I long to catch a fleeting bliss
A surging river in my veins
Flood my body with your tears
To wash away the emptiness
Take my breath from parted lips
Comforting impermanence
Summon me to clay and dirt
Swallow me in sweet embrace

You’ve paid for somewhere pretty to smoke
yet not realised that your decorated,
thin cold icing and sweet to taste, lips
will be ruined from every second cigarette ****.

But I forgive you
because your eyes are olive,
tried and tested and true.

For the girl with the bow in brown hair,

            the heat from the upstairs
restaurant cures the street where we walk,
            the freight’s in on the track,
you can tell by the horns,
            I from the diesel smell below the
afternoon clouds, faint above,
            sometimes when we speak a heart rate
somewhere peaks,
            another graph pinned to an office wall
shows this clear,
            sometimes when we talk tense chests
fear the answer you may say,
            the graph strays past paper and onto
those office walls, in red with a palmed
            smudge where you forgot where
the words ended.

            For the girl with the bow in brown hair,
your eyes are theatre-light reflections in twenty-four hour
window panes sat packed neatly off the corner of West 47th
and 7th, for you’re my central Times Square.

We strip down to our souls.
And we wear softer voices,
as we lay
imprisoned in bodies and sheets.
We rest our heads on the idea of safety and
we warm our hands on affection.
Your lips melt deep into my skin,
as my fingertips burn through yours.
Tangle me with words and whispers,
which I can not hear
but understand.
And I will try and do anything
to stop the world from shifting for even a minute,
just to lie with you one more.

he said
girls like me should come with yellow tape
police property, do not cross

and if that is because I am *******

I guess now
my skin should say: crime scene, do not

touch

because I am crying over men like they’re
still just boys.