Apathetic, acataleptic, anthropomorphic abstractions aided an anorectic.
Biology and botany, both broad, but bellicose blossoms bring banality.
Considered communication can conceal certain capabilities- cruelty without causality.
Delirious dreams of divination dwindle during daytime's discontinuation.
Echoing and eerie, ecclesiastical ecstasy eclipses eccentric ebullience in extroverts.
Face-to-face farewells facilitate friendships & fatigue families, familiar in fantasies.
Grace goes gardening, garnishing and ghostwriting, good god, glistening a glittery glaze over.
High, hovering, hallucinating helps habits' hardening and hiding in hazy harmony.
Introduced ideologies, indeed, illustrate ingenuity in idiosyncratic individuals I impersonate.
Jumbled and juiced juxtaposition of jitterbug and jazz justifies jovial jumpiness- jeez.
Karaoke on ketamine, a kettleful of kerosene, kindling kisses, knocking knees.
Last but not least, the lawless laying low are liberated, later learning large life lessons.
Mainly markedly meticulous, maids manage the meagerness of mess, mollifying mothers.
Namely narcotics, not either naivety nor narrow-mindedness, necessitates a nosedive.
Obligations to obtain n occupation only obfuscates obvious obstacles, and oftentimes objectivity.
Pervasive paradoxes parody people's past perceptions, predominantly persistent patterns.
Quick-witted quarrelers query quantifiable qualities, quotations never quivering or quiet
Rickety, raggedly radios ring with ragtime, rainbows remain a rarity.
Sick, staggering students suddenly spill, saucer-eyed, onto streets and scatter.
Thrown together, the tank top, the trousers, tempted and tongue-tied them, totally.
Underestimation ultimately undid the understanding of ubiquitous underachieving underdogs.
Variability in validity and value variance violates the valuer's viewpoint very vividly.
Wandering war-torn wastelands, wayfarers weaken, wait for water, wearily wonder at weather
Xenophobic xylophonist's x-ray wouldn't show his xanthopsia, xeroxed in the xanthic Xs of his eyes.
Your yawning and yelling is yellowing your youthful yearnings for yesterdays.
Zigzagging, zany zookeepers zestfully zone out with zoom lenses, to see from A-Z.

Cabin fever, feverish dreamer, saw the northern lights
on one of those nights, or had they only seen her?
The gas that spirals into stars left a burn on my
elbow, when I was catching-what-I-can-before-I-go,
and I stretched for all I could reach but
I dropped back to earth, found a face full of sand
on the beach where I'd come to land with
an empty satchel. I tell myself, oh well, most days,
oh well, here's a bit of a green glass bottle,
and as well, here's a half broken shell, the same
colour as the one I only ever see when I dream.
Oh well, you never can tell with the northerners,
the lights, the stars. I had just been so sure
they were, for a long time, simply ours
for the taking. But it takes more effort than
one might suppose to visit the solar system
when most planets keep all doors closed.
I told my best friend I'd seen something or one
extraterrestrial, and she thought it was a story
I'd spun to be extra interesting. She was
right of course and I was faking, which I don't
do very well. Gut-full of anticipated remorse.

Sometimes it's black marble, igneous rockets into endless dark and space.
and then sometimes it's an echo, resonating shades of black,
the frown on a clock's face, or the absent moon,
the illusory balloon, the ball that you chip away, also black,
while following the garden paths,
which don't meet but collide,
and the dice that are rolled ricochet,
echoing back the old days-

what could have been, what might have been?
the answers stand either side of the street,
face to face, but neither seen.

The clouds circle round you, windows blink in sunlight,
glaring, the obvious that hits you loud and with spite
and then the ground beneath you shakes,
the crowd are all staring when everything breaks,
you're a pile of glass, the same way everyone else is debris
of earthquakes: a fist of lost teeth, the split in twine after the fray,
the twist in time, and mistakes made by the billion everyday
on each lifetime's path, and every path at some point meets.
They may, for a time, treat you like hot sheets,
like what makes up their headaches. Be brave-
you may, for a time, forget all reasons to laugh.

Love knows no boundaries, they say. All of which I'm sure is
that it doesn't know how to say please, or any painless ways to go,
to find the exit sign, yet on the contrary, it enters with ease.
When you walk alongside it you cross every line.
It’s not the task that’s small as they tell us it will be.
You feel little and funny until you find yourself
more than twice on edge of a line that drew
the rainbows you saw above the war,
you want to go elsewhere for more,
see light-shows in the sky, explosions, and
the roar of the Earth applauding, a deep
rumbling sound, like bones and rocks and the
walls of Pompeii crumbling down all around.
But go back home, go back home to before
you forgot what love poems were about or for,
before the cats all got out, no need to lock the door.

If you are searching for some sort of formula to carry on fighting, or for a sequence of numbers or symbols to decode bravery, there is no purpose to look any further. It’s not that you are close to it, or getting there, or that the concept itself of a bravery code is the first step towards deciphering the code, but you’ll never get the chance. There is no code. When you are trying to pull your parts together and make them work in concordance even though you have been unhinged an inch too far from the here and now, the currents of reality. For example, where is one of your hands? One is banging on the tabletop for attention while the other presses down on your trachea to crush it closed. You need to calm down one hand so you can use it to loosen the other from your own throat. There are no pretty ways- or any ways- to suture the open wounds that have been left on you. It feels filthy and confusing to speak, and it hurts because you know only yesterday your talk was free.

