I could burst with my feelings
for you. Like a balloon.
Filled with hot air, babe. Tssssssssshhhhh.

Lingering past expiration dates,
the fridge smells
and you ****.

Black clouds don’t lift,
they loiter, intruding,
circling the drain.

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.

Hey. I miss you. Hope you’re ok. Let me know how you’re doing when you can.

Hey. Hope you’re ok. I miss you. Let me know how you’re doing when you can.

Hey. Hope you’re ok. Let me know how you’re doing when you can. I miss you.

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?

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.

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.

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.

I am quiet. Not silent.

It might be hard to understand the difference, but there is one.

Believe me, this once.

I have spoken, screamed, begged, prayed, all of it raw and angry and loud, and it has been too unpalatable for digestion.

Ignored and left behind on plates.

The suffocation of having words lodged in your throat, words that choke you to swallow, choke you to try to speak, because they are horrible.

And then they dribble out of your mouth, leaving behind the foul taste of their wretched shapes, and the putrid stench of those horrible words makes heads turn away.

The words unheard, the wounds unseen.

Except neither of those are true, because I have spoken them within your hearing, I have shown them beneath your eyes.

So not unseen, not unheard, undigested and ignored for your own rotten convenience. Sometimes worse. Questioned and made less of.

I burn brighter than any pit in hell; rage hotter than 5,779 K searing me from the inside out.

The fire could peel me apart, my skin clawing away beneath my fingernails to expose the flames that would set all before me ablaze, the flames that are hidden beneath my bones.

And wouldn’t it be fair? For consequences to finally exist?

I am no longer the same, irrevocably different from that girl who might once have existed, who believed in fairness.

I am hate, and anger, sometimes only this red burning fury, no more. Red that crashes down upon me in unending waves that erode me further each time.

I swish it around in my mouth, considering the taste: defeat. Injustice I must make peace with, rather than repay. Because I can’t. How?

I spoke. You didn’t listen. You didn’t believe.

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 *******?

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

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.

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.

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

I am swallowed whole.
I reach out to you.
You leave me
alone.

“Wait! Don’t go—“
I do, though.
I leave.

Dumb warm glow, go away
No one likes always smiling
Distracted by you

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.

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.

I don’t talk about anything important.
Just you.
And you are only important to me.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?