Like vultures,
Bald and pink -
Even ugly feet
Look handsome in the air.

Happy thing -
Come fiercely.
Bend me like a tulip at midnight,
Make something out of me,
Smoke out my *****
And saddle it in gemstones,
Gallop me like a tongue-twisted
Traveller into the
Whole globe’s bedrooms.

Happy happy thing -
Push me!
Make something out of me!
Kid me,
Front me,
Strike me dancing like a hot
Stone,
Hand me cigarettes that I’ll light
From the last one,
And the second to last one,
And the next one.

Happy thing!
Ohhh come colourfully!
Make the world all-a-bright,
Make red as red as a big red love
Or a spitsuckled cherry gumdrop
Of red-red-red-red-red,
Make yellow smear itself
like crushed cats eyes,
Make pastels all pennysweets
And green so luminous that
Clock hands can’t even dream of it.

You beautiful
*******
Happy
Thing!
You happy happy happy thing…!
Songs are burning!
And planets are droaning!
And London is sleeeeeeping,
And the morning is leaping at me!
Is it leaping at you?

My happy thing,
Come noisily.
Sit with me jabbering,
******* with me,
Snog me,
Pull apart my face and
Absolutely ******* drench me
In come.

Happy thing,
Pierce me,
Make me a Sebastian,
Riddle me with spears and watch me
Laugh out the blood,

Happy thing,
Come quickly.
Take my hand and run with me.
They’re shooting at us,
Making saints of us,
And they’ll get us y’know, they’ll get us, they’ll get us –

Happy thing
Come on now dear,
I know the watercolours are running but
Don’t they look pretty
dropping as keenly as our tears –
being caught is just another reason to escape!

Happy thing,
Don’t swallow that.
Are we lowering ourselves?
Are they poking holes in us?
Oh no,
Are they sinking us?

Happy thing,
I hope you always
Come fiercely,
Colours aren’t the same now
And ******* is just a drone of biology.
I promise that
next time we'll be immortal.
Next time we’ll have learned
How to really, really run.

I sat cross legged on the balcony as he rolled me a cigarette. He didn't smoke but he rolled perfectly. His perfectionism was killing me.
"The other night I filmed myself on my webcam." he said, rolling, rolling, thumbs turned inward. "I filmed myself going to sleep. I wanted to see if I talked or had nightmares or whatever..."
"Yeah..."
"So I watched the film back this morning. Turns out, I woke up in the middle of the night and chucked all of my things onto the floor. My books, my notepad, everything. It was like watching Big Brother or something. I mean, it was me, but it wasn’t me. I would never chuck my books onto the floor."
"Well…we all think that we would never chuck our books onto the floor, but we do don’t we? Hey you can really see the stars out here."
"I know. It's wonderful with a telescope. I have a very good telescope."
"Where is it?"
"Upstairs. We have a space gazing window. It’s my telescope but Frederick likes it too. But then he always smudges up the lens." He handed me the cigarette, thin as candy and gummed down with precision. "I could teach you about space."
"Oh, please, I'd never take it in."
"Yes you would."
I lit the cigarette and the paper glowed.
"I just like looking."
'You can't just look and not know. You won't even know what you're looking at."
I looked at him.
"Yeah, I know."

Click them off like

rosary beads

with accossiated prayers.


Smudge the dreams

into the eiderdown,

And divide them down

in ironed out

layers.


Line them up and

gobble them with listless

tea.

I am your prediction!

(said in shushes,

quite benediction)

I want to drop like stingless bees.

I am Addiction to Tranquility.


How jealous I am!

Watching him fall on his ****

as I begin the solitary farce

of trying to close my

eyes.

I watch his chest slowly sink and rise.

How beautiful -

to be cut down,

like grass.


Flophouse drapes of

cigarette smoke

hang from the ceiling in

billows.

A headache clings and

holds me close as

daylight stumbles

like a ghost,

and settles her questions

on my pillows.


The tragic thing about each morning

Is that I greet each sleepy dawn

with the dry and

pinkened threat of tears.

