AND I FELT THE LAST TINGLE OF YOU LEAVE MY BONES AND OH MY GOD
IT FELT SO BITTERSWEET TO LIVE WITHOUT YOU YET SURVIVE WITHOUT THE LOVE OF YOU

Taught to dream of blank-faced others.
Inescapably, months and weeks all waste hours in lone company -
same Sundays, same self,
so bury yourself in someone else.

But, don't pretend
This won't end like the rest.
Back down that track you'd once walked so boldly -
healthier for all as one, only.

Oh, son
lost boy
neck crack
eyes dry and
diverted
look at me!
your skin seems to shiver
to shimmer
are you cold?
Or do my eyes wish
a touch of life
- a kiss!
Or do my eyes wish?
I wonder if the years have hardened your lips.

Rising heat
and the
various plastics, and metal. And cold
The cold that spreads and burns.
I can't see
but I know your form
and prise it from your hands,
Sweating.
The drip of the loosening end
and the fray
and the cut -
the cut that I make,
She mote it be that
indulgences rot in your palms if held for too long.
I think of berries all through winter
but fruits left in the mouth taste bitter
and the sugars burn.
Night passes, and heals me.
and the wheel turns.

you must not yank and pull by the stem
you must instead grapple with the growth, finger-deep
and rid the soil of the root.
Headaches numbed with ice
betray a deeper bleeding on the brain
tear the pain out with your fingers
to keep bile from your veins.
Don't prevent mania.
you must instead bite the wound,
open your palms
and let blood to that fragile and fictive arcadia.

People look at me as if they don't know who I am
and I concede, I know not them likewise.
However, I am confident in the things I know all too well -
The view from my window, the sound of my own voice
in my head - disturbingly silent. But it
speaks a language others do not ...
unexpectedly, for I thought I knew of others.
I now believe it is the only voice I can translate as of late.

My mother tells me I speak eloquently, my father,
and I, share voices. But these people, I wrestle to find
humanity in them.
I count myself as not with friends. I count myself with art
and with great minds, that speak a language too complex,
but what's an artist without a human voice?
It is not healthy, to dream of yourself
but it is all one can do when you know no one else.

Enfoldings; picturesque enfoldings of memories.
Grey, hazy sights. Night brings desire to know someone again, deeply.
Fitting into sheets, blessed, breath, hot, sweat
dreamy or needy, blessed or
cold. How so cold?
Corporeal pulsings that used to quell and now do not
Now love swells, then it did not -
How did I ever sleep with a heart so hot?
Day break, forgetting - May days bring no mind ache.
A bare witness. One, alone, bedroom
soulless, mornings act, forgetting morning and
focusing on who I am now, bed plans
*** pangs
focusing on picturesque foldings of hands.

Moore-ish. Heaving in this white flesh that breaks on sight and gathers itself at horizons. I have bits of it here - a motley collection of broken things and cold-cuts: that grip, those fingers, a stomach, strands of hair, not enough, and deprivation is becoming aggravating. Like an infection that creeps increasingly deep under your skin until it is wriggling around your insides and chanting 'More! More! More!' and 'Feed us more of that flesh!' And I have nothing to give them, these hungry worms! Well-fed, we dripped from branch to branch and slithered around tombs of drunk gods, laughing, giggling, we pooled cool sand in our hands and crevices and swallowed soil like we were performing, Dionysian play-acting among the feathers and the leaves. What indulgence. The sun that cracked open your window and cast itself in a thick tread across your badly-plastered ceiling seemed weak and dull. The sea that lapped and tugged at the sand around our feet seemed tired. We ****** the energy from the earth! We took it and hid it. I know that now to be our undoing.

We jump from isle to sacred isle, finding more, and losing more. Islands of time, multiplying at the horizon.

still beneath, but rising.
The cooling wind and I swapped faces
but now my friends don't recognise me
and I panic through summer.
I think I prefer to imagine your touch
than to feel the burn and sweat of human skin
and struggle with the ways you've changed.
In my head, you're God.
I've given myself free access to the divine
and now this brain of mine is eaten through like Swiss cheese,
flea-ridden, moth-bitten.
Good thing I know my way around the holes,
rarely do I trip.

Blue skies, that fade to cream, that fade to a navy ache.
The sun and moon are poetry that only I awake -
What solitude.
Back home, I'm bleeding out
like rivulets to the sea
the sun and moon are a verse that only I can read
silent and soft, the touch of god
that bleeds down to the sea.

