sacred,
Meaningless and potent.
I want you to know me.
See my sadness and loss and understand they’re not all of me better than I do.
I want you to fill me;
Glaring holes and gaping chasms.
Pour light into me and soothe absences I should know how to heal myself.
Fix my rot,
Want me though I’m broken and lacking.
See me, unfinished and trying and with eyes that should help but follow you,
And pick me though I am the devourer of worlds, already devoured more than once myself.
I want you, and the want is so heavy.
Though I don’t break apart beneath it, or anything else.
All I do is stand here, wanting,
And my wanting wants you.
Jun 2021 · 168
hold me
Emma Jun 2021
Hold me.

Make me feel safe

And small

And hideable

Put your arms around me

So that the world can’t get past

Give me your care

And absolution for my needing it
Jun 2021 · 1.4k
Balloon.
Emma Jun 2021
I could burst with my feelings
for you. Like a balloon.
Filled with hot air, babe. Tssssssssshhhhh.
Kind of a haiku
Apr 2021 · 371
Unrealistic Affections
Emma Apr 2021
Unrealistically enamoured with you.
As in, we are an unrealistic pairing.
As in, if you ever /were/ to reciprocate my affection, we would both have to pray that my stupid crush-obsession turned into something real.
As in, before you discovered how emotionally stunted and unhealthy I am.
As in, maybe I can’t feel real things for other people, and maybe trying to touch you would only reveal you to be smoke.
Unrealistic, unrealistic, unrealistic, unrealistic, unrealistic.
As in, I think you’re wildly uninterested in me;
I think I’m the opposite of your type;
I think I confuse any type of fondness for a faint glimmer of hope;
I think I should ******* give up;
But I have an addict’s brain and it keeps chasing the idea of us round and around and around, wearing grooves into the earth.
As if by doing so I can tire myself out of the idea.
As if by doing so the cracks will bleed into reality.
I think I should ******* give up.
To be read quickly and with a lot of self-directed irritation/frustration.
Feb 2021 · 169
Rumours and Ghosts
Emma Feb 2021
Ghost,
Tell no secrets of mine
And I won’t pull you into the corporeal.
Forget the taste of life I left on your lips,
The wine of my blood you drank as an offering,
The honey of my skin.
Speak not of what was given too freely,
Memories that should have suffered our same demise.
Ghost,
Speak not my name.
If not for me, then for fear that I know your name too
And how to use it against you.
Feb 2021 · 144
Fear
Emma Feb 2021
Thunk, clack,
There is the sound of brick laid on brick,
Their harsh edges meeting as you build a wall.
P-R-O-T-E-C-T Y-O-U-R-S-E-L-F,
The Gameshow.
The audience knows when the lights flash to repeat the words.
Their enthusiasm is a bloodlust,
And you are just waiting for the blood mist,
A knife in your ribs,
Pain,
Betrayal.
So— THUNK, CLACK—
You build a wall.
Feb 2021 · 162
Sharks Swim
Emma Feb 2021
Behind six feet of glass,
You watch the sharks swim,
And know that you would be left in ribbons by them.
But the water is impossible blue,
And you’ve forgotten wetness.
Your fingers tap—
Tap—
On the glass, considering.
For a moment,
You see cracks spiderwebbing.
For a moment,
You imagine the glass breaking, water rushing out.
You can see the sharks lying on the floor,
Gills fluttering futilely, bodies struggling under the weight of themselves,
While your clothes lie heavy against your slick skin,
Soaked.
But you think of their eyes, unblinking, uncomprehending,
Pained.
So you stay behind six feet of glass,
Forgetting what pain feels like,
Along with everything else.
Jan 2021 · 154
Even Even More Six Words
Emma Jan 2021
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.
Dec 2020 · 353
More Six Words
Emma Dec 2020
Head buzzing with recriminations, I’m lost.
2. Tired of abandonments, I left early.
3. A fork: the answer or unknown?
4. Stinging hornet knives slash ocean sharp.
5. *******. Now ******* silence deafens.
Dec 2020 · 203
Dep 9
Emma Dec 2020
Lingering past expiration dates,
the fridge smells
and you ****.

