Let me write you into a fantasy,
spin your fingertips through a maze,
weaving the freckles on your arms into
the things that you crave.
The frustration will shatter
like the plates you have always secretly wanted strewed
across the kitchen floor.
Glass dust rests
in the creases and,
though you warned me to wear shoes,
remain endlessly embedded in my heels.
I will lift up my legs and let you see,
to try to catch a glimpse of your own reflection,
the sparkle past your eyes that match the glint
of glass in my skin.
“See?” I would say,
arms tight around your chest, eyes
clenched shut buried
in the damp nape
of your neck.

Let me become your time vessel.
Rewind, two years,
you are still you and I am still me,
pressed up against the corner
of one of your kitchen counters.
Your ghost whisper lingers
in my ear,
“You’re giving me goose bumps.”
I will bring you through time,
jumping moment
to moment,
a rush of feeling settling in
the pit of your stomach.
You are blindsided,
tangled in the clutches of each second wasted
and ignited into gray ash.
When I am your time vessel, those seconds will be collected
and stored, so you can replay them over
and over and eventually
you will understand
the implications,
you will find the meaning,
you will learn to be happy again.

Let me count your bruises.
Red-faced and breathless,
you push the world away
only to fall back into the carpet again.
Each exhale jagged but controlled,
a bead of sweat forming like tears
against your wrinkled forehead.
An instant clouded by exertion, hearing nothing but
the sharp intake of breath.
I will lie next to you with my hair
above me, hands cupping ears.
And as you lift
your shoulders
off the ground, I will count for you.

From night to white, winter's near.
Why do all the stars keep falling here?

You grip my throat sporadically, erratically – not often.
And trickle in through passages and pores I can’t defend.
Treacle through fingers.
But you avoid me too, and I hate it just as much.

I wait for your hand to loosen,
I breathe cool air,
Then I feel your absence.

Your gloopy venom is addictive.
I tasted you once, and now my tongue yearns,
And eats itself –
It flickers and twists and spits its serpentine-self out. In vain.
A vague, dull shadowy lustre remains,
Undulating under baited breath,
For another foul injection.

In reality I fear you. I despise you. I hate you.
If you’d only never return,
I could spit you out forever,
And tongue sweeter, healthier, more benign stuff.
No more swilling,
No more idiosyncratic sways upon social norms,
High Society and empty smiles that stifle natural intentions.

You are a disease, and far from untreated.
You are the last drag, the last hit,
The very last dose that no one actually wants.

I rebuke myself wholeheartedly
At even entertaining the idea of having you in my company. Yet there you are –

In every message, in every ransacked draw,
In every turned out rucksack, every old coat pocket,
Every ***** shirt, every unstitched button,
In every visitor’s news, every car back-seat,
Every dusty notebook, every empty fruit-bowl,
Every old, long-unseen smile, every dowsed fire,
Every man woman and child I sit across the table from.

There you are. Somehow. In some form.
Turning my sweat cold like cheap wine,
In what is otherwise an already disturbingly depressing
Struggle to maintain some kind of equilibrium or serenity,
Let alone with your smug mug cropping up scornfully uninvited.

You ****** me before I recognise you.
Helping yourself to the food on my plate with a wink,
While I do nothing as if handcuffed, and chained at the soul.
Then I move to eat.
Hand to fork.
Fork to mouth.
And it tastes of you.
It reeks of you.
And if I were anything but human,
I’d spit you out onto the kitchen floor,
Stamp on the bile you’ve stolen from me,
Burn you with kerosene,
And wage a third world war on the very concept of you ever existing.

But I am a human.
And moments later you have me
‘******* and thinking of death’
As coy and Marvellian as you like.

I indulge in full-knowing paralysis,
Lapping up your unvanquished honeyed venom,
With a voraciousness that redefines Lovesick –
Giving it a whole new meaning
Going beyond the epitome of disgust.

Enslaved, you have me smash myself against the ceiling.
And eat myself over again from within.
Consuming me like the fire I found you in.

You have me rage and conspire against those I don’t know.
But I will conspire against you one-day.
You have me hate others, but I will forever hate you.
You have me search my soul and grate it upon street corners
And the pavement of city-centres,
While you gleefully, whimsically **** my past
Or polish vain, rose-tinted hopes that without you
I’d know were futile and unjust –
Until I ruin them myself, knowing all the while
That you are the author of my unnecessary devastations.

But I will smash your green demonic skull into obsolescence
In some back-alley where none will find your
Bubbling frothing corpse.
You will be utterly repudiated even by the rats.
And the flies will drop you,
Iota
By
Iota,
Onto the tracks at Dalston to be rendered into absolute oblivion.
And I will go, a man unshackled, about my business –
Whether it be of importance or not,
It will be with a conscience cleansed.

But for now, vile sham of an emotion that you are,
I do your inglorious bidding.
Zombified and putrid, my actions smell of you.
They reek of you.

You intoxicate what should be left alone
And endured with silence and rapidity.
Yet you elongate these private, personal trails torturously,
In some sensational Cold War.

It goes without saying,
The world would be well rid of you.
Yet godlike, you endure the ages
Just as we endure you.

Perhaps Keats was too afraid to admit it –
You are the original
La Belle Dame Sans Merci.
Pluto’s daughter in persistent disguise.
To be seen presently
‘******* and thinking of death’.

I may not be able to provoke beauty
in my words.
Nod.
For I'm just a writer with no experience
of any masterpiece.

But for those appreciations, all of you
have given to my works.
Smile.
For each has left butterfly that will always
be inside my chest.

And that is irrevocable.

you told me to stop chasing,
but you didn't say to give up.
since then i have stopped
clawing my way through the galaxies
to get to you--

instead, i hooked myself to the last star
you painted your name on
(and i will never stop waiting there
for you to return).