The wet soil beneath the grass vibrates
with the same unending tension as the walls of my veins.
the Earth, my hypostasis. Shaking
and these soft, strengthless hands
can only do what they can, and pull you close.
Unfortunate, to find a man that
sends birds that whip, and buzz, and sting
laying secrets and carnal whispers in my ears
beating scars where you’ve been;
- I know only one form. A form I have not seen
but feel at that chord from the neck to my jaw, taught
with lips that web my nerves like threads
many have my body, but only you command my thoughts.
Those birds outside my window keep me awake
breathless and waiting – did you miss it?
And in how many words can I say
stop this fever, cold friend, or if I am for the axe
just – swing it.
Lying in jasmine, pale, blue-veined,
Playing in the dark, I don’t take breath
and you ask me yet…
I know you find it hard to believe that human lungs can't breathe
when drowned, when wet.
Arch your back. And feel as if you feel him
half-way across the earth but his cheek presses into you
and he always knows what to say.
Come, my love, feel this earth with me.
Feel the bridle and the shank and the strap around the ankles
- those hands of yours untie knots like God.

the peach-grey behind the clouds. those opalescent seconds
don't you remember that day
when we held hands and it felt okay
and I cried because it stormed and
Neoprene vastness of vision. I watched you sleep and you didn't feel human
I'm not free this evenin g and I'm sorry
Those hours in the morning where early birds speak and tell me
go to sleep
Hands hot and bristling
And forced to
- 'and she painted throughout her life-'
And we have to talk?
Because I feel like I've lied
but when you're not here I feel
Cold. The Cold that spreads and burns
and tell me h-
"I don’t see how Henry, pried
open for all the world to see, survived."
She sat across from me, on the other side
of the room
A gentle flood of blood that felt to me like drowning
and agreed that I'd reached Inner Peace.
on the way home it stormed, and I cried.

Quiet, now. This night might be waning, but
we're all out. and not so loud, although some of us
(while desperate to get home) are also desperate to get something out of this.
perhaps meet someone. Where are all the buses?
and underground, footsteps are loud, where we tread. Bzzz-kt.

Wake up, the day is day. Night's another thing. Don't let the cold get you down.

in living we leave behind nothing
but empty paths
there is no sweeter longing than recounting what you have lost.
I don't feel regret.
I feel only now the heaviness of time
like the tide slipping at the shore,
fleeing only to return.

Cut close, to the chaste, and hold fast.
I always have been tired, and I've lost the energy to ask
In roundabout ways if you too feel pain -
You are the ice that all at once numbed my fingers
and made me feel again.
I go to bed to digress.
I've lived, and given, and breathed so deep,
all I can do now is think of you, and sleep.

I'm bleeding through, quite viscerally.
And I'd hate to beg of you a hand to staunch the wound,
but I'll barter with the you I once knew -
to take these bits of me you touched and chewed
and pull the skin right off.
Because although the taste of it is tough
A wound of you is still by you,
and its company will have to do.

i fear long a certain caged-up growl
fingers left of the heartbeat of another
struggle to confirm their own circulation...
self-preservation, yes, much to my upset I must
face the ripping theft and rough lips of God
uncontrolled but perfectly placed, face God
and the skin that scrubs me clean
with long seconds. days and hours,
never forgotten, once seen.
When I face others, I find it a waste
to not see the prettiest parts of them.
Whites of their eyes, cheeks bruised up with rising blood
fingertips turned purple, then white
interior parts. expanding pupils that splinter outwards and fray to black
tears in the mouth - or is that?
opalescent sweat glands, red around the mouth
wet-washed skin, spit-stained lips, broken colours,
once seen, forever reflected in shadows of others.
Back to hands I know well
and a body that demands
tear me again from this heavy earth
and bite the air from my mouth. Force a betrayal
teach me how to come
break my skin and eat my mind
remind me I'm alive.

Girl, your life shines
but sad poetry (probably) is all you will make.
what thousand or two did you forget?
Don't - get it all in your head.
Swallow that salavous moon ache.
When friends let shots of honey
cut black like hot wax and eat the kids -
Worship yet;
you have cool, bitter unrest
and sturdy shoes to play drunk like death.

Everything’s happening again tonight,
and the stars are falling in.
A few years ago, I thought the distinct mix of loneliness and heartbreak was a one-time thing -
little did I know it’s a popular cocktail of life,
sprinkled in like cold gin.
I like the feel of old clothes, old lives
old memories and words feel comfortable on the skin
i am so young
and yet the past is like a warm, rose-tinted sea
and with a summer this hot,
I can't help but desire a swim.

wood and stone bolted down to protect us all from rain.
and then with singing hearts, some of us start building shrines that rival the sky.

tonight I am walking towards where all the candles are burning.
If you sit beneath her closely, the cathedral stands taller than the sky -
and if you touch the stone, you know, my Mum always said
think of all those other hands!
Look how the cobbles are worn from pilgrim-feet, here years ago.
Dead now. That's what these buildings used to be,
yards full of the pious dead, palms up to the earth.
and when I went to Canterbury, the entry-way limestone
was worn smooth like marble, and I touched it too,
because I knew there must be something good in all this,
such a big building, so many hands and feet.


a great warm shivering heart
that sits like a bird perched in the middle of my city.
Two big eyes that face out, casting light
back to when everything was young, and she was