Black clouds don’t lift,
they loiter, intruding,
circling the drain.
Aug 2020 · 310
Six Words
Emma Aug 2020
I thought you loved. You left.
2. I reached. Fingers brushed. Warmth built.
3. Cloud of angry words. Still standing.
4. Finger guns shoot... red blood runs.
My favourite six word story is Margaret Atwood’s, but I think Hemingway’s is more famous.
Emma Dec 2019
There’s this new scar down the back of your hand.
“New” implying that once in the recent past it was absent from your skin.
And you didn’t really mean for it to be there, this faint red line,
Sitting too close to the lone freckle that exists on the back of your palm like Polaris.
Because now it’s a constant reminder of how you got it.
And scars do not fade easily from your skin.
Sep 2019 · 171
Sunlight
Emma Sep 2019
Streaky little bits of sky splattering through the window.
It is open so that the outside can leak its way in,
Covering the stale unchangedness.
You were once here,
This warm glow of skin that made the spilled drops of sunlight more beautiful.
And now you’re not here, or there, or anywhere.
It’s all just so much ******* uglier now.
Emma Aug 2019
You’re so unhappy.
And ******* but doesn’t it make you special.
Afterall no one else is unhappy.
Your pain at night is the warmest thing you are sure you could hope to feel.
It gives you your driver’s license,
And you drive right the **** over anything that throws into question what you do,
Your tire marks steadily worming beneath my skin.
The secondhand rhapsodious misery you expel into the air crawls into the threads of my clothing and lingers.
Your justify your uninspired cruelty as being something I need to hear,
Point to pain as truth to fuel your fallacies.
That’s not what truth is.
You wound because you can,
Too afraid or angry or selfish to apologise and so you spoon out excuses,
Each more common than colds.
Like chunky lemon milk,
We linger past our expiration.
Jul 2019 · 407
The Point
Emma Jul 2019
Him: What exactly is the point of that?

Her: The point is that you’ve got something inside you that has to be let out, something that would die otherwise,
and you would die too if it was lost.
Jun 2019 · 296
Souls
Emma Jun 2019
You loved her less, for whatever reason—
Your brilliant redemption, your glowing new start—
And it made you realise
You were just the same.
That decay you thought she’d burned away
Had just been waiting in the wings
And in the moment you loved her less,
Her illusive light fading,
Your soul began to rot again.
Mar 2019 · 1.9k
Hentais
Emma Mar 2019
I hate hentais.
I don’t mean to victim blame
Japanimated schoolgirls,
But why can’t any of them ever end
With the girl killing the **** out of her ******?
Instead she just
Loses herself,
His mind broken *** slave
And that is the glorious end.
**** that.
****, pussycat; faster, faster
Bite his **** off.
How can there be any
Happy Endings
in such *******?
Feb 2019 · 281
What If
Emma Feb 2019
What would things look like
if I could press
rewind?
Take myself back to that moment
and make sure it never
happened?
What would it be like,
to not be
naive?
To know then,
that you had nothing to do
with me;
Were just drunk on
yourself?
To push you away
and be
certain?
Before feelings complicated the mix?
What would it be like
to have never
loved you?
To like myself
better again,
To be sure
—once more—
that I would never be so
stupid,
What would it be like if I’d never met you?
Feb 2019 · 372
Love: A Note
Emma Feb 2019
Real love isn’t meant to be brutal. We perpetuate this idea that it is, because we want there to be a reason in our suffering, and we want there to be hope that the person who’s making us suffer will change, because they love us and that means they’ll get better eventually. But real love isn’t meant to brutalise us. Real love is supposed to make us feel happy and secure, and even when we fight it shouldn’t be like the world’s ending, because we should still know that the other person cares about us. It’s not a rollercoaster ride that we’re terrified of falling off of, it’s someone who makes us better. They make us feel better, and they make us want to be better people, and we want to learn and grow and change and show them our world. Love isn’t brutal, unless someone doesn’t love you enough.
Feb 2019 · 284
In the Darkness
Emma Feb 2019
I am swallowed whole.
I reach out to you.
You leave me
alone.
Feb 2019 · 674
Easily (You Are A Lizard)
Emma Feb 2019
And so the shoe drops,
Easily, easily
It’s much easier for you to wound me,
than wear your human mask over lizard skin.
You gnash your teeth and flail your limbs,
like a stupid ******* lizard person.
How hard is it to check in when you’ve said something so worrying?
How hard is it to speak?
Or is it just that words don’t issue,
from betwixt your lizard beak?
Jan 2019 · 448
Wishes Are For the Fishes
Emma Jan 2019
I wish, I wish, I
Wish.
But it’s dumb. I should stop.
Maybe once more, for you.
Jan 2019 · 421
Guarded
Emma Jan 2019
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.
Jan 2019 · 1.5k
The Moment
Emma Jan 2019
What was it about that moment that made him love you less?
Was it that you needed him, and he was supposed to be the one needing you?
Was it the use of it? That you didn’t share, simply asked of him?
Was it the failure?
Or was it just that before you were unmarred, unblemished,
An unreality?
And then all at once you were just like everyone else.
What was it that made him love you less?
Emma Jan 2019
I could leave, but you hold me tight
In your arms it’s hard to remember what’s wrong
I would rather stay forever
So caught up I’d leave me discarded on the floor
You are always in my head, perseverating
You of the ancient flame, you of the bic lighter
It’s like a sickness, susurrating in from all directions
I can’t tell cold from fire

How to stand, beneath the weight of it
You are everything, the explosion of even creation coming into being
I’m lost to this
You comfort me, you come for me
Drink down all the words I hold
My nerves like musical instruments.
And leave me to unravel with the fury of my love for you
Jan 2019 · 341
The Sorting of Confusion
Emma Jan 2019
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.
Jan 2019 · 524
Nothing of Import
Emma Jan 2019
I don’t talk about anything important.
Just you.
And you are only important to me.
Emma Jan 2019
How do I stop?
By stopping?
That’s nonsense.
What if you didn’t want me back?
What if I left and never saw you again?
That’s the definition of stopping?
**** that.
You should stop.
Stop hurting me.
Can’t you just be mine?
For a little while.
I swear, not long.
I love you,
In selfishness and desperation.
But still.
Please.
Jan 2019 · 412
Lucid
Emma Jan 2019
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.
Jan 2019 · 811
Why?
Emma Jan 2019
Right now it is easy to love you.

