Love like a butcher knife. carved out, and blindly awake
as the star alive in the sky. pointing north.
A cadillac with a massacred paint job, bad orchestras,
hollow at the heart. Good riddance. you hear that?
We can cultivate careful flowers and preserve hands
like clay or lake water; delineate what I know -
all the missed calls, together trying to suspend grief.
I liked that version best. On the day before the war I woke
to forget safe, forget someday, to forget all I have done or can do.

Take memory of us as children, pale backs to the open air,
unhinged and split down to the unsolved sum of their parts.
Language is out of whispers, out of dental floss, out of spines
and I want it gone. the gossip of eyes. Your face healing,
becoming wider, slicker, something peculiar, mystifying.
Chipped paint, my broken toes- here, eeriness is terrifying
and irresistible. We’re made into animals, into streets
then shadows, our ghosts finally unravelling in gilded seams.
The sun creeps down haunting myself from within,
heart yawning open, wider with each passing moment,
your empty promises of bones or something like that.
and your hands open, larger each time twisting away.
shuddering yellow as butter, as wheat field sadness,
right there in a parallel universe where this isn’t quite natural.

We were sheltered in spiderwebs, rundown by motels
with blasted neon. My brain has become a fuzzy blank.
I am sick of cries from the mouths of birds being poached,
colossal grief in the sky, grey slabs of meat, banality, lawyers,
a gesture, a mouth bruised for air, the thing you feel
teasing at the sutures, the faraway planet. We never get it,
maybe something close, but always something else:
a variable, some otherworldly energy blast from a hero’s eyes
and the high sinister jagged moon looking down on night
demanding that it hides different versions of itself.

We recited stories of dragons everyone knows and pretends not to.
The only thing I know is to be gentle, to be flaky, and too quiet.
There's floral wallpaper in a steamed up bathroom
and this sadness - the kind of fear of seclusion, window
on a ruinous heart, carrion catcher, sleep in the pits of reddened 
eyes.
contaminating poetry about love and bicycles, that 1920’s echo
in your empric mouth. I remember the laughter of people long gone,
an old whisper to an old friend, “Shhh, don’t ***** them."

Fear is not one to reason with. Time zones in clumsy prayer.
How the mondays folded in on  birds, my willingness to spill blood
at every opportunity. Don't think about faraway fragile nests
and the whole dizzying unfair gentleness of it all.
It's 5 AM and what’s left is the delirium to pry dawn open.
An evanescence of being. Short-lived, sweaty. a shadow to carry
though it's smitten loud and an endless maw of your affection.
Suddenly, it’s summer. Suddenly, I’m unremarkable.
My heart getting weighty with the demolition of stars.

When she understood her first game of chess.
When she was runner up.
When she swam in the sea fearlessly.
When she heard the words I Love You struggle from his mouth.
When she landed on the ice and didn’t fall.
When she shut the door and was brave.
When she was sad because someone else was sad.
When she was happy because someone else was happy.
When she fell asleep on the train and travelled far beyond what she knew.
When she went elsewhere and came back.
When she learnt to identify fox gloves and two distinct birds.
When she read about what Katy Did because she’d been told to, and what Katy Did Next because she wanted to.
When she felt beautiful and invisible and good at his birthday party.
When she got an upgrade on an aeroplane and fell asleep with all the leg room.
When she broke a bone in a playground in Egypt at night.
When she protested for peace.
When she photographed them smiling.
When she walked calmly across a stage.
When she made a statement about double standards.
When she was eloquent at the dinner table.
When she decided to let it go.
When she said goodbye and looked back.
When she said no and meant no.

Going to and from somewhere not far,
I pass a couple of children on scooters
shouting, Ice Cream!
from across the street.

When I dare to raise my eyes to look out
instead of down at my shoes as I walk
I instantly see faces of strangers,
crying- Eyesore. I know they are right.

But nobody is selling what I want.
It does not seem producible.

It is not a house on a corner, the size and charm
of a dormitory, with window treatments.
It is not those shoes my sister likes with the red soles
or sunglasses my mother likes with the diamonds
or the endorphins or the caffeine or the career ladder.
I do not covet Ice Cream, the biggest or best thing,
and I don’t have romance for pipe dreams either.