Sleepers – do you know the

might of what you do

each ******* night?

The oblivion in half your years?

The fiction of your wild frontiers?

The obliteration and presentation

of all your garbled

Freudian fears?

Do you know the glamour in what you do?

Do you know what I’d give to be like you?

To live and somehow not be here?

To close my eyes?

To disappear?

Fourteen years old
and my life was a trap -
My ankle was caught
All red and ragged
In the jaws of an age-old machine
Designed to catch boys.
But there was a missing cog –
a little *****,
because there was a way,
(There was a way)
There was a way
to
get away…

College Library,
Domed and dark,
The silence disturbed by a bluebottle’s
Rumble
And the sly ticking of my own gold watch.
Oh! Getting high on the smell of
Other people’s universes,
Tissue thin and
Dogeared immortal -
Gotcha!
I’ve got 'em all!
You can’t contain me in these walls,
I can go an – y -where.

I can get drunk on Holden’s Highballs
Or Sebastian’s brandy,
I can weep at the grave of Ignatius Riley’s
Sexually inappropriate ****-fantasy dog,
I can neatly eat Prufrock’s peach
Or a dismal breakfast in a seaside caff
With Dallow and Spicer
And dear Rosaried Rose
With one eye on the sea and
Some lukewarm tea.
I can spend a season with my namesake,
Far away from Heaven,
And shake hands with Satan as he
Finishes a speech,
Wiping his mouth on a swollen
rock,
Hot as heaven and black as a leech.
I can walk that sheep on B612,
I can whip around the Second Circle
Of Hell
Or lock myself in a toilet
With Franny,
I can live in a garret with a garrulous ****** -
I can be East of Eden,
Wonderland,
I can die in Venice,
I can shoot soldiers in the sand,
I can lust after Lo – lee – ta
Tip of the tongue,
I can be a girl,
I can be a nun,
Blow into a conch,
Diffuse a bomb,
Digest my lunch,
Be a sub,
Be a dom,

I can sparkle here,
I can be free here,
I can just be here
And there are no rules here,

Just one boy
And a book
And a bluebottle
And a watch.

Aw dear -
What a flawed design for a cage!

I remember the back of your neck.
The summer changed it
and it became a thing,
My own sleeping
Pet to stroke -
Powder dry,
As warm as the bed.

I sometimes touch the back of my neck
and pretend it's yours.

1.  Understand Weather.

(Strangers on a bench,
Looking up.)

“Cirrus, I think.
Cirrocumulus?”
“Stratus surely.
Or altocumulus.”

(You must also hate the cold
And the sun,
And always wish the current season
Was a different one.)


2. Never Be Honest About Stuff That Hurts.

Pain so bad
Can’t even **** –
“How are you, Arthur?”
“Brilliant, thanks!”

3. Have An Opinion On These People

Katie Price (Feminist? Witch?)
Kate Moss (Goddess? *****?)
Stephen Fry (Snob? Wilde?)
Frankie Boyle (Offensive? Mild?)

4. Never Talk About Money.

“So.” An American asks. “How much do ya make?”
“I…I…Oh My God look at that dog over there that has a face like a pancake!”

5. Learn How To Apply The Class System To Cigarettes.

Pipe – Monty Withnail
Silk Cut – Comfortably Middle.
Lucky Strikes – Probably not British.
B&H; – Shops at Lidl.

6. Secretly (Or Openly) Enjoy The Royal Family

“So, did you hear what they called the baby?”
My boyfriend shrugs and says -
“I don’t give one tiny ****.”
“They named him George. Isn’t that twee?”
“Aw ******* hell, I had a tenner on Louis!”

7. Hey Jude.

If all else fails,
At the end of the night,
Sing na-na-na
And it’ll be alright.

8. Never Complain About Your Meal

“Hm. These mussels look a bit suspect.”
“How’s your meal, Sir?”
“Perfect!”

9. Always Hate The French, (Even If Your Own Mother Is French)

Numberplate 'F'
On an articulated lorry.
“Stuck up…onion…*******.”
(I’m sorry mum, I’m so sorry!)