You crawl into my arms, and let their strength pretend to shield you.

You let me press my lips to your temple and act as though I can comfort you,

Your head tucked against my breast.

I love you fluently,

Feeling your patterns flow over my hands, their weft and weave,

Like god in their clarity and warmth.

I cannot spin us into what we want, each of those things so opposite.

And I can buoy you now, but without you near it creeps upon me again and

I am so afraid.

I see it striding confidently forward, coming down the road to meet us,

Neither a swagger nor a barrel, but

The ineluctable approach of the pain that will crush me again.

I left you.

Couldn’t you have let me?

Because I don’t believe that you want me.

And when this passes, as it must, you will cut me to ribbons.
Jan 2019 · 239
Though I Know How This Ends
Emma Jan 2019
Hope is stupid but,
It pulls me inevitably onwards.
Towards you.
So I let it bloom
Jan 2019 · 402
For You
Emma Jan 2019
Your hair falls, like dark
feathers over your forehead,
too soft for lowly
hands. Your eyes they live beneath,
the hole you live in
reflected there. I bend and
shoulder another
of your burdens. It is all
I can do. You are
trapped, like a prince in a
dream. Or a nightmare.
In my love for you, it feels
as though tenderness
will tear a hole through my heart.
I would carry worlds.
Almost a Haiku. In alternating 5-7-5 syllables.
Jan 2019 · 15.7k
Understanding
Emma Jan 2019
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.
Jan 2019 · 344
Diary Entry #1132
Emma Jan 2019
You’ve done more to my pride than I thought I would let anyone.
And I don’t miss you, but I miss the surety I had before you.
You made the world so much uglier and so much less kind.
I wish I could take back all the power I gave away.
I wish I hadn’t been so weak and blinded.
I wish I could punch you in the face.
Jan 2019 · 367
Sick/Regret
Emma Jan 2019
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.
Jan 2019 · 313
Anhedonia
Emma Jan 2019
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.
Dec 2018 · 291
Flight
Emma Dec 2018
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.
Dec 2018 · 2.7k
Blood (Pens)
Emma Dec 2018
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.
Dec 2018 · 156
Run
Emma Dec 2018
Run
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.
Nov 2018 · 397
Perfidy (Blasphemy)
Emma Nov 2018
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.
Emma Nov 2018
I would do anything to have you back.
I say those words and I don’t know if I mean them.
I would do anything to make this stop hurting.
I would do anything to never go through this again.  
I would do anything to do it all over again.
I would do anything to have never walked down this road in the first place.
I would do anything to feel like you loved me, missed me.
I would do anything to have you back.
Nov 2018 · 229
Beginning the End
Emma Nov 2018
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
Sep 2018 · 1.2k
Relapse
Emma Sep 2018
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.
Sep 2018 · 302
Birds Fly, You Can Too
Emma Sep 2018
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.
Emma Sep 2018
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.
Sep 2018 · 357
The Value of Love
Emma Sep 2018
Yes, I love you.
It is tentative and new, sea foam lingering on the shore, waiting to be washed away.
So what?
Sep 2018 · 201
Violence
Emma Sep 2018
Invidious, invective, violent, and vicious

I say that I understand,

but you ignore me when I feel like flaying myself,

and I want to dig my teeth beneath your skin and expose the red threaded muscle beneath,

energy screaming against the sides of my brain.
Sep 2018 · 11.3k
Forgotten
Emma Sep 2018
You are
              so nice
    To listen to me without judgment.
To   accept   the   words   I   feed   you   when   you   ask.
You want my stories.
You ask for the bright ones, but there are none
                    Left.
So I give you
                dark ones instead.
And those you swallow down
      with your
drinks in the fitting darkness of night.
You let them dissolve away, amortised with the alcohol in your blood,
Forgotten in the morning,
And I wonder
                                        what it’s like
To love someone who
                 Doesn’t
                    Truly
                        Know
         ­                  You.
Sep 2018 · 3.5k
Words
Emma Sep 2018
There will never be enough words for you.
Probably that’s why I keep trying.
But what you mean to me is a swell of feeling, something I don’t know how to find voice for.
Not all the way.
You ask me for an explanation, for reason, for words when they don’t exist.
I am pleonastic, skin covered in scrawled ink,
But I can’t give you what you want,
Can’t give you something that is swimming so large inside me.
Because what I feel for you is more than me, more than I have ever had contained within me before.
I love you like you’re mine.
Sep 2018 · 258
Love (-ing You)
Emma Sep 2018
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.
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