We sit in waiting rooms
In leafy suburbs and council estates and amongst the urban hubbub
Of life continuing without us
Around us
On NHS waiting lists and in clinics
Waiting for a swab and a stick and a booklet with a few telephone numbers
For you to call and fix yourself, if you wish

Sitting
across from our familiar stranger this week because of the new news that is our
history, Herstory
painful reality
Fresh on our twitter feeds
Souls laid out bare for everyone to see
Our hurt. And still you'll never understand what it means.

This week
Thousands of women in their weekly meet
Our stories told and untold, forgotten and remembered,
memories always a feather's distance away. Whispered
And carried through the storm.

But still you won't hear how deep
The trauma sits
But what matters is

We survive
And we are together, now.

How do you make the words fit on a page;
in patterns about reflections on a new year
new dawn, old beginnings and fresh endings.
Dancing rhymes to succinctly say in eloquence
“It’s been pretty ******* ****, mate”
How to find the alliteration to communicate that this isn’t just about celebrities dying, Brexit or Trump
This was cancer and hospital wards; sickness and cure
Running away from your job when a boy took more
Than you wanted to give.
Investing in people who broke you, who took your love and ran with it; hid it behind apple trees and train journeys and buried it there
And not yet learning how to let it
go
And heal
and be whole with a hundred imperfect pieces.

Sometimes I can’t seem to piece the jigsaw together in my head of what happened in that bed that night
And sometimes I play it over and over again and rewind
When I was sixteen, on a Thursday morning in double maths, my teacher taught me about things called infinities and parallel universes with possibilities

See in one of them there’s this court case
And I didn’t let the alcohol seep into my bloodstream, nor let the memories fade
I didn’t let him kiss me or smile at him at all and I made
Love when I was married
A ****** in the night
I pushed him away more times than three, tried desperately to flee

I stood up in that court room and saw the room before my eyes
Stretching back for miles to Australasia, Saturn and to ocean tides
Tear stained faces, vacant expressions stared right back at me
Millions of broken women, their stories you’ll never see
Newspapers piled high up walls, lifting up to the stars
Every woman a tale to tell of a man who gave her scars

I open my mouth to speak and jolt wide open awake
Just another nightmare
That I’ve been having a lot of, of late.

Sometimes it’s fast, electric
Darting minnow through my brain
Neurones passing messages like school children in classes
Someone flicked a light switch; sunken ship
Like a red arrow nose dive;
Except not leaving behind
the smoke clouds
Sometimes it’s thick, I’m wading
A parachute unclips but I’m still falling
Cardboard in the rain tears eventually.
Submarine sinking deeper into thick purple
at the bottom, of my mind.

I sometimes scratch too hard, too deep until the crimson bleeds and seeps out of the flesh I tore up in a state of subconscious something.
I used to draw noughts and crosses on my legs as a child and now I draw stress and anxiety.
And sometimes I draw manipulation, because you hate seeing me in pain so maybe if I scratch and scratch and scratch you won’t be angry at me anymore.
See I’m a bad person.

Some days I’m depressed too much.
Sinking deep into sheets I haven't washed in a few weeks, surrounded by plates and lipstick stain free cups because when is the last time I actually had a shower?
Drowning in numbness, beckoning tears because at least at least then I’ll feel something that isn’t just….deepness.
Thick, purple, swirling, deepness.

There have been times in my life where I’m too terrified of a world out there that could eat me up alive that I’m afraid to go outside.
To go outside and be trapped in my own mind, in a situation.
I remember on Christmas Day once I was too scared to open presents in case I had to leave the room and times where I was so afraid to go outside that I didn’t want to go outside
Anymore...
That’s anxiety for you.

But I’m always, without fail, I’m always, just me.
Flawed, anxious, depressed,
angry, obsessive, manic,
crazy, controlling, ****** up,
passionate, invigorated, beautifully imperfect me.
And that's wonderful.

And I touch you with such purpose
Press my fingers into your shoulders with the intention for each tiny neurone to pass on its message eventually to scream "I want you more"
Every kiss another secret of my body I allow you to have
To hold
Me
In a way that only two people who have stars aligned do
There is something in the way that I know you. I knew you in 5 seconds.
Predict me
Where will my hand fall next or my finger or lip. Do you know?
We are poetry
The chemistry you only watch in the movies that you think you'll never know until you do
And you know
A dangerous current of electricity that spent far too long waiting for someone to turn on the switch
It almost burnt through the wire before we turned on the switch
To leave, Just
To leave
And I know these things are sent to test us but I wish that plane ticket didn't exist
Does electricity continue to resist across a sea
Wire me up
Entangle me in a cats cradle to cradle me and be reminded that
We are poetry

And my eyes will continue to search for you
across the crowded rooms we share.
Tomorrow i will scour less
than yesterday;
and my love will grow weaker
and then i will be ready...

My heart will beat slower
And the urge to make it beat faster with you
will fade ever so slightly
if not significantly, enough
and then i will be ready...

I will let go of this lead balloon,
which against all odds will float into the sky,
and away and away from here and from the us that was.
let me go now, honey
i cannot cry any more
i cannot care any more
it is too much for me any more
We could have been more.
We are no more.

One day I will kiss the stars;
The ones you told me I could reach sometimes,
But held my hand too far away for me to touch.
I will caress them with my whispers;
The ones you dismissed through your own arrogance,
And didn’t want because they were not in your possession.
One day I will marry the stars;
The power is gone, you cannot stop me.

This is something I might share with you-
to feel close to you ; we are sapiosexual like that.
And we may talk and share and talk and share
before I feel the goodbye approach like the late train,
Expected, tinged with my hope
that tonight you may fall desperately in love with me.

And we would talk into the night and you wouldn't care about getting up the next day
simply because you wanted to grasp moments where we were connected.
That night we could have sweated under covers on the phone
As we sweated under covers when i gave you something to stay for,
Your own selfish desires, you id.
Just as you did when you sent me home after your release
and after times when you didn't, but never looked me in the eye
to tell me with your looks that you loved me.
Oh I resented you for it; honey
just want me like I want you.

I like you most with cracks;
there's a reason shells are so easily broken.
Nothing that is for proof is for truth,
Vulnerability is not a weakness.

and shells are necessary to our protection,
but we are the most true versions of ourselves between sheets.
that said it is your whole that i am falling in safety with
slowly, at first