I feel like my poems have just become a list of complaints but how can I find the beauty in this storm?
No church has ever heard as many prayers as that hospital room that night.
Your life hung in the house like a crucifix or an old family photo.
HOW DID YOU EXPECT ME TO GET THROUGH THIS?????
Did you think your absence would make anything better?
It hurts.
It's killing me.
You left in paragraphs. You said I'd be fine.
But when you left you took me with you.
Now my bathroom floor knows more about me than I do.
Now I see you everywhere. In the halls, in your sister's eyes, our coffee shop. oh God that coffee shop.
Your presence still paints the walls there.
The coffee isn't strong enough anymore.
All I taste is you.

Loneliness is an epidemic.
To have all your breaths cut short
by the ghost of a boy fizzled out.
Just a burned down wick,
the aluminium shell of a tealight.
I didn't even burn at both ends.

By the mist of an old bee sting.
Was pain any better than this?
I remember deciding to stop feeling
but not why I did.
Loneliness is a piercing migraine.
I am a bottle washed smooth by the sea.

My skin is a reused Manila envelope.
Well used and travelled,
every scar is an ink blot, how did
you know where I was going? You didn't.
Loneliness is an epidemic and yet
you scream in my loneliest moments.