I fell out of time
into wavery scarves of seconds
glittering of snowflake anticipation, and
minutes of quiet purring joy.
Tonguing thickening clouds of breathsteam
he has always been a familiar stranger;
every joint is a champagne cork, white
marble smile that bubbled

over wooden lips. Tell a story
in ten words or less, tap fingers pointed like guns
twice against her hot temple, smile
and half a tooth still ******. Tell a story with one
word, bang, and sock away the other nine.
Turn to a cat and say, I’ve got your tongue.
We sat together on our heels in the smoke
and snowfall, the plumed weapon of breath

melting. Cars slide into the lot, ice over easy.
The alcohol tasted like soap. It is not enough
for maybes and not-know-hows---grating
cheepcheap common sense, fail me now.

Maybe you didn’t write LOVE on her
battered wrist but LIVE instead,
maybe you stole all the magnetic a’s
off the fridge, you’re not the one
who highlighted instructions on a macaroni
box, so you broke all the chalk and wrote
the name of your childhood dog above the sink.

Maybe “hostile” is a fuzzed blue comforter
three months past laundry day, every lint
ball sharp as the word “cut”, the word “*****”,
the word “scream”. Maybe I’m naive, sentimental, but
I believe in a common kindness
like the common cold running thin
in threads of worn-out heart chambers.

its been a month
since a blade has touched my skin,
and as i was taking a shower,
i shaved my legs and
i accidentally nicked myself.
i watched as blood
dripped down my leg.
i looked at in awe,
i know i miss the feeling,
maybe one more scratch wouldnt hurt?
but, thats where i stopped,
i didnt try to nick my leg again,
i didnt let the thoughts get to me,
i won.

another day down,
a whole life to go.
{dear god that sounds awful, huh?}

I filled your veins with water and wrote you down on white paper so I didn't have to read you back anymore. Girl's got a suicide pact across the pacific and all I can do is taste the dust.
2. There is a certainty in the way your body moves out time with itself when you think too much.
3. You told me you wanted to be a saint but you were too afraid of the sight of god. When you asked what belief tasted of they told you: fresh buttercream and a wasp's sting. We didn't see you for days.
4. There is a certain tension and it only exists between the bends of girl's legs and the concrete which holds them stronger than any arms could.
5. I want to run every cliche by you and watch you hold hands into the night with it instead of me.
6. Some people can be replicated entirely out of candle wax.
7. WHY DO YOU HAVE TO BE SO ******* SELF AWARE ALL THE TIME. You can't even watch yourself.
8. You know you're a halfway house of cells and who are you to say I can't keep up?
9. Say would you tell me if I was just a little off key?
9. Would you tell me the answers to the questions I never asked?
9. Would you play that evening differently if you could turn back the hands that bind you?
10. I burnt you a bridge and sent you the fire like we could ever fill a room with your god. I want to ask him what he thinks of our sins.
11. There is a fluidity in the way your words turn back on themselves.
11. There is a fluidity in the way you turn back on yourself.
11. There is a fluidity in the way people leave doors open for you.
12. I don't think I'd even know what to say to you if I saw you.
13. I only feel comfortable on even numbers.
13. I guess I made myself an odd number.
13. I don't know what we're left with.
13. This is not how we were supposed to end up.
14. I wish you could see the holes you left in the back of my throat.
15. Loving you was as easy as leaving the lights on.
16. And that walk to your parents house was a floodlit symphony like you capitalised every word of every passage I wrote about you with
17 reasons to stay.
And 18 to leave.

The first was the last time I shook like a guard rail and you were a concrete staircase, and I swear, I ain't never seen nothing like you yet.
The second: my fist on your name. But I am here now, like a lit splint bursting into flames, you won't ever find a ghost like me again babe.
The third. And you just want to **** everything. I said you just want to **** everything in your Berlin Wall house.
Your girl's got a bullet hole for a mouth and when it rains, it really does pour round here.

You're breaking on your camera hand. Haven't got a leg to stand on.
You tell me
you're making me a colour with your shorthand.
Dropping parts of your mind behind you and I can't pick them up, I can't follow you round anymore.
Kid, you're shaking on the stage again
explain that you can't write this down anymore
and that everything inside your head is a storm.
And I just can't tell you.
I don't have the guts to tell you
that I still smell him on my hair on days when I don't think about you now.
But I can't tell you what I'm thinking
like how you're so wrapped up in your own broken strings that you're not getting me right anymore.
You're not getting me right anymore.

These things I lost down in my chest:
how you made this body your chalkboard fourteen days before we even spoke,
and I don't know what you're leaving with. I can't find the words to leave you with.
Tornado hands. Texas lungs. How this world made you a storyline.
You're an underage drunk on a school night.
Stop dropping yourself I can't hold you up anymore.
This is not a hold up.
This is you forgetting to ask about yourself.
Here are all the letters I never sent you
take them out of me, stop making me write you down I can't write you down anymore please scratch yourself out.

You once asked me if I felt it when you woke up in the middle of the night across all those miles, I told you:
you're a church bell in a hurricane
stuck under all the folded over pages I left you with, and I'm leaving you on a Sunday,
just like all those characters you left sawn off.
And I just want to ask you how many times I have to break myself apart before I piece back whole, and I realise
that we've got nothing left going for us anymore.
Your chipped teeth under my tongue telling me "stop apologising for yourself,"
ripping the keys off a typewriter just take everything I've got.

