you can’t just
play me out until I’m dizzy
and lying on the ground like a lost infant.
you can’t make my words
at once crash off the shelves,
my tongue will drop down my pipe.

perhaps I’ll close my eyes
once open, I am masked.
masked until I am as thick as my skin
punching through the layers inside
as my soul pushes them back.
so that they are well hidden from your luring voice,
like these marks stained on this paper.

It’s the thought of your cigarette smoke.
Which cracks through the gaps in your teeth,
and into the hollows of your lips -
becoming so coarse because they are soft.

Clouds of your grey
pollute my eyes.
And you hide behind it until
it has threaded through my every pore
and into my tongue as I swallow into my gut.
I savour as if it was you that I inhaled.

I drown in that somber ocean
of your lighter in the side pocket of your trench,
and the packet which you dig from out your jeans.

As you breath
smoke flows into my ear - pollutes them
With late nights you spend alone.
A half dry pen on tea stained paperd notebooks
that are buried under paperclips and mangled headphones.
The sound as you force, pelting creased paper into the fire.
and tears which drip out onto your sweater.
and echoes of dying guitar strings
that can no longer bare the abuse you show them these nights
when the words and notes won’t kiss.like you want them to.

As it drips down through my gut
I taste the rasp smell of your cologne in the morning
after the rain wastes it off in the morning.
Along with the taste of salt that you drench every word in.

The smoke evaporates from my view.
I stare at your bones glowing under an orange street light..
Your eyes hollow,
eaten up by the shadows and I wonder
if you are in front of me.

Or if I only recognised the familiar grey clouds
- that once hid my blue sky.

your eyes blank with the dimming grey
of the cigarette that you dreamt you held now.
even if it blacks and barricades
your last air - in your last lungs.
Because it’s saving you from your
void into reality.

now the smell of pain’s smoke,
gnaws into the walls of the room you lurk in
from the insides.

spreading to suffocate the ones who
bullet this hatred into your restless head,
under your river of limp hair.

and finally it blanks your glass window so all you see
is your black hole of distort.

Its when it gets to the point when you
can physically place your hands on me
And just zip down the seams
that have caved in fears and neglect
from them all.

Unleashing this wind of fire,
that streams out my chest and
burns you to the core - crisp,
with relief and thanks.                    
For escaping me, and pulling my souls out
from turmoil ashes.

I think I know exactly
just how you’ll kiss me.
I can already taste the aftertaste of your lingering regret.
See they’ll touch
and you’ll gulp as you swallow
my every last morsel of skin.
       At this time each nerve alerts the senses to stop.
they know I’ll soon be left to burn out.
They don’t think you like the taste of me
because as I float down each of your pipes
I only sink deeper into your sorrows.
As if I’m a safety ring that you’ve swallowed to stop yourself from diving any deeper. Into your own
sickening blackness
        And I understand now
because you are so desperately trying to
regurgitate your last actions.
Only so that you can spit,
Spit my soul back onto the ground.
When you smell her perfume.
                That’s when you allow your footprints to walk
and stain
this white dress that blanks the inside of me.
And that’s when I stand to my own balance,
to trudge so many steps away from you.

I seen it crawling up my shoulder
as I realised it consuming my shadows.
Thickening and emerging upon my gaze
- as it settles softly into the creases of my shirt
and I imprinted with your selfish.

Since that bomb left your palms,
its flooding the steps upon me.
your gas stained my skin lifeless and pierced me numb.
leaving wounds that won’t close
because they don’t know how you did it.
So much so, that they cry
tears of red and regret for ever nearing close to you again.

Whilst I thought
that you only threw on battlefields,
these deluded bodies around me -
awoke my realisation.

As I inhale the same thin poison
on their skin.
which I feel is dying me.