A honeybee hovers
Over my lawn,
Scouting nectar
Like a drone.
He hums a song
I love to hear:
Honey, he hums,
I'm coming home.

he only thinks you're
pretty when you cry
when the aching
vulnerabilities sting
like red welts along
cheeks that are
white as teeth
only then are you pretty,
when the red blood
tears fall like soldiers in
the war of peace and
he kisses the place the
bullet exits
he promises he will
still love you as the lion
that murders the lamb
when the sky bleeds,
crimson echoes down
mountains of death
his viper hands
snake round your
hips and you just
don't mind, you just
don't mind anymore

I keep thinking about his bones. How I will never see them.

Sometimes it feels like he is holding me between his fingers, watching me sift through the spaces.

one time he rolled my naked flesh onto the floor and refused to clean it with the ***** sheets.


How naive to base my well being off of someone else’s existence-



(BREAK YOUR MIRRORS. Your stomach cannot handle the person he has made you become. Break your blood vessels open- the ones in your lungs. Scream about the glass-covered floor- You created this mess by trying to look at something that wasn’t real.)

He wants me to break my body like the holy wafers on Sunday when I was a child, when I still believed in things that weren’t real.

My body is his, but only when broken and scattered with prayer.

I have to strip myself clean, collect the mud that clings to my teeth in harsh clumps.
bite my tongue to resist the temptation of running it across my jaw.

There will be dust on my eyelashes but I should leave it.
(Someone Else will always brush it off.)

and this next part is very important because my Whole Life-
MY WHOLE LIFE- people have been tying rags to my Sharp Parts,
trying to Save me.

I am round, my floral underwear straining against a torso that isn’t used to the beers he never buys me.

he’s been ******* other girls

he knows that I am young; eager for it-
for the something that doesn’t exist in him.

He can see me blink, feel my aching when I wake up.

He will let me do it again.

(He’s sorry. He met someone better. Someone with taste, someone who pronounces words correctly, doesn’t laugh too loud. He’s sorry.
He never wanted to mean this much to you. He never wrote about you.
He closed his eyes when you danced. Shook his head. No. You should forgive him. He’s a ******* metaphor. He’s sorry.)

and I'm sorry.

sorry that I am
starting to make things up, starting to remember things differently.

I don't cut my skin for 24 hours, then 48
Then a week
Then two.
Practise abstinence in all forms
No drink, no drugs.
I don't stop my body from jittering and convulsing.
I let myself cry in the shower
Shave my legs without thinking off bleeding
Rest my nose between my mothers worried eyebrows
Kiss her scarred palms
Rub ointment into her feet
And go to bed smelling of lavender and love.
I wake up early, walk round the greenery. I don't open my mouth for 5 hours,
Plant seeds in my mamas garden and meditate where they'll bloom.
I refrain from eating meat. I drink a glass of milk when I wake
A glass before sleep.
I listen to Beyoncé. I watch French films without the subtitles.
Plan holidays.
I whisper prayers into my sleeping boyfriends neck
I go a whole day without thinking about our dead baby.
Walk to the train station and read the newspaper and never once think about jumping in front
Of my oncoming train.

My estranged father posts a status on Facebook, a joke, about choking dominant woman.
I wake up drunk, my arm sticking to a puddle of dried blood.
Cut chunks of flesh out of my forearm and leave a trail from the liquor store to my fathers gambling shop.
The next day I have a sore head, a sore arm. I starve myself for three days and let myself throw up watery bile into the toilet.

I start again.
I don't pick the scabs from my arm. I let red circular scarred skin form
Draw badly designed tattoos and make empty plans to cover them.
I call my friends, tell them how much I adore them, how beautiful and special they are,
How I never want to live a day without them
They call me cheesy. We laugh and make plans but we're all so busy. We hang up.
I practise excessiveness. Make my boyfriend ******. Laugh loudly. Put on too much makeup and spend £50 to eat out alone.
I call my aunties in Guyana. Let them speak for hours about a 'home' I've never been too.
Listen to stories about my mother, and her mother.
They ask me hushed voices if I'm still ill, tell me my mother has spent hours crying to them over me.
I tell them my plans.
Tell them I have a boyfriend.
I am studying. I am working, and loving and laughing.
They sound glad. They put me on to my dying grandmother and she prays for me
Tells me in strong accent that her children show her pictures of me on the computer
She tells me I am beautiful, so beautiful, she tells me I look just like my father.
We pause.
Her voice cracks and she praises Jesus for my health.
We say goodbyes. I promise to make more of an effort. Tell her I will visit her soon. Send my love to everyone and hang up.
I start reading two chapters of a book before bed.
Revisit old poetry. Write new words.
Dream in colour again, sing in the shower again.
I drink a glass of wine with my sisters and fall asleep being held by them.
I mute my father on Facebook.
Now we can start again.

