I want to say please don’t leave,
I still have your coat in my wardrobe
and it looks like you can’t have gone far,
and please don’t leave, I don’t know
where else I’m supposed to stay
when it’s two in the morning
and everything feels like communion,
and please don’t leave, I am having to confront
how selfish I am.

So you’re leaving, and I’m trying to work out
if I should pack my memories into little boxes
and pretend that you’ve died, and you’re leaving
so I’m on the floor in my bedroom thinking
about going somewhere and trying to find Judas
or at least a tree with sturdy branches and the end
of a rainbow with thirty silver coins as compensation.

And now you’ve left, or at least made the decision
to leave, and here I am again trying to wave you off
with images in my mind of the Titanic leaving behind
everyone who couldn’t afford to die so grandly;
you’ve left, and I’m using metaphors to talk about this
because it’s easier than genuflecting and joining
a faceless pew - sorry, don’t think I’m calling myself Jesus
because I’m not. Really, I’m not. But you’ve left,
so don’t I have the right to call myself what I want?

It’s not like you’re here to stop me. There’s that word,
gone,
like it’s final, like you’ve joined the laundry list
of everyone who said they’d be there forever. You’re gone,
and I’m promising myself that I’ll stop being addicted
to people, only cigarettes and cheap wine and the feeling
of missing something when it isn’t quite packed up
into all of the final moving boxes just yet.

Take off your hands
like a shop window mannequin
and give them to me;
let me imagine that it’s you
sleeping on the other side of the bed.

Your hands
and mine.

Let me let you
feel the bridge of my nose
and run your hands over
the scar on my elbow,
the mole on my chin
to make it yours
even when I’m holding you holding me.

Tell me it’ll always be this easy;
this gentle;
this much led by the me
that’s leading you.
Let me use your hands
to call you
so I can use your *******
to tell you that I hate it
when you don’t answer.

Make your hands puppet master
and let me hold them;
as they contort me
into however I think they think
they want me to be.

And then let them
fall into bed with me
as I sleep,
holding your cold hand
in a double bed;
painfully aware
of the blistering, dry
burn of always being
alone.

Soft skin, marred,
jagged cheekbones
cutting into blank white;
suffocating plastic sweats
against the mouth of the thing.

A moth-swarm of faces,
of sickly hospital white
plastic; mouths gasping
for air and everyone drinking spirits
like the world is about to end.

The façade of a masquerade,
pearl whites with jagged oysters
creaking underneath, all botox
and sloppily revisited youth;
death is passed as a disease.

One within, too prideful
for a mask, yet pale faced
enough to spend the night
in the quagmire and relive
the quicksand underfoot forever.

Hard, wrinkled women
ruining themselves,
asphyxiating slowly in the crushing
pressure of plastic on sweat on skin
right down to the bone.

Still, the white-wind, bare, ghost
lingers in the after-party,
picking up the discarded masks
with smooth, youthful fingers;
resignedly exhaling down into sinking earth.

Clenching my lies within my fists
I stand prominent,
forcing the pressure of weightlessness
onto them until they crack;
opening up like wounds,
drenching the tips of my fingers
in venom and lava.

Their acid burn
seeps into the cuts in my skin
from times I have fought this before;
an unyielding inevitability
soaks the marrow of my bones
as I stand – defender and defenceless,
my fists still closed, un-bloomed.

Primed to punch, my stance is unyielding,
as if my body and throat are at war
between the truth and the other;
head lolling in despair
at who I have become
and what I am holding.

The way out is the way in
and I’m looping,
rolling down a hill in a memorial summer,
catching myself at the bottom
and finding it to be the ash-sky;
continually Catherine-wheeling
through remnants of other iterations
of this inevitability.
We always end up here.
We always end up
here.

Copy yourself,
make something other
a binary you,
in a world
of starships and code
and the fact that death
doesn’t really mean anything here.

Right here,
we don’t need
oxygen or food,
in this world
of falsity and fantasy
and the sweetness of hallucination
that aches behind your body.
Stand still,
headset firmly on
and breaths calm,
a new world awaits your better self
where you forget the depersonalisation
of still always being human.