You can have my apologies love.
You can have my best friend sitting on the tracks.
You can take me whole, take me home.
You're a boarded window, nothing disclosed,
"get away from me".
Candlelight through the gaps on a Saturday night in December.
We're home alone again.
Home alone again.

When I get here, don't ever ask me to leave.
I'm not saying I won't ever leave just that I can make up my own mind
and I've been a long time coming
and you can pack my bags for me if that's what you want,
I was never one for folding,
for folding,
for folding creases,
for creasing folds down the middle like I was waiting to be split in two,
I am waiting for you to split me in two,
split me in two,
split me in two,
cut me in half and all you will find are mirrors.
Your face staring back at you. Jagged edges so I could feel you from the inside out,
feel you,
feel you,
finally feel you.
I've been knocking at your door,
staring through your windows every time I had your door shut in my face,
knocking on your walls,
knocking,
knocking down your walls,
cracking your safe so that you know
when the sky seems like the most solid thing around you,
that you are always a porch light.
You are a struck match, a roaring flame and I am orange, fully open,
I can always be your accident.
You are the oldest thing in the universe made new for me,
a lens,
my left hand,
my right hand,
my arms, clutching hold of my wrists
so I can feel your heartbeat in my fingers,
your pulse a busker, singing only for me when the clocks have stopped and the lights turned out
and we've been waiting at this door for too long.
And I'm just stuck at my boarding gate,
halfway across the world and you're still dragging behind
like it's all too fast
and all I can tell myself is that I would always drown in you.
I will always choke on your words so I can taste them in my mouth,
taste you in my mouth, like a warzone,
taste everything you've ever said, ever been.
I will make up my own mind. I will keep you in mind.
Keep me in your mind like a cemetery.
I'm a long time coming.

There is a 93 year-old man. He has been driving for years
trying to unlock his lover's jaw
it is stuck tight with the thoughts which have become lost somewhere
near the back of her head.

He thinks about the mist in her eyes, how once they were islands.
She was a child surrounded by the sea. He was a soldier.
Sat next to two bombs they both went off,
when he met her
he told everyone he was the luckiest man alive. They were stranded together.

Now he drives around the Hebrides. Thinks about the summer
when the ferries stopped, they ate nothing but salted fish.
He is desperate for her to remember. Somedays she does.
The winter he met her father her family
had never seen an Englishman before. It was so bleak.
She only used to wear shoes when the snow fell like an apology,
now her feet are so lost they barely carry her
from bedroom, to bathroom, to window.
She looks out over walled gardens, everything she once had was an open space.

She tells me about the day he came home from the army.
Threw his pistol in the bin
like he could ever throw the war away
I think of the irony: a man trying to throw the pieces of his life away
that he could never forget. Now all he can do is look
through flesh and heartbreak
and too many stories to tell.
All the addresses in his book, like they're not just bricks and bones
and nursery rhymes
like it's all falling down now
through curtains
and IED's breaking through bodies over screens.
Like a train crash.
Like a house fire changing everything you know
holding it to your chest like it's more than ash.
More than this.
Looking out on a bank holiday wondering what goes on
behind all those closed doors
counting all the things you miss.

I would give up sleep for you.
I would live my life five hours behind.
I would spend my inheritance money.
I would leave like breaking in the morning
just slip out through the door.
I would swim the ocean, loose my body to the current
like a broken bottle frayed and battered until I was all green frosting and smoothed edges
and opaque.
I would wash up on your shore.

I would drive for miles. I would purpose build.
I would tear up the books, rewrite them with your name
over and over, out though the skies,
climb up through the atmosphere
paint the moon with your face.
Loose myself to gravity. Just give me something to blame.
Give me water. Give me tidal waves. Give me ocean hearts,
your storm-wall, ocean heart, breaking-wave kisses
wear me down gently.
Tell me your life story. Write me into it.

Remind me when I forget who I am,
even, when you have nothing else to give.
Take me home.
Tell me something true.
Pin me on your chest like a buttonhole,
wear me to your wedding.
Show me off
like I was ever something to be admired.

I can tell she's been drinking by the discarded lemon skins dripping on the counter.
I clock them at quarter to three, or nine fifteen
and the clock reads ten past twelve, or zero zero one zero on the digital.
There's a dead energy, like watching a spider stand statuesque,
giving you the anticipation of feeling your skin crawl
when its threadbare limbs stroke the polished surface of your wooden floor
and the simultaneous begrudgement that it isn't instead rotting in a bed of decomposing soil.
The windows are unrelenting slabs of black
and the only light is a twisted regurgitation of the scene behind me,
a mocking parallel universe that blocks me from the outside of this hollow house.
I hear laughter lightly bouncing off the back walls
and I see, through God's black humour as it feels a miracle,
a light through the window, bobbing up and down through the movement of some silhouetted poltergeist -
the consumed, burning end of a cigarette.
And the light transfixes me, in all its seductive intoxication
as its products curl gently against the absorbent tissue of my mother's throat,
because it penetrates the darkness outside;
because black silence encloses me as it is pulled backwards
and is then broken when it is rocked forwards and laughter once again stains her nicotine-kissed lips;
because that bobbing light in our shadowed, rotting garden holds more power in that moment than either of us.