it's nights like this, when we tangle
together like weeds in a seabed of lust
i beg for once, your eyes instead
of your mouth, would confess
how you felt for me.
your lips grow like ivy along the grey
mortar of my spine, your fingers write how
much they don't love me all over my body
and tiny birds take flight from my breath
to be together, is to be apart
when i am with you every word is a mistake,
we press our lips together
harder than we want to press
them against each others mouths
i keep tripping over apologies
and you just want someone who
is steady on their feet
i once knew a boy who told me
he wasn't an artist, but painted
the shores on my cheeks
when he spoke, even the trees leaned
in to hear his beautiful lies

Wherever I go
I can't escape whoever
Resides in my head

the soft of your father's breath decaying inside you has suffered through us
staying up at night-
trying to

long enough.

yet somewhere
in
the meat between your marrows and tomorrow: we were not good enough to
get it.
and all the vulgarity of every single tear shed in your name
failed to be censored.

you cared more for the ****** little
soccermoms
murmuring in the background to cement the violence of
their mediocrity. i stopped it there-
no one left to call me out, they found me.
but
i have eyelashes that walk across the sides of your face, better than anyone.
and
we held if off for just
one more
but- there will be other times
and they are waiting for you to drop your guard
and sail into them
with lids closed and
fluttering.

the front door open.
the dogs not barking,
slapping some wet skinned faces in front of everyone,
wishing i was a broken bottle
or something.
there's want of a forest in my yard
-the whole world softing out:
action dust; to the girl that screams:
there's no such thing as sinners, there's no such thing as love, there's just people and what people do,
whole forests of paper feel your words.
           sincerely,
                            we're all just crazy.
sweet dharma dewdrops fell off the tongue of the clean-cut kid.
he had soapy teeth and no shame to speak of
and when he spoke to us, his fingers glowed
because.
did you think that words could do more than arms-
and that anything else alone could do more for you than a full bodied embrace.
and
i looked at the rose you had buttoned on your blouse and i tore it off and dashed it upon the ground
because of
the mist
and the yellow billboard
lit up softly like a wheatfield
and frost was setting onto the long blades of crisply dying vegetation.
and there is the matter of those ghosts in the parkinglot
unaware of the cars that skid by full of people, all with capacities to know and be known-
sometimes i wish i could tell them
that it's okay to reach out with soft red fingers, wet from running water, warm from hot running water rinsed
over our hands to bleed out the chill that leaches into our too-thin fingers on cold nights such as this.
meanwhile-whole forests of bright white paper
i think that if i ever found you,
it would be walking on a road next to blueberry blossoms-and close, dry
thicket branches that crunch swiftly sometimes-and slowly, others- behind our heels
and hands shaped like mantras gesturing towards us from trees- telling us to go this way, and that,
welcoming us with their imperfect notions of morality and telling us that everything was going to be.
light a match on the bathroom window,
take one step closer to breathe in the bad-handwriting of the graceless morning. put one foot forward on the floor-
one hand on your temple.
only time will tell
if this is hell or just a special hell for me and you
choke me in the white-noise drone
of the shower.
push against the vitalities of my neck-
offer your hands around my faltering voice.
tell me about the pharaoh.
and the legless learners of passion.
tell me that you need to fall forward onto your face just to remind yourself that you're alive.
drum against my chest imperfectly with your
fingertips.
the unskillfully applied paint on your nails already chipping off- (you do this thing with your thumb and
forefinger as a nervous habit and always ruin them.)

the sun come

i trace over my neck with cartridge-blade razors
-rip away the stubble like peeling off snakeskin shadows.
snow falls
dusting my eyes with the harpsichord sounds of porcelain.

there is no longer bitterness nor sorrow.