If you're afraid of past tense,
                           Don't let time pass....

Mother, I know that you’re close to me.

Summer floods my heart and bathes my skin. Glistening, gleaming, glowing. You made me with stardust, elements of a universe I could never comprehend. From beauty so mesmerizing that to sit in silence is impossible. A sea which flows deep within my stomach, swells and with force washes every life-giving cell within my body. So much beauty I can’t sit nor stand as the water  rushes to head my head and trickles out my eyes to produce a single tear.
         Halted.
As if the cold harshness of the world pulled the plug with such force that the water simply fell from me. Hollow, empty, sinking.

Mother, I know that you hear me.
United by a language, only 4 letters long. Hidden, universal, the alphabet connects us all. Like a golden silken rope, a hope, binds us together. From pigs in pens, fruits on the tree, entangles humanity and it connects to me! From the genepool you made us, gave us chance to grow, evolution pulling strings like a puppeteers show. But we spat that back at you, exploited, your body lay cold as your ***** once again for your oil and coal.

Mother, I know you see me.
Dawn brings with it the purest of hours. Time allows us to talk, to stop, like old friends in a coffee shop, letting themselves droop into the dancefloor of the steam, encircling there heads like the ghosts of lost dreams. It’s the calm before the storm, your bitter cold nestles into me to seek the warmth that you had made. If I could Id take you in my arms and protect you from all that I can not fix. I’d aim my words like weapons into the hearts of your tormentors, your children. With my pen id scrape the plaque residing within there souls and we’d stop this, look after you as our own. But as hairs stand on end, my frail frame shivers, our fleeting moment slips away. It is silently understood that I too am broken. Your tears fall, cascading down the tarmac scars etched across your body. With you I cry, my clothes wet through as if to bear your pain is the only hand I can offer you to hold.

Mother, I am sorry.
Sorry for the eyes that stare back at you from behind that bars of their intensive homes. Their bodies a prison, destined to be the marinated centerpiece, a symbol of status for another desperate housewife, barely breathing through the contraption that fits her in loaned clothes.

I’m sorry I can’t finish what I’ve started. The last words should offer you comfort if not solution, but how can the answers slip from the chaotic mind of the broken-hearted. The truth is we all have nails in our hands, and what it means to be human has been lost to the cross that we all bare. Lonely, despair. We fight the tides of society, its judgments, expectations, racial discrimination, oppression, victim blaming. We try to keep sailing. But what we fail to see is that we’re failing and the only hope of this changing lies within the broken fragments of our humanity.

You are like a cacti.
Everytime you touch me i bleed.
Yet.
I will water you with love and marvel at your blood red blooms.

They asked me to read them my favourite line...

Your name rolled off my tounge

You were just another mistake to learn.

Today, I woke up to a flesh fair.
Dresses are getting shorter, sometimes there just not there.
More cleavage than ideas, more muscles than compassion.
More media coverage of 'age appropriate' than how to feed the world!

Our bodies are beautiful and nature has hardwired us to know this.
But, know that our bodies preceeded our existence, your ***** bone is not taboo!
You strip your clothes and strip yourself bare whilst you hide under a 1000 layers.
Let's shift focuss from what was always there!

Nakedness can save us, if only we were willing to face the cold.
Pull on your Wolly jumpers, open your mouth to bare your soul.
Weaver a fabric of intimacy, a patchwork connection of trust and honesty.
Shed all the ugliness of media gorged, superficial controversy.

Why is everybody naked?
Not out of self-love, alone and in awe.
Not with a partner wit whom you entrust your life.
Not to make a midnight snack in a heatwave.

But. For entertainment.

A science show with naked hosts, not very educational?
To advertise clothing or cars, as if we're still neanderthals.
Our nakedness is owned by everybody else.
So many hands in the ***, we don't know 'how' to be naked.

I am watching myself in the future, nestled safe in memories.
I try to love myself whole-heartedly.
So, when future me lays alone. Lonely.
She can wander through treasured memories and know someone loved me!

A mood can change in the blink of an eye.
I reread your text through blurry eyes.
My hands shake to the beat of my racing heart.
My blood runs cold and the red mist decends over my restraint.
The cold sweat consumes me.
Locks me in my head with my whirling thoughts.

When i claw myself out of this madness, i ask who am i?
Who am i to be jealous over an unrequited love?
They could make you happy, surely, i just want you to be happy?