10. ‘Jerusalem’

Mime a sword in your hand,
Bang your chest with devotion,
Wave the sword about,
Sing with emotion.

To be 'old hat' at something
is to know it inside and out,

off by heart.

four weeks ago you pinched my panama
and it looked so good on you,
butterscotch and black

Table,

My father and I sat
In our timeless silence
That brewed away beneath the lights
Like a sweat that never breaks.

Sister and the Stranger
Sat flanked by pillars,
With two full glasses of
Blood-lit wine
Simmering warmly like
Lamb's hearts
Dropped into bowls.

Never do I love my sister more
That when she wears that little fishhook
Of a smile,
A grim refusal of her lips to flicker down,
Making mincemeat of photographers,
Men in bad jumpers,
And garrulous psychopaths.
It was crueler than any frown.
Far more efficient.

The Stranger buttered her bread-roll all at once,
(A damning thing to do this afternoon)
And dinner turned to coffee
Without a hitch.
I noticed that the whole evening was
Done in a deliberately cut-glass way -
Two siblings painting themselves
Into the people they never wanted to be,
To make a ******-minded point.

She’s not one of us.
She’s nothing like us.
She’s nothing like mother -
Absolutely nothing like mother!

And as we stood waiting for the car
My sister turned to me and said –
“I thought my expectations of daddy were low.”
She swiped at her flapper-girl haircut,
“Turns out my expectations
Have a basement.”

We only notice class
When we need to shut someone
Out.
We only notice class

When it's all we've got.

(I fancy you.
I ******* fancy you.
I fondant fancy you,
I flight of fancy you,
I fancy-pants you,
I fancy the pants off you)

I fancy your body -
Every inch of it!
I fancy your hair,
I fancy your spit,
I fancy the way you
Knock on my door,
Just the knock gets me hard!
(But I don’t fancy the door.)
I fancy you first thing
In the morning
When my mouth wants to do something
Other than yawning,
I fancy the way you pull at my hair,
I fancy your smiles,
I fancy your stares,
I fancy your job,
Your wardrobe,
Your phone,
I fancy your burps,
Your kisses,
Your groans,
I fancy your tongue,
I fancy your licks,
And I really
Really
fancy your ****,
But most of all
I fancy the fact
That I fancy you
And you fancy me back.

years ago
when I ****** my boyfriend
I'd sometimes pretend to pay for him.

how much?
I'd say,
so he'd make believe he was turning away,

you can't afford me.

he'd stand there
obnoxiously
and I'd fling wads of money.

six hundred
seven hundred
eight hundred
nine

a grand, baby
a grand and you're mine

Close your eyes.

         Imagine a white room.

There are objects in the white room.

Each object represents something in your life that worries or stresses you. Each object binds you to the external world. Each object stands for something that keeps your mind active, keeps you worrying, keeps you awake.

Imagine a white room.

I really am trying. My eyes are tight, eyelashes stuck to my cheek.

(I can feel the blood trickling through the veins in my sclera, ******* itself from end to end like cherryade through a drinking straw.)

I have my toes resting on my knees like a good little lotus, my fingers resting on top of them making the ‘ok’ sign.

This is a hard trick. It takes concentration. It takes effort to clear your thoughts from a metaphorical room (Jean’s room, tidy but never clean.)

What if I fall asleep upright? Will my neck break?

You ever see spiders playing dead? They roll onto their backs and cradle their bodies inside a disjointed prison that they’ve made with their own limbs. Their legs bend back at jaunty angles, crooked at the knees.

A spider ran at me once whilst I was sat on the toilet. I was reading an encyclopedia at the time, just flicking through, and in my panic I hit the spider with the spine of it. He curled up into a crumpled ball in the middle of the pink bathroom mat. I thought he was dead, but by the morning he had moved on, not leaving a trace.

In the grand cosmic metaphor of it all, we’re all just bristly little gymnasts looking to be left alone.

The white room is flying over the sea.

Objects that represent your daily life are sitting in the white room.

There is a door in the white room.