That is someone's else’s dream,
unexceptional, formless, but probably fulfilling.
I hope I am never fulfilled.

In my hand there’s a digital map that orients me
in a roundabout. I am a breathing oscillating blue dot.
I can’t get anywhere from here.

Why do I not want Ice Cream or summer dresses?
Why do I not want to be out on the town, meeting new people?
Why do I not participate?

I watch people on television, traveling.
I am so scared.

I listen to Neil Armstrong radioing from the moon.

I scan the transcripts over and over of
Earhart circling Howland Island:
We are unable to hear you
to take a bearing.

Intermittent despair- what can you make from that?

I look up to see the sun caught in the tail end trail
of a jet. I wave:
Do you hear my signals.
Please acknowledge.

And then all my thoughts are frostwork and blue
with parachutes and windows on walls
and I am filled with clouds and I can’t see.

We cannot see you.

Now I know I begin and end with images,
how far across this field can my voice spread out,
extend and reach in singing, in screaming?

Rapidly the crows started circling under clouds,
the winter dropped it’s hemlines,
wind chimes started hanging bones and teeth
where feathers were now too fickle.
I whisper to you from a distance
who whispers to me from just below.
You went missing from my dreams.
I couldn’t recognise their forms, their frenetic
and frenzy, their motion and melancholy,
I drew the world in shades of cry, you cut me out
and walked away. The black and white figures
floating like paper planes or glued on snowflakes,
origami flowers, ornamental place settings.
You were always somehow both the paving stones
beneath my shoes and the endlessness of sky
rolled above my head, a canopy sprinkled with stars
blown from your knuckles like snow.
This is not a morning song because the sun isn’t going to rise
on this land anymore, it’s seen enough of daylight
and there’s nothing you can do about it.
This is called growing up. This is called a learning curve.
A wake up call. A character building exercise
that requires some demolition before you begin.
No one can tell you if the darkness has come to stay
or if there is an exit route. Is there anybody there,
treading the waves in this night-time sea.
I hear your voice, I hear the stars coughing
quietly at the back of heaven, I hear the lampshades sigh,
the picture frames, the paperweights, the rain gutters.
Were you up there with the birds, like you hoped you
someday might be, although I hope this doesn’t mean
that you are dead. There’s a finality to being dead,
everyone just accepting the empty space that holds
your shape, the vacuum you once breathed in,
trying to move on and trying to forget the presence
of that loss, trying to forget it ever happened
or you ever happened- that you never died,
so never lived. Nothing else quite has that same
brutal symmetry that is maddeningly unequal
on one side. Dark and light. You can’t have one without
the other, yet light is filled with shadows,
and war and peace. War is a permanent state of
losing when you are supposed to be winning but
with so much losing all the time, you accept some
victory wherever you can, and then peace becomes
an arbitrary thing, a concept, a Utopia, a fairytale,
and war both real life and the stuff of fiction,
both their problem and on your doorstep.
It won’t be war or darkness that kills us.
It will be the forgetting of things, letting them
drift away and not being able to remember
them being with you still. Parts of yourself
start getting chiseled away, you are whittled
down to slimmer sets of variables, the situation
tightening around you, the doors closing, more
dead ends, more walled up corridors,
and this time, only one escape, no trap doors,
to loopholes. Hands you used to hold, you forget
who they ever belonged to. Words you used to
speak sounding now just like silence.
Wishes you used to make greying the glow
of wishing entirely until you are left with
just bones, an empty bottle, a melted candle
and a broken fountain. Those little games
you used to play with yourself, those superstitions
and fantasies, the make believe, the Peter Pan,
they become cumbersome and painfully false,
the skin they are in hardening to cold plastic.
You are already an overexposed and underexposed
and wrongly exposed photograph and you
haven’t even grown up that far yet, you still
have further the go, nobody to show you the way.
No wonder I got lost. And I have never been good
at orientation. So I found a place for my head
in the sand, and listened to the sound of the sea
in shells, the glimmer of fish, the sea monkeys
we released into the Wiltshire stream. People
want to fill the world with silly love songs
and goldfish and miniature castles. Four seconds,
flash and it’s gone, it’s a whole new world.
The sand got in my eyes, in that dust bowl of
papery scratchy anxiety, attrition against my skin,
dry and eating away at the edges of me,
until I start to collapse on myself. I should have
worked on making my skin thicker, or growing
a stronger backbone. I brace myself with wishbones
and wish that you were here, or I was anywhere
with a star to point me in one way and the moon
to change the tide, for planets to align and the poets
to smile on my fortune, write me a perfect sonnet.
Where are you now? With a dagger and a pack of
sandwiches and sardonic smile, flint stone eyes,
shadows on your heels. Where did the time go,
is it under my pillow, and if I slept right through it
how am I or was I ever supposed to know?
The clocks hold hands, the faces slip just slightly
out of position, the hammer on the nail one more time,
the forest fire that used to be contained in an ashtray?
I hear you, are you out there somewhere
swimming. Quiet now. Was it you I heard, or me?

