They say that

Van Gogh ate yellow paint

To put the happiness inside him.

But she, instead, would

Cut out the sadness from her skin

And let the hatred pour out

In gushing streams of red,

Her screams echoing

The injustice of colour.

Her wheat skin looked prettier, she thought,

With the raked furrows of half healed scars

And painful slurs
Etched into the deep ochre of her soul.

She quietly detested her terracotta skin,

Smooth like a polished stone

Picked up from the Ganges.

But here in the pale waters of the Thames

She was a blot of burnt sienna on an otherwise ivory white riverbank.

And every new cut

Would heal bloodless and waxen,

Which made her vow to herself to cut off her skin completely,

Leaving nothing but

The darkened red of her fury

And a frightened echo of a scream

In a room filled with bitter laughs and slurs,

In a room filled with the muffled cries of the oppressed and unheard.

Shuffle
Skip
Repeat

He played his usual game of pretending to consider the palatable array of music which graced his iPod before settling for an Arctic Monkeys song, as always, just in time for the 7AM school bus that revved up the road with a satisfying crunch of gravel. The morning had a deliciously crisp quality to it, with swirls of fog swathing the trees in mild ambiguity while the sun danced a waltz in a rose and custard sky, the colour of cakes sold in Pastéis de Belém, the best patisserie in Lisbon.

He realised he hadn't eaten breakfast just as he boarded the bus.
Ah, well. **** it.

The sun skipped between the spaces in the leaves, playing hopscotch with his imagination as he dazedly looked out the window, lost in his music. Although the people on his bus were nice, he didn't exactly like them. The boys wore low pants and branded caps, the girls caked on makeup and tittered vapidly at everything the boys said. A few others quietly occupied the back seats like him, engrossed in their own world. He felt a stronger connection with these people, although he'd barely spoken to them before.

He lapsed back into his reverie while looking out the bus window, lazily tracing patterns in the cracks of the broken walls of the empty restaurants and hotels that passed by. The economic crisis had rendered hollows of places previously choked with people, now haunted with the after image of busy commerce and make-believe vignettes of scenes occurred in these skeleton remains. They were darkly beautiful, modern bones of the city that held a history too close to his own.

He forcefully snapped out of his running internal monologue just as the bus pulled up the driveway outside school. The distance of a block stood between him and school, a block fraught with danger, for he'd been robbed on a previous occasion (not that his school bag had much else besides lunch money and books). At least they hadn't nicked his iPod. He'd be helpless without it.

Music was his poison. He drank it in like the alcoholics of the night drank scotch. Every drum beat was a ricochet echo of his own heart, every guitar string picked was a twanging of his veins.

And music got him through the day. The last bell had already rung and school was over. The kids rushing out the hall blurred into an exquisite pointillism of neon clothes and benevolent cusses at each other. He picked up his bag and walked to the bus, lost in the sleep deprived haze of his thoughts.

On the ride home, he wondered where he'd be in a few years. He wondered if he'd find a place in the cascading chaos of a society ruled by the anarchy of physics, and the fear of inevitable oblivion. He wondered if he would be remembered, if his footsteps would have an echo.

But for now, he thought, his microcosmic life in Lisbon would do. There were dark alleyways to explore and museums to visit and pastries to eat. Somewhere, a waiter put a tablecloth on a dinner table with a flourish, where two lovers would later dine. Somewhere, a boy ran down some abandoned train tracks with his dog, laughing at the summer sun. Somewhere, a girl with auburn hair picked seashells from a glimmering beach as the waves crashed around her fragile legs.

Somewhere, in his heart, a flicker of nostalgia coursed through his blood.

The next song on his iPod came up.

Shuffle.
Skip.
Repeat.

i.
He told her
That mathematics was too
Sombre.
Too, too
Linear
To be poetic.

She said that
He had only seen himself
In a mirror,
A reversed hologram
Of his external self
Burned into his retinas with
His subconscious filling in the gaps.

But she had seen him
The rays reflected straight off him
Into her eyes;
Not some half-assed reflection
Off some silvered surface.

ii.
She said that
His jawline was
The ***** of a curve
Pencilled on a graph sheet.
His candlewax skin
A wavelength
Quantifiable on paper.
His spine
A number line with
Dashes, to show real numbers
The set of which was infinite.