There are windows.

Using your imagination, remove each object from your room one by one. Throw them out of the door. Pour them out of the window.

Clear your mind.

Throw it all into the sea.*

My laptop is drowning. My journals are dissolving like sugar paper. White birds come from nowhere and lift up the corners of my bookcase, shaking it out into the ocean as one would air out a bed sheet. My memories are eating sand. The people I have loved are unsmiling shop-window cutouts, rolling along the waves of a mythical sea.

How far do I have to go? It seems like this means more than just Sleep. Every night do I need to be new, need to empty myself out like a clogged up sea-shell? How far do I have to go before it’s just me that’s left?

I can never make my sea deep enough because I don’t wish to drown. I’m not Ophelia.

I’m really not.

I don’t hold flowers neither.

I just can’t sleep.

(White isn’t a colour, it’s an absence.

Put a tick against my name. Use a bright red pen.

I’m right here. For always.)

We shed our gap-toothed gentleman coats
and ran white skinned into a purple river,

George (a weak swimmer) grabbed handfuls of
reeds as the water undid a fantasy of clouds.

Our feet found love with the edges of rocks and
our swimming trunks unloaded the stink of chlorine

into the cold bright dark light miracle of water,
our reflections broken into champagne pieces and

beautiful as only two laughing boys can be.
How clichéd to be lost in the heart of the morning,

as George sat with his orange juice like an
illustration drawn by the most lighthearted of artists,

a little prince against a backdrop of blooming baoabs
that shrugged behind him like green diamonds

with the tunes of birds still clinging to their leaves.
How deeply romantic I was at fourteen -

too young to have read Brideshead Revisited,
too old to have gazed at George’s hair and

seen a simple tumble of boring blond.
This was the summer that ached with everything,

like a muscle throbbing during tennis
reminding you you’re playing as best you can.

That summer was the shimmering pause
between two acts of a dismal play -

our childhood not yet left behind,
lingering like a tan line on the shoulders of joy.

One night we drank lemonade out of brandy
glasses and sat together in the biggest bath you’ve

ever seen, winding our wrists together to sip
from each others drinks, his hair was dark and

damp at the tips and there were bubbles everywhere.
Such things I remember, the gentleness of first love

and the way it shapes each love to come,
I’m still a sucker for blonds and a gallant lover of

summers spent as they should be spent:
in water baby England, with the countryside

humming inside your ears, and the sunlight
warming up the grass to greet your feet after

swimming in rivers, and to wind down at night
with a friend who is beautiful,

and to kiss them just once, near the ear and only here,
to wish them goodnight, goodnight, goodnight.

I’d done a lot of drugs that summer, drank a lot, and lost my virginity a hundred times over.
David. He was the man who ****** me for the first time. He was in his thirties, a Buddhist, and a patient teacher.
In the dark, he was so ****, iron filings and gum.
But perhaps it wasn’t him that enticed me into ***. I think it might have been a combination of everything. The way his girl-faced Buddha shone by the light of a candle. The view from his window – city flowers and washing lines, Chopin on the stereo, the cleanness of his sheets, the girl in the next room talking loudly about Jean Paul Sartre.
I want you, I said.
Fifteen, I was. He didn’t know that, of course.

There was a terrible pressure when he ****** me, so he told me to
Relax
Relax
Relax
Imagine you’re emptying out
Imagine you’re emptying out and accepting something holy
communion if you like
you're catholic aren't you?
You look lovely
You feel lovely
You look lovely

There was a part of my mind that thought of girls being torn through, blood and pain, embarrassment in the morning. I couldn’t stay hard.
There was a part of me that gave in, with my knees up by my shoulders.
There was a part of me that wanted to flip him onto his back and **** him, part of me that was desperate to be a man, part of me that hated this submission.
In the morning there was no embarrassment, just cereal and ten different types of smile. Milk in bed. A lecture on loving kindness.

The winter was unkind
Yet you loved it
So much,
It was your gauche friend,
Reclusive in its blankness,
Complicit with its demands for
Many layers,
As snow is complicit in ****** -
Snuggling coldly into
Footprints.