Being free to leave and not being ready.
Crying (some good will come of this).
Hearing another human cry.
Actual growth and the grief in it.
Impatience growing here.
Fate, if there is such a thing- having other plans.
Recurring attempts to build character.
Inherrent corruption.
For the sake of argument.
Tastless excess.
Exhausted Christmas lights.
What crossed my mind.
A language nobody else understands.
What costs you when it's arbitrary.
Exclusion.
Indistinct goodbyes.
Goodbye.

There are frozen birds in the garden,
trains stranded in the downpour,
flowers missing from the bouquet,
boots left standing by the door.

There are papers soaked on the front step,
well wishes clinging to the trees,
a sort of pleading in every word 'no'
and consent absent in every 'please'.

We'll stay at home, together but alone
but for the mornings that crumple on the floor,
like waste paper printing headlines on the ceiling.
We'll stay behind the door, afraid to wander
in uncertainty, parallel to busy roads,
the voiceless excursions,
the plans for long soporific days in expensive homes
and fresh-aired kitchens filled with frying pans.
Without direction, the answers all lie behind.
Ask me the question; I'll try and make up my mind.

Elsewhere the city men all crowd together,
either not talking or talking about the weather.

The clarity in eyes that bless the walls,
The understanding in a dull gaze on the walls,
sprawling time packed up into a box or a fist,
hurrying on tiptoes everywhere the sunlight falls,
tripped up in the garden, an inevitable descent,
and oblivious to the clock-face, the crimson crepuscule,
disappeared again into the rushes. No one knows where it went.

But it doesn't matter what's been done.
The eyes, still and still clear, don't recognise time passed,
don't realise what they may have missed.
It will end in the same place that it had begun,
nerves tight around the second try as tight as the last,
no space for thoughts of new starts or possible debris,
not one thought for broken hearts, for the people we cannot be.
We'll share this absent-mindedness, between
the clutter of conviction and certainty,
and practicality and potentiality,
and other matters on which we can agree

Elsewhere the city men, all crowded together,
are not talking, or talking about the weather.

And if we are going to fall apart, then we will do.
Our facades will fracture, our fallen faces,
our lost grip on graces, our black and our blue, our lost places
in the queue. We create words for the fears we cannot name.
And although our landscape erodes with the years,
the cage is the same. The scenery is new,
but what we call history will happen again,
so how can there be anyone but ourselves to blame?
Break and build, create and burn,
the pride follows the fall when pride has taken its turn.

she smells like honeyed storms –
meaning: we are all a mess of light,
we are bitter and raw; a drunk train,
a daring locomotive, a dream ship;
we are also summers and bedsheets
and nectarines and rain, old maps,
deep with creases, but also brittle,
paper like moth wings, easily torn;
we are fast like wax, lazy like roses,
full of madness and malice, of motion
like clockwork; we keep those faces
and hands because we are not in time;
we are in-understandable –
meaning: we are all in a mess of infinite,
we are limitless; an acceleration,
an unwinding expansion, a runaway,
a struggle; we are all in a mess;
we are the holy that you will not find
in a temple or church or stained glass
or ancient passage; you will not see us
in any book, or on walls or at windows
or along skylines or across seascapes;
no, we will not be findable at all –
meaning: perhaps, just this; perhaps,
that is the way of the metaphor.

