I've braved the life of living in the past,
Of caring for what never cared for me.
I've watched a hundred thousand days be flashed
like glints of sun across a choppy sea.
I've never taken tea with foreign kings,
but I could tell you tales of how I have,
and in those fleeting moments, fickle things,
my words would be your melancholy's salve.
I read my tales and stories with a head
that sits upon a swivel and a lie,
and every word I've written, thought, or said
will follow you until the day you die.
A greater sun as never shone on me
Than when I found my immortality.

You, my dear, are dead, I said.

I am not so, she told me.

You are, checked out, moved on, deceased!

Then why so tightly hold me?

[Inhale...]

I feel the way your body flakes
Like chipping bits of bone
I see the way your fingers quake
Whenever you're alone
I tell you that I love you, and
you always say it back
But you never lend a hand
Whenever I'm about to crack
You say that talk is wasted
Because words are so ****** cheap,
But jealousy is tasted
When I'm talking in my sleep
For fear of letting go, and so
admitting that you're dead.**

But she was done responding
to the voices in her head.

Don't need some professional at a rehab center,
because these strains of infatuation go on and on.
No one can be paid to change the fact that
I wish I didn't miss you.
What'd I say?
I meant, I wish I didn't keep missing things.
Otis keeps telling me that a change is going to come.
But you can't be my lover and that won't change at all.
If you really want me... never mind.
I didn't write a song for you, but I listened to one.
And the entire time I pictured non-existent home videos from the past.
You wanted me ten minutes ago, but will you still want me tomorrow?
Probably not, because desires will be something different tomorrow.
And my body and my soul will be something different tomorrow.
You can't make me feel a desire that I can't see,
because I can't go for that.
Is this all desire really is?
Something I have to take happy pills to get through.
Well you lost me last night,
and all I was thinking was that soon we'll be found together in a different place.
I was 93 million miles away from you when you were just outside smoking a cigarette.
We're hanging from the Edge of Glory, trying to hoist ourselves up with string bean arms.

You're breaking on your camera hand. Haven't got a leg to stand on.
You tell me
you're making me a colour with your shorthand.
Dropping parts of your mind behind you and I can't pick them up, I can't follow you round anymore.
Kid, you're shaking on the stage again
explain that you can't write this down anymore
and that everything inside your head is a storm.
And I just can't tell you.
I don't have the guts to tell you
that I still smell him on my hair on days when I don't think about you now.
But I can't tell you what I'm thinking
like how you're so wrapped up in your own broken strings that you're not getting me right anymore.
You're not getting me right anymore.

These things I lost down in my chest:
how you made this body your chalkboard fourteen days before we even spoke,
and I don't know what you're leaving with. I can't find the words to leave you with.
Tornado hands. Texas lungs. How this world made you a storyline.
You're an underage drunk on a school night.
Stop dropping yourself I can't hold you up anymore.
This is not a hold up.
This is you forgetting to ask about yourself.
Here are all the letters I never sent you
take them out of me, stop making me write you down I can't write you down anymore please scratch yourself out.

You once asked me if I felt it when you woke up in the middle of the night across all those miles, I told you:
you're a church bell in a hurricane
stuck under all the folded over pages I left you with, and I'm leaving you on a Sunday,
just like all those characters you left sawn off.
And I just want to ask you how many times I have to break myself apart before I piece back whole, and I realise
that we've got nothing left going for us anymore.
Your chipped teeth under my tongue telling me "stop apologising for yourself,"
ripping the keys off a typewriter just take everything I've got.

You can have my apologies love.
You can have my best friend sitting on the tracks.
You can take me whole, take me home.
You're a boarded window, nothing disclosed,
"get away from me".
Candlelight through the gaps on a Saturday night in December.
We're home alone again.
Home alone again.

Give me your tired,
Give me their dreams to crush for my bread
Give me  your poor
let me drain their life's blood
give me Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free
And I will give them eternal sleep
Smothered against my *****,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore
I will allow to crumble to dust.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door
and set fire to their bones.

There is a 93 year-old man. He has been driving for years
trying to unlock his lover's jaw
it is stuck tight with the thoughts which have become lost somewhere
near the back of her head.

He thinks about the mist in her eyes, how once they were islands.
She was a child surrounded by the sea. He was a soldier.
Sat next to two bombs they both went off,
when he met her
he told everyone he was the luckiest man alive. They were stranded together.

Now he drives around the Hebrides. Thinks about the summer
when the ferries stopped, they ate nothing but salted fish.
He is desperate for her to remember. Somedays she does.
The winter he met her father her family
had never seen an Englishman before. It was so bleak.
She only used to wear shoes when the snow fell like an apology,
now her feet are so lost they barely carry her
from bedroom, to bathroom, to window.
She looks out over walled gardens, everything she once had was an open space.

She tells me about the day he came home from the army.
Threw his pistol in the bin
like he could ever throw the war away
I think of the irony: a man trying to throw the pieces of his life away
that he could never forget. Now all he can do is look
through flesh and heartbreak
and too many stories to tell.
All the addresses in his book, like they're not just bricks and bones
and nursery rhymes
like it's all falling down now
through curtains
and IED's breaking through bodies over screens.
Like a train crash.
Like a house fire changing everything you know
holding it to your chest like it's more than ash.
More than this.
Looking out on a bank holiday wondering what goes on
behind all those closed doors
counting all the things you miss.

I would give up sleep for you.
I would live my life five hours behind.
I would spend my inheritance money.
I would leave like breaking in the morning
just slip out through the door.
I would swim the ocean, loose my body to the current
like a broken bottle frayed and battered until I was all green frosting and smoothed edges
and opaque.
I would wash up on your shore.

I would drive for miles. I would purpose build.
I would tear up the books, rewrite them with your name
over and over, out though the skies,
climb up through the atmosphere
paint the moon with your face.
Loose myself to gravity. Just give me something to blame.
Give me water. Give me tidal waves. Give me ocean hearts,
your storm-wall, ocean heart, breaking-wave kisses
wear me down gently.
Tell me your life story. Write me into it.

Remind me when I forget who I am,
even, when you have nothing else to give.
Take me home.
Tell me something true.
Pin me on your chest like a buttonhole,
wear me to your wedding.
Show me off
like I was ever something to be admired.

Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That's all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.

Watery eyes stare at the ceiling
As aching limbs stretch across the bed
Grasping for a hand that left long ago