And I remember the simpering
Light
That night,
As it squeaked into the
Room like
Lab rats bred for death.
I remember the slip
Of your body on the sheets
And your
Speech bubble breath
Spearmint ellipses,
Your teeth white
Your eyeballs white
Your watch-face white
The witch behind you
White,
Whispering the content
Of her
Turkish delight
And sculpting you
For her museum.

(Nothing ever really warmed you up.
How I hated that winter.)

I put the heating on and
Showed you the
Wedding dress –
An antique affair
That had been passed down.
My sister did not want it,
As she is not at all romantic.

When I got back from
The bathroom
You were out of bed,
Holding the dress against yourself,
Stuck in the mirror,
Head turned,
Absolutely lost -
A tiny bride
White as a
Snow tongued branch
And just as still,
Waiting for the wind
Or the clouds
Or some kind of joy
To move you.

Your name
Snowballed once inside my brain
And was gone –
(I don't know the Russian for 'one' or 'two'
But for a minute I knew the Russian for you)

So go spend my winnings on the days you've lost,
Your blind-eyed perfect smile is worth the cost,
Good fortune means more to me than luck
But don't sit so close, love,
My poker face is ******.

(You were so good,
Your taste went on for days as no taste should)

One day soon I'll recall your name,

Where I'm from
All the snow melts in the rain

In a Bluebird toffee tin
Are a hundred letters –
Most of them doodle-stamped and
Delivered by hand.
Unlike the letters I sent to you
They do not smell of spritzed cologne,
(A trick that I learned from Grease)
They are not messy
Or tea stained,
But perfect powder blue
And allowing for small extravagances –
The Cursive of the Obsessive,
Cursed by neatness and perfect hearts.

I pick one out at random,
A casually cruel one sent from Rome –
I imagine you blinking on a balcony
With dazzles on your collarbone,
A teeny tiny sugarless coffee
At your side,
And a pen tapping your knee.

“I’m not a **** at all –“ you wrote,
"It’s only that you are gregarious
In the most DISGUSTING way.
That’s your problem not mine -
Your optimism won’t catch you.
(Cynicism won’t catch you either,
But it has the courtesy not to throw you.)
I’m stopping now,
By the time you get this
I’ll be back home.
What pointlessness we endure for one other.
I miss you, as you say,
‘ever so’ –
Bedtime here is a source of misery.”

And then you signed your name,
Tiny,
Small,
Impossibly graceful,
Just like yourself.

You were always nasty
When you missed me.

Fossilized
Bed frame in the garden
Picked bare by the vulture of rain.

Analyse.

Mustachioed archeologists
Will dustily brush
Its slatted ribcage
And wonder how many years it suffered.

“This ornate four poster,
This mahogany rollercoaster,
Was used to aid in sedation and
Sensation.
To the best of our knowledge
It seems to have broken
Under the weight
Of a boy's imagination.”

History repeats on us,
One life holding the gown
Of the next,
Waiting for its turn;
Just look at how the future greets us,
With a capful of
Utter unconcern.

I want to be of use to you,

But my memories
Are not admired by most –
They involve love and only love,
Or desire described as love
And floating
In the sky of a castle
with a hatful of flowers boasting ‘now’.

Dullness comes like rain,
Eyes dull like champagne
Left out in glasses cold,
Like underpolished gold.

Such mollycoddle words
Such words I’ve often heard,
Disguised as strong commands,
With my shoulders meeting hands.

A shooting spree of dreams
On a melancholy green,
I hide him under beds,
And tell the room he’s dead.

Dullness comes like rain,
Like old champagne again,
Paralysed and rolled,
In underpolished gold.

Liquorice fellows,
Hooded
Execution -
A glossy black
Etonian intrusion,
Settling walnuts
Cracked apart and clever,
Snap crack
Snap, crack,
and
black
forever

Caterwauling rats
All brown and nasty
Sprouting tumours
Buck teeth
Rhinoplasty,
Stealing eggs and dragged on backs
of tumours,
Hissing soft through yellow teeth
'consumers'

Rabbits silver
Lands of plenty green,
All green and plenty
Land of ours, unseen,
Rats and crows
Pick our country bare,
God help the rabbit,
God
God help the hare.