Tender and illusive, thirty thousand beams of light.
She had a cherry pit heart and the bitter-sweetest bite.
Pinpricks and clumsy kicks and a head just like a cave.
Sleep so thin and far too steep collects all it can save.
Nothing made of sound that’s real; ideas grow absurd.
From the seeds of perception- what is seen or heard?
Or how does it feel to hold on tight to the hems of mad?
Suffocation becoming softness and good becoming bad.
No one ever speaks of him, the prodigal son’s brother.
Who else gets forgotten in the shadows of each other?
If the streets were to empty and all people to disappear
How long would it take for loneliness, after relief from fear?

Figure I.
The first time you see the desert. That first time will be too much. You will be looking from the passenger window of a car the colour of sea-glass while there is someone you care about talking in the backseat about something you no longer want to hear. Mostly because the world seems to be losing its music and it’s mostly because the people in it aren’t listening. Not the way they used to, not the people you know. We know. Further down the road, everything else will be too loud or too distractingly important and there will be no music. Fearing this deafness you see in the people you grew up with, people at the same point on the road, with the same shoulders, the same bus passes, the same alarm clock calls- they don’t have to be the same any more than being in the same place- this makes people think sometimes in words that are not kind but they are true. You would give up three years of your life to be the desert.

Figure II.
Someone says thank you for being here. You turn back your head and swallow the paper ball, swallow it like it’s prayer when god isn’t watching.

Figure III.
Well sometimes it’s okay I mean they said I was too destructive too sensitive but I mean how can one person be both, if we are really just one person each? It won’t be forever no not the rest of my life but it is then I need to get over it if I am ever going to do anything or be anything or is that the same thing too? I’m sorry to bother you- go to sleep you are my favourite person I’m okay.

Conclusion.
It’s all terribly loud. Did you sleep last night? Are you comfortable? Would you like to leave with me? Stay with me? You are enough for me. The desert doesn’t care if I am not enough when there is so much space to exist.

Enough now, about all the boys and men whose hearts you stole,
how flowers sprouted from their chests
before you swallowed them whole.
Tell me about ghosts trapped in amber, about how
you can take flight driving down an empty road
with your eyes closed, at night.
I want to hear about summer lightnings
recorded on cassettes, personal but dangerous mythologies,
and winsome regrets, and if you ever sleep to dream,
if they hurt more than waking because either way,
you’re driving, and your voice is still shaking.
You were a girl born of crystals, you grew into a shell.
I think you could love, or ****, but you hide it all so well.
Red and blue lights like a prayer ending,
an exit night gave you. You are calling ‘catch me’-
will they find you or will they save you?
Aren’t you going to live forever?
Aren’t you named after a hero?
Aren’t you a modern Joan of Arc, a Titan, Michelangelo?
Swerving into traffic, smiling more with every turn.
Tell me you are racing for someone,
not imagining how to burn.
I want to ask what happened to you, but
I’m not strong enough to face what I can’t predict to hear.
I can't witness your fall from grace.
I’ll tell you that I love you, to remind you that it’s there
yet I wonder if love itself put hatred in your stare.
Don’t tell me with such pride that you never stick around
and how he loved you more, and it razed her to the ground.
I know that girl, I am that girl,
and you’ll move on and forget her.
She’ll hear the echoes forever-
*I’m like you, but do it better.

They never spoke about it but it happened, and thoughts
of what happened pushed into the soil only grew heavier and dirtier
when they pretended to strip the past of its indelible importance
and pretended that their early nights were the product
of productive days and not prescriptions, but they never had dreams
and they never took flight and they never felt the rush of wind
on their faces and their faces did not even feel theirs.
They stilled in their silence until silence sounded like a soundtrack.
If they had thought about it, they might have seen the faintest promise
of closure, enough to try for, enough to cry for. Cold and concrete
and the cure perhaps as painful as the poison itself but to come to a close
nonetheless. Instead they chose to tell themselves no closure was needed
for no wounds had been left open for nothing had wounded them,
and saw this as stoicism, as strength but it was strength mistaken,
in actuality it was slavery, and the bad guys got away,
and the robbers got rich, and what went around never would come back around
with some comeuppance. Their paths redirected, their plans and aspirations
and passions scribbled beneath a blanket of white noise they thought
was safety. They never again would take off their shoes to dance
or light candles in the summer or make someone's day by offering a smile
or offer anything much at all. Why would they, when they got nothing back?
A tombstone in every doorway, a bitterness in every bite,
a listlessness in every kiss and in that listless life, one big lie-
I am whole, I can be what I want to be because this never happened to me.
They throw their heads back and then they laugh. They watch Forrest Gump
with dry faces. They sometimes have nightmares like those of children,
of crocodiles and claws under the bed. When they wake, that means it's a new day
and that means nothing now. Tell me you know I exist, says the smallest voice,
a whisper, an echo, from somewhere buried so immeasurably deep under stones,
a voice that had been ****** to death. Tell me you'll save me, that
you'll pull me out of here, that you will give me a chance to survive,
I'm all bloodied up and broken but because of that I'm stronger now.
I know the meaning of strong, and I know that it all means something.
If they ever catch a breath of that small voice, they turn up the radio,
take another pill and swallow, change the channel to a game show,
check their phones and when the curtains are drawn, throw more stones.