She said that
A Fibonacci sketch was
A minimalist rose,
A post-modern bouquet.

And that
The reflected pale morning sun
In a half finished cup of camomile tea
Was a cardioid
With fixed coordinate values on the axes
And an algorithmic tangent.

And he
Was a negative infinity
A paradox not sorted under
Quine's classification system.

iii.
She had
Recorded his heartbeat and blood pressure;
Measured the distance between his lips with her own;
Tried so hard, so very, very hard
To put him down in a numerical form
And write him off as an equation.

But all she could say was
That he was more
Than the sum total of his meagre parts
And that she
Was his reciprocal value.

I nurse my insomnia
Like an alcoholic recently off probation
Nurses his drink
Savouring every drop of liquor
Rolling it under his tongue
Slowly dying all the while
Of insanity
Rather than addiction.

A body cradled in a nightly cocoon of blankets and self-loathing.

A contact list full of numbers in which calls go straight to voicemail.

An explosive cocktail of one part perfection and three parts depression, with an overdose of cheap coffee.

A personality of anti-anxiety pills and choked down insanity, with a side order of slit wrists.

An A+ on your history test, smudged with tears and smuggled *****.

A sleeping tablet.

A mind like a room with the blinds down for weeks, a smile like a gunshot in the darkness.

A broken tape recorder of one missed calls, of slammed doors, of smeared lipstick in front of a mirror sparking with tears.

A cigarette for every sin, a dollar for every broken dream.

A full wallet.

A brain like a twisted forest path, a sketchbook full of scratched pencil marks, a screaming teacher at the end of every class.

A daughter of the human manifestations of nine-to-five jobs with a pension scheme and insurance.

A carefully maintained vocabulary of whiplash sarcasm and blank stares.

A graduating member from a class of 'Congratulations on Getting the **** Over Yourself.'

*A bullet.

Thirteen steps in, nine steps right.
Un, deux, trois.

Follow the flow, dear. Don't lose faith. There we go.
Have you been practicing? It's much better than the last, much better. Yes, I know. It's too soon, isn't it? Keep practicing, though. Get the jumps right, dear, you do, ah, tangle those up, don't you?

****. He won't like the jumps then.

She quietly swore as Madame left the room. It would be minutes now (and it seemed like less) that she would feel his hands snaking around the arch of her spine, his emotionless voice softly murmuring 'A little right, you've got it. It's never too difficult for you.'
Effortlessly smiling. Surveying the smooth movements in her limbs his labor translated to.

Stop it. What was the point. He was gone before he even..oh, what the ****. It didn't matter.

And she gave up trying to resist his memory, because it was like smoke inside her head, clouding up her survival instincts and filling her with the warm drowsiness of his caress. With his breath on her shoulder and the faint scent of mint and depression that hung around him. She used to tell him that he would smell like hospitals and he would grin (not those idiotically crooked grins the boys in her other class would throw at her, but a proper, ridiculously wide grin that made him look fumbling and slightly simple and made her feel something special) and he'd tell her the story about the first time he broke his shin and he'd stayed for three days in a hospital room that had no ceiling, and it was the most incredible thing ever, because you could see the stars.

'Stargazing', he would tell her, 'is a bit like looking into the past and the future all at once. Light takes such a long time to reach Earth that the light that reaches us from, say, Deneb, which is one thousand four hundred and twenty five light years away, is exactly that many years old. One thousand four hundred and twenty five years old. And you can see the light now and your three year old cousin will see it when he grows up and life forms from other galaxies will see it a million years from now and you can never,never stop that light even though the star itself will one day explode and collapse itself into negative space. But the light, until it is seen by somebody, anybody, until it forms an image on someone's retinas, will stay alone in the universe forever.
Beautiful, forever.'

Or for at least one thousand four hundred and twenty five years.

He was a lot like his stars, she surmised. His after-image seemed brighter than him, enough to burn your eyes and leave your throat parched and make your heart start aching.
But the boy himself was full of ****.

It's sad how everyone says 'he was' now. Not is. Was. Past tense, like they couldn't see his light still running up his ******* one thousand however many years. Like the negative space he occupied wasn't ******* burning up the sky with its brightness.