It is disturbing to smile and to hold your face without anything to express. All you want to do is release that scream that begs for freedom, just as speech. But you can’t go on like this, all torn apart- this is a body fighting itself, a war against its own shadow; it’s a mind murdering the body from inside. Think about that, if you can just about bear it, and then you’ll catch onto why there’s not a instruction manual waiting for you after your experience to lay out in bullet points the right way to feel. How to’s on coping with grief, guilt, disgust, dissociation, nightmares, the memory becoming part of your autobiography. There’s no manual or guide because there is no way to make peace with that.

No one ever taught you that bravery can be something other than clawed in eyes, sharpened nails, feral smiles. It doesn’t appear as the torn up hands of a wrecked clock or the veins filled with venom under poisoned skin. You can decide what your bravery looks like. Maybe it looks like smashed plates, slashed tires, the silver gleam along the edge of a bread knife that flashes as you make yourself a sandwich. Maybe it’s letting the shadows give you some comfort when the windows are jammmed and refuse to open. It’s framing pictures of yourself and your mother because you have a need for nostalgia almost as much. It’s changing the colour of your hair, it’s gin and tonic before noon or else only juice you drink from cartons. It’s taking out the ******* bins whilst knowing they contain one or several things you ought to not throw away, but taking the words of Kerouac- Accept loss forever. It looks, perhaps, like trying to fix a clock but allowing for times ahead to weave in and out of an arbitrary linear path. No matter how many times you look at those hands on that face, you’ll never be able to turn back time or bypass a single moment on fast forward. It’s brave to try and invent a potential cure and to persist, but someday you’ll be thankful you couldn’t fix yourself by going back over time or denying the disappearing time.

It could be going to confession every Tuesday and Thursday, or visiting a shooting range, whether or not you end up firing a gun. It could be learning to bake your favourite cake, then baking dozens of small cakes and eating them alone. It could be a simple mouth to pillow scream. It could be the development of an entirely original and organic dream. It didn’t come from nowhere, nor from what you are trying to be brave for. A terrible event can be catastrophic and cataclysmic. The evidence in that is surely in all catastrophes and the associated ways in which the world shifts around it, accomodates is corners, and is changed even just by the wake left behind.

Most likely it is writing and it’s burning. It’s howling, visualising your head split in two against a wall. It’s bleeding to remember why you stopped drawing your own blood. It’s acting sinfully to forget. It’s undergoing an exorcism of your own by drawing a map of your body and marking out all the hiding places taken as territory by the spectres that haunt you. You’ll need your bravery to claim those spaces back, to conjure a monster frightening enough to scare the spectres themselves out.

If you try on lots of looks for bravery, be aware you’ll be black-night and blues and plum-colour bruised. Healing looks a lot like brutality, but it is the best home you’ve ever had. It is the first that you have built with your own hands and you owe no one for it.

Remember: Whatever has been done. Whatever you have done to survive.
Remember: the war is almost over.
Remember: you have always been home.

I am the dancing queen of all the eyesores
who sprang to the stars from one of the seesaws
in the moody playground where heaviest rain pours-
there’s no compensation for what the gutter endures.
When I fell back to Earth, I landed on seashores
between the horizon and an endlessness of moors.
I saw a single seagull take to sky and how it soars
and wonder about other things one usually ignores
until I seek out scuttling ***** carrying their claws
to protect them, I imagine, from the way the sea roars.
I saw a small wooden boat missing both of its oars-
that must hinder the rower wherever he explores.
After some time watching the bigger outdoors
I begin to feel sad about ceilings and doors.
But thunder comes in echoes of rumbling applause
and I don’t feel a part of it. It reminds me of wars.
The war is what happens while we do our chores,
or sit close to a mirror to examine our pores,
or pass away a rainy day completing jigsaws.
We are mutually something that the war ignores.
I skipped some stones and didn’t keep scores.
I tangled with questions of consequence and cause,
pondered my way back from fossils and dinosaurs
to a creaking house with long narrow corridors.
I wake up when the **** crows and the crow caws.
The Cheshire Cat smiles and licks invisible paws,
'We're all mad here. You think that dream is yours?'

The midnight tides wafted between cityblocks
and shops, rolling the wheels of each bus,
and we stood as if in an orchard
with the moon's light gently rippling on us
filtered through leaves of apple treetops.
We couldn't unstick from our heads
(or one another's) words of
the same song on repeat.
First we both caught it, then caught
ourselves out kissing. Repeat.
There is a symphony rumbling beneath my feet.

In everything, there is some orchestrating
taking place in a place we've not been before,
we never thought to. Everything is little more
than what dangles on the pieces
that the invisible orchestra will play
- an underground score,
day rising and falling away,
open window, closing door, and
I am listening, waiting.