Of course – a blush
Of course - a rose,
Ecg plasters,
Hives,
And the blood
On the feet
Of eternal fouettes.

(Red hourglass woman
Turns everybody’s heads –

Because she's so far away from death
And because she's red, baby, red.)

There is a strange quality
That infects beautiful people.
Marilyn Monroe is a perfect example-
It is the quality of other-worldliness,
Convincing us
That this idol transcends the mundane
And become something holy,
Untouchable
Wholly untouchable,
Their beauty circling us,
Dreamily,
Slowly.

Tom,
Despite being the most beautiful
Creature most people have ever clapped eyes on,
Does not possess this quality.
In fact,
It is the absence of it
That makes his beauty
All the more unreal.
He is so lodged into the fabric of
Existence that even the colour of his eyes
(Which have been compared to the sky so many times
It has ceased to be a cliché)
Do not look like the sky,
They are the sky,
His pupil a black sun
Stuck in the way.
His furious storm of hair is the
Golden brown of fine malt whiskey,
You can get drunk on every strand,
And you can chart the seas
From the white half-moons
On the fingernails of his hands.

(He flutters behind the bar like a drunken hummingbird,
The gold paint on his face
Turning him into an off-duty statue from Covent Garden.

He turns to address the crowd of customers.)

“Right – roll up, roll up –
Come see the Brick Lane-ologists favourite mixologist,
I’m a cocktail maker and occasional drug taker,
I can do things with gin that’ll make your head spin…”

He begins to juggle with three glass bottles,

“I’m your loyal bartender and I take any legal tender…”

he sets the bottles on the bar top with a grin,

*“And I’m at your pleasure…for just two quid a measure.”

Snatching at the hours,
I point my feet
Like a clock at twelve
And imagine hands.

I’d like to call you,
I’d like to tell you
That I’m thinking about
Walking to the countryside.
I’d like to tell you
That this highness
Doesn’t feel royal,
And that I can’t stop
Thinking
Of beheaded ancestors
And bolt-headed cattle,
Loveable tortures,
Millions of wandering dogs.

I want to call you and
Reel off a list of
Everything that’s ever happened,
All the people in the world
Who have made love at
Deeply
Satisfying
Angles,
I want to call you,
Pump you with blood,
My fingers rabbiting
Through a snug warren -
Bright Eyes,
Bulldozer,

Wanna call you
And say
'How could he do it to me?'
And in the same breath,
'Imagine me on my knees,
Oh, uh,
**** my mouth from
A distance -
But,
But,
How could he do it?'

Wanna call you
Because I’m not happy at all,
The universe is sitting
On my head,

Need to call you,
All ******* in a tangle
Baby,
I know the histories of
All the trees
And I want to pour over maps
Today.

I want to call you,
I've got so many questions.

I’d like to call you
And ask you
Why I’m not dead.
No melodrama,
No pressure,

But I’m gonna really need an answer.

In a Bluebird toffee tin
Are a hundred letters –
Most of them doodle-stamped and
Delivered by hand.
Unlike the letters I sent to you
They do not smell of spritzed cologne,
(A trick that I learned from Grease)
They are not messy
Or tea stained,
But perfect powder blue
And allowing for small extravagances –
The Cursive of the Obsessive,
Cursed by neatness and perfect hearts.

I pick one out at random,
A casually cruel one sent from Rome –
I imagine you blinking on a balcony
With dazzles on your collarbone,
A teeny tiny sugarless coffee
At your side,
And a pen tapping your knee.

“I’m not a **** at all –“ you wrote,
It’s only that you are gregarious
In the most DISGUSTING way.
That’s your problem not mine -
Your optimism won’t catch you.
Cynicism won’t catch you either,
But it has the courtesy not to throw you.
I’m stopping now,
By the time you get this
I’ll be back home.
What pointlessness we endure for one other.
I miss you, as you say,
‘ever so’ –
Bedtime here is a source of misery.”