we lay horizon-angle along aisles of the city,
its veneers bore the clouds as they idle awhile
in copper-bordered cobweb bundles

and rain is language, language is rain,
loosened from the tips of wine-stain tongues,
knuckle being blown or kissed by lip
lines; we trip over them all the time
or shoe-laces of feillemort-freckled boys,
never an umbrella, washed-out old news.

listen to the not-words we aren't speaking in a
shake of salt, a game of conkers, or get out of the city
and to the woodlands where, in a haze of petrichor,
you'll hear it all around on bark and leaf and then
the tinnitus of every caravan or shed.
A tin home with an iron lid to live in,
corrugated skin,

city life is wilderness but I know there is more
and wilder such, but I only half-dream of trees
carrying curses, stolen idols or heirlooms arising in
the anatomy of snakes wearing war-hoods
purely for the purpose of poetry/.

the storms that come can rattle the trees
round the courtyard into an epilepsy unflagging
and then sometimes

in my mind, flowers spit out embers petal-tooth
and lava spills onto tarmac streets.
the night knocks on the closely matched
blocks of paving stones. fireflies are out
but it looks like they'll die, their translucent wings
bring to mind an undressed volcano.

the cathartic outbreak of spiders that
that spread into a multiplication of landmines.

Everything is wrong until it’s not.
With your temperament, the world around you
and all that you’ve got invested in this life,
it is all going to rot, and the more
worms eat away the more you detest
so busily detesting that you forgot
that everything is wrong until it’s not.

Everything is wrong until it’s not.
People queuing to put their voting slip
into the ballot slot are inwardly complaining,
about whomever and what are they plan
to do and how they’ll explain, nothing is plain,
and thinking in plain terms, you forgot
that everything is wrong until it’s not.

A heart fails to start, no cry in the operation room.
Occupied by just I, this is less a home than tomb.
Maledictions in the curtain, heard from the floor.
Contradictions make uncertain what I knew before.
They pass away, pass us by, the past is left unresolved.
They disappear and go missing, cases still unsolved.

Everything is wrong until it’s not.
You thought you had it under control but now
you’ve lost the plot, you’ve lost your map and
X marks the spot and you’re selling out,
dropping out, ready to snap, you snap
at the world, it snaps back, and you forgot
that everything is wrong until it’s not.

Nothing is alright.
Life’s an endless fight.
It’s that or flight--

and the war was all around you
but the last gunfire is shot.
The bullet goes right through.
So you just keep on going too
and now somehow, despite
that on your back there’s a spot
you swear was put there: targeted
and misled and kept up all night
with voices in your head blaming you
aiming for you when you’re in full sight-
This war will all seem so contrite
When you stop placing blame,
and everything is alright.

In the operation room, the baby cries.
Anticipating doom, you told yourself lies.
You won in the end, after so many tries
You begun, in the end, to see the sunrise.
There are some things we’ve yet to realise.
Each realisation brings a surprise-

You fought so long and took on a lot

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.

There is more to be said
in the wordless breaths of sleep
than one supposes

when the breaths are sharing space
between two dreamers
touching noses.

You were high as the hill you climbed in the night
up to the dog that's a tree, all bark. The birds bite-
there's a ****** of crows- don't stop to stare
Take and make bows from those that billow in my hair.
Do you know the question marks that follow all you say
can be bent into arrows? You fire away.
You never meant to be kind but your eyes shot stars
out into the skies. We both are shooting blind,
The answers we find were never ours.
There's been a ****** of crows- feather as blade.
We put away the arrows for I was afraid
I can't say for sure whether birds died in the dark
but the pure Green Man's song was in the dog tree's bark.
As the trees protect you, Green Man folds in your arm
The birds respect you. They sing, 'do no harm'.