Or maybe he was a black hole, mercilessly engulfing light into its emptiness, spitting it out into another dimension where only she existed. Where the light was only for her and was invisible to the rest.

Or maybe he was just plain gone.



She hated believing in death. As she danced to Prokofiev she thought about how much she hated believing in death but now she had to because she couldn't feel his presence, and there was this little hole gnawing at her going 'gonegonegonegone' because he was dead and she was dancing and she wanted to stop the unfairness of it all because he was always the better dancer. He was always the better everything.

His voice faded in her head and his arm slipped away. She wanted to turn and say 'No, no stay. Don't go, please love, staystaystay.'

She didn't.
She didn't say it.

So maybe it was good that he was dead to everyone else and dying to her because she liked the idea of him slipping away and her head being occupied by her own thoughts. So she just kept dancing because *******, that's what I loved doing before you came along. And she pliéd and battement glissé dégagéd into position, two steps forward, one step right, finale chassé
and
then
allegro cabriole.

The feeling of flying. Her legs crossing and extending in mid-air. Her muscles screamed in pain and her face broke into a smile.

And her feet hit the glossed wooden floor. En croix.
A sickening crack. Her feet gave way.

But she was smiling.


From the window, Madame watched and thanked her son's ghost for finally letting go.
As the final bars of Prokofiev's coda emptied its lucid notes into the rattling vacuum of the city's pandemonium outside, she contemplated going in and helping the girl,
but.

This
      was
  her
        fight.

And what doesn't **** you.
   Makes you wish
it
*did.

I can taste a nightmare
At the back of my teeth
Roaring, growling, seething
Waiting for release

I can see my noises
Quiescent and opaque
Tender and bitter
Bursting with bubbling hate

I can hear my tremble
My noiseless, hurtful shaking
My hands turning to claws
My heartbeat leaping, racing

I can smell a sleepless
Night spent in limbo
Cold sweat on my fingers
Wolf eyes in my window

I can feel so broken
And yet I feel so whole
Insanity at my tail
Like sharks in a china bowl

Her abandonment was absolute,
eyes vacant and glassy,
windows to an echoing room of emptiness.
Her forehead sagged like an unrepaired ceiling with frowns and wrinkles;
she had fingers the colour of old whitewash.
Her hair sighed like old wood in a breeze,
the scars on her arms like rusted nails on ply.
Her heart creaked and ached with old timber;
an old soul, filled with sawdust and ash.

Soon enough
she would rot and collapse
to the earth,
weighed down by disrepair and neglect;
she would never find the strength
to get up
and be filled again
with children’s laughter.

Never to be called home again,
just the broken remains of a tomb,
irreparably
and completely
forgotten.

I have been
In my bed all day
Watching the sun cross
A thirsty sky
Soaking in sunlight
Like my brain soaks in
The nightmares that lurch and writhe
In the wrinkles of my bedsheets.
I have been trying to
Drown myself
In a cocoon of white
Two week old cloth
And the empty echo of my mind.
Depression is quite literally
A hole
Which you have to claw yourself out
And my body has impressed its depression
On my bed,
On a place of rest for others.
When the tungsten lights seep through under the curtains
My bed turns into a bottle in which I drown my sorrows.
Strange thoughts fill me
Of white thunder and ravaging claws instead of hands;
I am sown together with the fabric of nightmares.
My mother calls my name
It is a distant sound,
Like some long forgotten calling
Across a sea
And yet I reach a feeble hand
Through time and space
For an epiphany
Before falling into a tormented sleep,
Only to wake in the same bed
As the same person.
Rinse and repeat.
It has been
Six days
Six weeks
Six years
Since I felt anything
But a hollow absence of me.

One day

I will wake up in the early morning

My fingernails aglow with sun

And I will not want to scratch the pain out of my skin.

One day

I will not be subject to

Pleasantries and masquerades,

Hellos and goodbyes and see-you-agains,

But be greeted with a small smile

And a nod of understanding.

One day

Someone will say they will stay by my side

Even when the sea inside me

Overflows, and drowns him too;

He says the tide will bring us back ashore.

One day

My fingers will not shiver

In summer, because the cold is never gone.

The blood in my veins will not carry the echo

Of hate and self deprecation.

One day

I will wake up without internally screaming,

And hey, who knows, maybe I’ll smile.