And then you signed your name,
Tiny,
Small,
Impossibly graceful,
Just like yourself.

You were always nasty
When you missed me.

We were just two children
Really,
Not knowing which way to
Turn the maps,
But finding our own way
Anyhow.

Our own strangeness
Propped us up
Until we were
Curling our fingers
Around a strange sky,
Two stars touching,
Neither hot enough to
Burn the other.

You learned how to cry quietly,
The same way that I learned,
Holding onto your stomach
Like a little bear that was worn out
And threadbare
From the wear and tear of a
Lonely childhood.
A tear slipped,
Like a boy on a wet slide,
Pooling at your nose.

“I keep making mistakes.”
You said.

And I told you

That I would delight in
Any mistake
you had ever made,
Or would ever make.

Do you remember
When you called me
‘******* of the
Century?’

I do.
I remember the exact
Shade of red I went –
I can pick it out from
Colourwheels in DIY
Stores –
(“An *******’s
Shame",
Also available in gloss.)

Look –
I know what you thought
And I know what you’re
Thinking,
But you were never an
Experiment,
Never on a par with a
Night of heavy drinking,
Thinking,
‘I’ll never touch ***** again!’

And no,
I’m not sure why
We still end up in
Each other’s arms,
But I don’t think we should
Talk about it…
What good will it do
For me and you?
Why strip ourselves
Of the only innocence
We ever had?

Reliving you is
A beauty to me
Because you are the only
Souvenir of a past
Before Him,
A breathing reminder
That there was such a thing.

So,
Do you remember
Calling me
‘******* of the
Century?’
I do.
I remember the exact shade
Of red I went,
And I paint my guilt in it.

In the sand
Was a gist of light
Filtered through his fist.
I could see
The exact shape of it,
That gist,
Squeaking
Inside that hand.

Harriet –
I have wanted to say this
For a million years.

Your face is cruel.
Your daughter
Popped all those balloons because
She didn’t want that party -
And Eton will not
FIX YOUR SON.

This family is split down the middle –
The hard ******* and the
Fruitloops.
Get used to it, Harriet.
Your kids belong to us.

Get me my old school photograph
And I’ll point out every boy that
I ever kissed
Or even just dreamed of kissing.
Him?  Linguistic brilliance,
Chewed the skin either side
Of his fingernails, red
Raw they were.
And him? A map of acne
On his back, felt like
Braille,
And him? Such
Almond eyes,
Like milk allergies.
I take photos of every beautiful thing
I’ve ever seen.

The devil is in the details,
And God is in them too.

There is a deep, rich silence and the bedsheets are as soft as oil.
“What do you think happens when you die?” I ask. “From a purely scientific perspective. Is there any way…?”
Dee rolls his shoulders onto my hands.
“No, Art. I told you. There’s just nothing.”
“But I can’t imagine ‘nothing’.”
“Of course you can. Before you were born – what was there?”
“There was the promise of me.”
“No. There was the risk of you.”
We both laugh.
“There must be something.” I say. “There must be.”
“I hope there’s nothing.” Dee says. “ I can’t think of anything worse than an afterlife. I want peace and quiet. A lifetime is enough. Being alive is such a strange predicament. Knowing everything and knowing nothing.”
I can feel his heart against me. I can feel his heart and smell his skin. I feel us, as we are rocked by the world and breathing together.
And outside is the garden, the wisteria, the white chair, the promise (and the risk) of something, anything, everything, nothing.

in the silver
bowl
you let her head all henna hexed
with indigo
sink.
you watched the ink
Twitch out to tell the tales
from one blue star to the other,
but no maps.

how black is her hair now, this mother,
and how deep am I standing in it?

I am black to the ankle
black and blue to the ankle,
and to the knee,

From the knee to the elbow that
crooks
to hold the baby?