Copy that,
you’re the captain
of false starships,
hurtling through uncertainty
with virtual reality comforting
you when you realise that
you’ll never be like this.

Another you,
version fifty-three
in a chain,
never changing yourself
or becoming something better
only sticking in mistakes
and pretending like it’s improvement.

Copy yourself,
make another other
for another self,
forget your body
and transmit human signals
to other fake-people
who tell themselves aching stories

of a reality
that we daren’t change.

We bought the galaxy
on a mortgage of borrowed time.
Because I wanted
to give you something grand
and you wanted space
and all of the stars.

Who’s in charge of this?
Not us, lying in a single bed
traversing the skies;
you need a bottle-opener
for your wine,
so you destroy a planet
and forge one in a star –
one use only.

I tell you that if we fall
into a black hole,
we’ll see in front of us
everything that will ever happen;
and you tell me you’ll look behind,
instead.

We try and find one,
but our hands come up empty,
and you say you never liked
vacuums, anyway.

I know all this.
I’ve always known all this,
and yet still,
I let you destroy
any home we create;
your hammer on the mantelpiece.

Perhaps spinning through the universe
is worthwhile,
because it means you
have to hold onto something;
finally.

I trust and believe
that the words of others
are truth and law;
we’ve always been standing
on unequal ground here -
forever on this titanic plane.

The crowd of everyone
and the universal singularity:
me.

You say whatever
and I say okay;
I say I’m drowning
and you say
you’re waiting for something
in the water,
to pop up and tip the scales.

When you knock on my flesh
I tear open a door
for you,
let you worm inside
and deposit your truths
under my skin;
let them grow like parasites
within me,
festering in septicaemia.

With my rotting body
like sea-soaked decks
at the bottom of the ocean,
I’m asking you to validate
the fact that I am becoming the decaying waters
and swallowing the boat,
because you made me
this way - and I?

I am somewhere in the picture, too.

I’ll lie to you tomorrow,
but tell you today
that the next 24 hours
will be the start
of something beautiful;

a lie only becomes so
when the truth is impossible –
for all the times I say tomorrow
will be wonderful
there’s a possibility

unfulfilled.

So get a load of this,
me, again,
smiling to show my gums,
me, again,
writing down plans
and burning them,
me, again,
hoping that the ash
will be taken by the wind.

Unfulfilled.

Sunrises are the start and the finish line;
it’s so easy to run,
but it’s harder to stop
before I’m not
unfulfilled.

Here we are again,
the peak of the trough,
and I’m telling everyone
once more
that tomorrow
I will be (un-)

fulfilled.

Arch your fingers, clasp your palm,
touch the keys as if pulling
at the heartstrings of a lover;
back in the looming financial crash of 2007
when a family bought a piano
and a new house,
and a young girl ached Chopin.

With your hand out of the window
and the car on the motorway,
talon hands, poised,
feel the air as a shotput;
smooth, round, permanent - oxygen bubbles
puppeteering pale fingertips
until the window goes up
and the radio is heard again.

Speaking three languages,
la mort, la mort, la mort;
D – E – A – D
the keys cannot spell ‘childhood’,
but her fingers reach
more than an octave now
(her thumb still ******).

Chopin welcomes her
to her final decomposition;
her piano, dusty
and blooming with flowers
through each key,
plays discords
that don’t quite make
a funeral march.

Havisham’s hands are ******
with the half-squeezed heart
blackened by falsity,
like thick red paint,
her crackling fingertips
keep moulding something invincible;
the permanence of lying.

Altars still stand
after the apocalypse,
registry books torn
to become cigarette papers;
the ash of everything
and a child,
painting the phoenix
onto the acid soil,
until the core coils into chainmail.

The echoes of the innocent
make pews into death row,
where the absence of a void
ruminates, glitching, triumphant;
wedding dresses at funerals
brush away the humid dew
of unmown grass,
as the softness of forgetfulness
crowns each grave eternal.

Havisham’s hands are made of soot,
the woman as the pyre,
long-since engulfed
in bitterness;
one lie creating a fragile universe.
Greek chorus repeating
minor rites
until the dead phoenix
dies again,
and only the smoke
of lie-infested letters
rises.