I will put on my yellow boots

Not as a reminder of the sadness I hide,

But a proportionate guarantee of the happiness I feel.

But today, you see,

Today I cannot find the strength to leave my bed;

The blinds will be closed the whole day and

The postman will know not to knock on my door.

Today

The sea inside me rages

And ****** the backside of my eyes,

Drenching my pillow with saltwater.

And in a blurry pointillism of blues

I will drown

Before I reach ashore.

I think I would rather have had gills than lungs.

To live and breathe under water would be such a ******* blessing.

A place where the icy touch of water smooths over the rough, aching edges of your skin.

A place where your screams dwindle to mere echoes at the distance of a hand-width.

Where sins wash like watercolours in the purple ache of night.

But we are creatures of the land.

Cursed with bipedalism and an unbridled view of the stars.
Naively destined to watch a movie with a happy ending,

When your own life is a car crash,

And hope.

They said that she had fairy skin

And cinnamon dusted hair,

A sleepy countenance, a ragged demeanour;

They said “she’s never quite..there."

Her fingers, when I saw her
Were tangled into a wreath.

Their fragile veins seemed about to snap

But she sat so calmly in her seat.

What a waste of a fine young lady, I say,

As she muses at the sky;

An excess of poetic form

Has made her mad and shy.

And yet I harbour a fascination

For one so truly lost,

Who cannot tell real from dreams,

Who nightmares do accost.

And oh, what a beautiful sight

To see one stay so naive.

At least, I say, I’m not the kind

To pin my heart up on my sleeve.

And once again the monotony

Of another day rushes past,

And the sea inside ****** the back of my eyes, I see

An exquisite pointillism of stars.

Maybe she’s the one with the luck of the Irish,

And I’m just a manifestation of routine.

She’s awake and full of fireworks,

And I’m just half asleep.

I spend my days waiting for night to come,
And nights awake waiting for day.

It’s a hopeless conundrum,

Like waiting for a flight in permanent delay.

My bedroom has become a terminal

Where tungsten lights seep through tearstains,

Where happiness is a criminal

On the run from your grenade.

I’m waiting for your satisfaction

Your smirk of approval, your disdain,

And all I get is a kiss from your shotgun

Blown off, blind-sided once again.

What’s another day to me

One step closer to being depraved

Of meaning, of purpose, of distinction;

I’m just another patient face.

I’ll wait.

Stay awake for the dawn that comes
Awake for the light at the
End of tunnel
Blink and it's gone now
Just wait and see
A cerulean
Behemoth
The sun an illusive revolver
Shooting love like a fast paced finger flung dart
Burning up the starch on your blue shirt
Searing through your heart
This is what it means to be alive
This is what it means to be alive

I have been knotting and re-knotting my headphone string

For twenty seven minutes,

Trying to re-enact the exact contortion of your fingers interlaced with mine.

I have been staring into my coffee for eleven minutes,

Trying to find the exact shade of the brown of your eyes in it.

I have been glancing up at every stranger who passes me by,

Trying to see if any of them resembled you;

One had a jawline with the same sloping curve as yours.

I have been watching the grey skies outside the pane glass window,

Trying to find the cloud with the exact billowing contour

Your cigarette smoke made in the mornings.

I have been listening to the metal detector beeping,

Trying to recall the sound your alarm clock made, sitting on your bedside table,

Waking you up from a woozy dream.
——-
They have announced the boarding call for flight 207 at terminal 6.

I have a ticket in my hand

But I am glued to the seat,

The warmth of the person sitting before me still lingering.

Perhaps he had used the same cologne as you;

The smell was awfully familiar.
——-
I have not moved from my seat

For three hours and twenty three minutes.

I can feel the eyes of the security guard burning a hole through my back into my chest,

Trying to judge if I am a criminal or not.
I would be a criminal for you, love,

But it is too late

You were the one 

Who stole 

my heart 

first.