Is it weird to hallucinate wind chimes? twinkle twinkle, they go - twinkle, twinkle

I didn't eat breakfast but went straight to church, out of the sun and into the stone. I lit one candle and it shone on the rack.
I am sitting behind myself, a teenager coughing emeralds into a wet tissue, raging with flu.
Over there, I am ten years old.
All of these me's, bursting in the silence, finding excuses not to pray.

ten am
walked to the cafe to watch ten thousand beating hearts carried like luggage -
one girl has bought an orange and is eating it right in front of me-
It slipped down her neck one piece at a time.
I suppose it's quite intimate to watch someone eat an orange like that.

Dutch guy (I think Dutch, but god knows) on the phone
with a very, very, very nice **** and a tattoo going up his arm that
sort of looks like a vine.

walked some more and dunked my head in the fountain to cool off,
already dry and sitting in the park
music everywhere
I can't get that piano piece out of my head, 'The Entertainer'
and also that bit from ******
'all the stars and the cars and the bars and the barmen'
or something like that.

hello love, would you mind a good seeing to?
not tonight sweetcheeks, I utterly loathe you
I am aching everywhere.
Do I look mad or heartbroken or both?

if he doesn't call by one then
(what? what are you actually going to do about it you stupid ****?)

The key to good mental health is to avoid thinking at any cost and don't go anywhere when you have nowhere to go.

Bedside origami,
A corset of pins turned
Inward,
Find some solace in folding yourself
Into two pieces,
Tubes scratching the back
Of your throat to
Carry out blood and
Bile as
Thick as treacle.

Puncture wound,
Important vein,
Hits the back of the
Teeth before it
Registers on the skin,
Like a cold hammer
Smashing into
Echoed ice.

Cigarette burn,
Cold,
Setting the edge of
My hair alight,
Dusty, bright,
Almost holy.

Bladder spasms
Like boxer’s kicks,
Yellow rodents
Thashing,
Can’t
Even
Speak.

Thick muscle aches,
The kind that make it
Hard to pour milk
Or ******* -
And leave you like
An OAP in the most
Deathly of winters.

A sensory explosion,
Indoor sunburn,
Lighting up your
Leg
Like a pajama on fire.
Cool flannels will
Do nothing.

Five week constipation,
A car with no
Biting point,
Suspended over a toilet
Crying tears that
Have nothing to do with
Sadness.
The mirror hands you
Back your own
Ugliness with a smile
That is not a smile.

Unlike the slow and groaning gloaming,
A creeping darling
Moaning morning
Heavy lashed and lulling
With a shushing fingered longing,
Puts her eyes on, limp and limpid,
And steals through fields of lamb-licked grass.

In the city, roofs are cracking
And the light is soundly whacking
At the windows of the sisters
Sharing bedrooms with their brothers
And sunlight settles on the curtains
Of a girl who is uncertain
Of the boy she’s waking up with
Who is feeling up her ****.

Politeness stops her yawning
On this creeping darling moaning morning.

My boot on the stone,
Lace is stubborn black.

Greatcoat collar whips grey -
Joins sky.

A flat day for colours,
Boot on stone,
Stone is dim,
Dim like sky,
Sky grey.

Stubborn black won’t knot -
But why, it won’t say.

It Girl,
Pierced **** girl,
****** as a jaywalking crow
With bluebottles for eyes.
I can see your billion goosebumps,
Your skin dragging at
Your perfume.
You’re not beautiful,
But girl -
You
Are
It.

We think we're hard done by

Coasting in our sleeping bag boats,
Binliners of lumps
waiting for our names
and for our coats.

Oh Lithium Lovers
Are we ****** - ?

Are our bloodlines blue,
black and blue and botched,
blotchy on the page,
cowed and crowing in the cage?

We were birds, stunned birds,
Singing to the guns,
With picks behind our eyes
And walls to catch the turds.

We were history
We were gassed
We were mush inside the glass,

We were carnival sweethearts,
We were the horrors of the crowd
****** if we were quiet,
Or a bit quiet,
Or loud.

Yellow pages,
A pipe,  not a pipe,
Notes -

What's your name, darl?
And where's your coat?