This love. This hurt. This friendship. This obsession.

This nothingness is leaving no space left for sanity.

A mood can change in the blink of an eye.
Your texts stir up like dissolving lies.
My hands shake to the beat of my thundering heart.
My blood runs cold enough to freeze the pendulum swinging in my head.
My stomach wants to be sick, its letting me know my world is upside down.
The cold sweat consumes me.
Locks me in my head with my whirling thoughts.

When i claw myself out of this madness, i ask who am i?
Who am i to be jealous over an unrequited love?
They could make you happy, surely, i just want you to be happy?

I do want you to be happy.

This love. This hurt. This friendship. This obsession.

This nothingness is leaving no space left for sanity.

You are not the one.
Me and you, we make no sense.

But.

For my wasted hollowed heart, you are the only one.

One day you may love me back,
One day i may walk back into the sunshine...

What if I told you to get out of your head?
If I said humans don't love for methodical reasons.
Your husband is not won by quadratic formulas.
Put down your glossy magazines, they're rewriting who you are.

take off your clothes and be naked, be one with everything you are.
I'm not saying that everybody is beautiful. Of course, they're not!
The multi-billion dollar beauty industry wouldn't allow for that.
I'm saying everybody id here, and human, and present.

No anti-ageing cream can do that!

So shake off your insecurities about the world, for they're manufactured too!

The silence is getting heavier,
I struggle to breathe under its weight.
My skin holds on tightly to the marks you left when you loved me.
Because these marks are all I'll ever have of you.

My thoughts are filled with 'Eskimo kisses', entwined fingers, the peace of your presence.
But your heart is cold in your bed made of empty promises and false hope...

I heard that pain nourishes courage.
And that romanticised love is cancer.

I hope that this suffocating, consuming  love will devour enough of me.

Will make me sick enough to find the courage. The cure I need.

To fall out of love with you...

I listen to my gut instinct, but it tells me a lot.
I need to hear your words, before my insides rot!

The heart is an over-used analogy for love.
besides, parasites are more fitting.

Like a flatworm, you're under my skin.
But theres no doctor who can get you out.
Scientists don't speak of how you got in.

A new discovery, nothing to stop you devouring me.

I know that you're a writer.
One day you're going to tell our story.

It's going to be the greatest love story the world has ever known.
Or the greatest, most tragic tale of loss.

Which way the pendulum swings is up to you.

My notebook is filled with squiggles and lines,
A franctic search for words to define,
The chaos in my head, I scream, I pine,
For a soul to unlock this mental prison of mine.

You are my antiparticle.
We are destined to collidide and when we do, you will annihilate me!

**** on the train.
Really, **** on the train?

I think think those naked, explicit maggots have rotted your brain!
Assuming you had one.

You say this is socially acceptable.
I guess we know what you mean by "movie night".

You're a putrid, mangy creature without a soul to call home.
You cretanous waste of life, you dont deserve a ******* rhyming word!

Im sorry of this is offensive but made me an obsessive.
This isnt ****** but we both know *** is power and I feel powerless

I have dark secrets stashed in my heart.
Not idle gossip or an unknown fact.
This secret feels more like a ball and chain.
This freedom you have given feels like a prison.

To me the rain means to stay.
Water brings nourishment and life.
So plant your seeds and stay.
Let the rain take you home!

I never wanted to be everything to everyone.
I just wanted to be something to someone...

To me you are floccinaucinihilipilification,
and as ugly as the word too...

We reap what we sow, so I’m put my trowel down.
I have hay fever, and your pollen is notoriously high.

My tongue speaks in riddles my ears can't decipher.
It twists and turns, guiding a rollercoaster of emotion.
My hands protect my head during sudden drops.
As my knees crash to the floor to beg for mercy.

I feel vacant again, Can’t stop blowing my brains out.
Mt triggers pull the trigger and my 24 years young, old hands tend my wounds.
Despairation hollows out my mind the way hunger knots the stomach.
My war-torn fingers march back through no-mans land, they’re dancing through a mine-field of trauma.
The only dance they’ve ever known.
In this desserted land mirages are deceitful, like hallucinations are liars.
Like ‘swallow this bitter water called ‘coping mechanisms’ doesn’t sound like ‘you’re destroying yourself’

I can save myself.
'salva te ipsa' marks my arm, a reclamation, declaration, that this body is mine!