Last night
I heard you leave
By the back door
12:22 AM
And the neighbour’s dog was barking

You left your jacket behind
I thought
Of calling you back
And sliding the sleeves up your shoulders
Cracking your icy demeanour
With the warmth of my gesture
And making you smile

I heard you
Muffled laughter
An audible kiss on her cheek
The quiet purr of an expensive car
Crunching gravel
Rolling up the driveway

I ran my fingers
Through your tangled bed sheets
I can’t remember
The last time
You slept well with me

I pulled the covers over my head
Drowning in your warmth
In this darkness
You were still here with me
Your limbs
Intertwined with mine

Your photo
On my bedside table
Your coffee mug
Next to mine
The dishes
Still in the sink
It was your turn to wash them
But I let it slide

I got up and put your slippers on
My toes crinkling with the feel of you
I put on your sweater
And I took your torch
And I grabbed your lighter
(I never told you but
I hated that you smoked)

Last night
I heard you come back
3:45 AM
And police sirens were shrieking

The house
And my heart
Were aflame
Drowning in your warmth

I heard you cry out my name
I heard you cry
I heard you
I heard you
I heard you

(But I don’t think you heard me)

a purple, aching darling
of a dawning day
unfurls her chilly fingers
over a greying grassland
to close the creaking door of night’s cabaret.

she slips her feeble sun-rays
through a cracked window pane.
dust motes, sauntering in their orbits,
float through a parched concrete bedroom
where once false love was made.

here lies a brave soldier
who fought for hell’s brigade
and shot a widower in love’s name
after which he bartered souls for simple comforts -
oranges, canned fish and pain.

and he never met his son
or saw his daughter’s face
for he had left his lover’s morning singing
and life’s sunlit meadows
for a wartime martyr's charming ways.

so he took cover in the city’s ashen shadows
from the crossfire of his mistakes
and faked his life and death and everything else,
while his sole mourner slipped into his sparse, concrete bedroom
(where he had once kissed his darkness into secrecy)
and wailed.

—

i raise the barricades
and watch the deaths from within
of day, of night, of soldiers and of sunlight
and tell myself to hold my breath
and wait.

I saw a picture of two people kissing.
Their fingers entwined.
Their lips apart.
Smoke billowing from one mouth to another.

I looked away.

No.
What?
This picture isn't meant for me.
Why?
Show this to someone else.
Who should I show it to?
I don't know, anyone else.

I saw a picture of two people kissing once.
My eyes hastened over it.
It didn't feel like it was meant for me.
I rejected the sight of love.
It, quite frankly, repulsed me.

It looked too much like a train wreck.
It tasted too much like scotch.

I poured myself another.

*I would rather brave the headache alone,
Thank you very much.
There's the door.

I have
A train ticket
To the sea.

I have no relatives left to visit,
No business to justify my stay,
Nothing except
A sense of abandonment in me.

I have
Some loose change
And a candy wrapper
In my pocket.

I have no place to stay,
No place for dining;
The seaport has nothing besides
An old lighthouse,
Rusted and forgotten.

I hold its keys in my hand
And unlock the creaking door,
Climb the spiral staircase to the top
In a sort of restless agony.

We are one and the same,
Too close to the crashing waves of reality
Yet still with the silence of disregard,
Gathering dust and cobwebs
And echoes of human warmth.

We both sit,
Quietly looking out into the frothy churning of a violent ocean,
Salt spray crusting on my fingernails,
Its railings squeaking under the turbulence of the grey air.

I feel less alone
In the presence of loneliness;
We are one and the same, like I said.

So we sit
And we wait
For the tide to come in
And my love to come home.

my sister fell soundly to sleep in her duvet
once i sang her the song of the moon;
her curls framed her delicate face in the night’s light
and her breath hummed a rhythmless tune.

i had sung her the story of an elegant princess
who haunted the moon’s sunken hollows.
her dress was woven of lonely girls’ tresses
and rope from the broken mens’ gallows.

i walked through the amber of the living room lamplight
and stumbled back into my bed;
i gave myself up to the threshold of nightmares
but sleeplessness came instead.

i told my brain to be quiet and rest
and i turned and twisted and waited
but no matter how tired my eyes were of shadows
my thirst for sleep was not sated.

so i went to the forest where the owlets were hunting
and climbed the first tree i could find,
then thought of the place where the sand was ashen
and the darkness was quiet and kind,

and i wished and wished and wished myself back
and not a moment too soon
for next morning my sister found that my heart was beating
but my soul had flown back to the moon.

There is a space in my heart that's not
A storm or a roaring sea,
Just an empty room with walls so wide
That my echoes never come back to me.