I can love myself.
I can love myself so feircly that not even a thunderstorm dare rain on me.

I can fix my own ******* crown.
For it was my war-torn haands that placed it upon my head.

I can save myself.
'salva te ipsa' marks my arm, a reclamation, declaration, that this body is mine!

I can love myself.
I can love myself so feircly that not even a thunderstorm dare rain on me.

I can fix my own ******* crown.
For it was my war-torn hands that placed it upon my head.

I can save myself, but for now, I'll tell the truth.
Saving myself means peace and contentment.

It does not mean having you.

Loving you is bittersweet, for this loneliness without you is all consuming.

Though you are unattainable.
You are the most beautiful start-lit sky.
Uncomparable, fleeting.

Save yourself for yourself.
He was never listening.

Hold your own hands, your arms are strong enough to wrap you.
remember, his were cold anyway.

Be honest with yourself. Always.
You know you dont trust him.

You remember all those long walk on the beach?
Staying up late and talking for hours?

You remember that sense of home, whereever you two went.
Just remember that that was not him.

Let go of your fear of abandonement.
There nothing to fear if you love yourself.

It's been another long night, dimmed bath room lights.
Puffy red eyes stare back from a broken mirror, a broken mind.

And if the scars of heartbreak create a mosaic of your face.

Using binds that can't break if delusions can't shatter.

I'll look at it in the mirror, I'll note how its the only colour on my drained fragmented being.

And, I'll still see it as a masterpiece, art, beautiful.

A face that from me draws a love that knows no bounds.

I've been trying to write you a poem.
But words fail to paint pictures of my vulnerability.
So I pray that you can read between the lines.
Invite you to open Mic sessions under the sheets.
Let you caress the words that are etched on my skin.
The scars of my bare flesh speak more than the songs of angels.
Still, I fear that to you this is just ***, and to me, this is my confession!

My fantasies have become very strange, I disturb myself at least once a day.

I imagine, my helpless body sinking. Sinking down deeper into an unknown. A memory of the only breath that would last a lifetime. A lifetime two minutes long.

I go to the library to find peace of mind, to find myself in the pages of a medical journal.
On the pages will be blooms of hope in the names of tablets that can ease my worried mind.

The cold sludge will embrace me tightly. Covering my eyes so I can't see any of the pain anymore. Holding my limbs tight, to remind me that its always there. That deaths embrace is certain. That I will be at peace.

Papercuts cover my frantically searching hands, like warriors. They're fighting for my life, a war against myself. Cramming pages into my eyes and plugging my ears with facts. A Freudian overload, a desperate attempt to medicalise my state of mind.

The thick taste of salty sand fills my mouth, my breath gasps, my involuntary reflex to save my life. The silence comes, the voices fade away. Its bittersweet that my death brings my every fantasy.

They clatter as they hit the sink, prescribed nonsense designed to pull me into myself. Make me more compliant. Dig my own hole deeper. Make me easier for society to swallow, for you to deal with. My hands have finally saved me, poured away the mind-altering remedies. Showed me the only thing I ever needed was already part of me.

Another nail through the palm of my hand, another label for you to wrap your ghastly mouth around
The words ‘beautiful’, ‘****’, ‘love’ burn into my skin like I’m caught in an acidic thunderstorm.
You pin them into my fragile flesh like notes pinned to a corkboard of advertisements.
Butchering my body and sedating my soul, objectifying my existence, object of your desire.

Let me tell you what loving you feels like.
Like I'm a snail, like you're salt.
Like I fell into you and now I want to bubble and die.

Like a star, your light lets me live.
My world revolves around you.
Like the egyptions followed the sun gods.
I will always worship you.

I want to leave,
Because I want to live.

I fear that staying still, staying here.
Is to simply exist.

Im not really dead yet.
My chest rises and falls.
The breath escapes from my lungs, the air curls into ghosts of you.
Empty I loves as icy as your heart.

I won't be planning a funeral.
Doctors won't be pulling a sheet over my head.
There is life between my rib cage, it beats soft like a cats swishing tail.
There is life here, im apathetically not dead.

There is life here but not like with you.
Memories are haunting, like craving for water alone in the desert.
There is no LIFE here, only the stillness you left.