Boating on the canal made me notice summer's return for the first time
and immediately I missed winter. The way my head  tilted forward,
spine protruded. I spat fire and ash, a small dragon;
my skin sagged like a coat on a cold blue hanger.

One morning after I'd spent the night with a boy,
while he showered I saw a skeleton in his wardrobe mirror
so ugly in loose underwear, the darkened hair lank,
skin grey and sunk to bone and it all disappeared
when turned to one side.
How could he share a bed with that? I thought then,
seeing clear how I existed for the reality of others,
as a shell, offensive to the eye, a skull-head.
-
The voices came not long after,
and in clinic bathrooms
a coyote hungry stare,
the silence of September.
For thousands of days I had not felt my body.
In my mouth grew ulcers and teeth died.
,
I really did stare at the sun and started drinking water again,
Slowly started eating again until I managed pasta and pie.
My body now- I think I'm touching my arm but instead feel thigh.
There are the bones of an elephant
gravely buried inside me.
There  are phantom limbs attached,
they belong to soldiers who shared beers
in Vietnamese hideouts,
they belong to the widows who lose their wedding rings
down the garbage disposals.

They shall fight
(them)
on the beaches and with growing confidence
and growing strength in the air,
(we shall)
never surrender,

and they fought and never gave in because we will never stop
because finding peace is like locating Nirvana,
as Kerouac said,

then we set our alarms to the atomic clock
and on the radio they tell of a President,
some well-spoken man with a halo effect, I'm sure friendly as any,
ordering for the bomb to be dropped
because he was always meant to

Millions disappear, living people there and then not,
because it was always going to happen
and people can point fingers
How could they? How could it be?
Because it's you and me.

We are ripples in a series that create city-wrecking waves.
We drown each other.
We are not destructive because we are evil.
We are you and me.

Our parents, our stranger fellow commuters, our heroes, our enemies,
our fiction, all conspiring, and it all adds to this.

Our wars- we are all soldiers and all politicians and all victims
of a lot of all our shared bad decisions
and all the consolations
like the great loves and great distances.

Isn’t this the simplicity of being? The ultimate irrefutable answer
to every question and questions only make us upset
- then I can see in my tracks
the black spot.
They said among pirates it was the mark of death
William isn’t afraid of dying and says it’s pointless
if you want it because it puts an end to
nothi

Wilting and whitening
abandoned in the sun.
I thought of dying but decided
wallowing would be more fun.

I thought to cut my palms
as if opening a letter
but then decided
cutting your throat would be better.

Trying  to do cartwheels
over rough raw hands
and landing on two feet
in disappearing sands.

Ophelia enters, playing the lute
to share a song that she wrote
about being sick to death of being good
but keeps hitting the wrong note.

The Lady of Shallot is mute.
She has been since she failed to float
but she etched her song into the wood
that made up her grave and her boat.

So, this is the poem that I will end up writing
when no other poem is willing to do the work.

This is the poem I write when I'm past not
being able to sleep and I'm beyond
even trying. This is born of body burnout.

This unfolds as I unpack myself from
bags beneath by eyes.This is an ugly poem
unfolding from ugliness.

In this poem, I'll make an ambiguous allusion
to someone who is missing. The kitchen
feels suddenly too small.

This may be one of a few kinds of resentful:
parental, psychosocial, rebel-without-a-cause sentimental
but the poem blames something for what it is.

This poem is to say I am not a talented poet.
I'm a poet with a stammer, a non-poet, speech impaired,
a poet with neither the rage nor the riot.

So this poem may even plagiarise, for
not even poets have measured how much
the heart can hold. -Zelda Fitzgerald.
This poem throws itself down the stairs.
It burns down the asylum with stolen words inside.

How do I urge this poem to do better?
I can't, I can only keep writing it.
Writing out my resentment, my restlessness.
Wretchedness, Wanting. I can even break
linguistic, grammatical and syntactical
regulations By capitalising some arbitra-
ry Words and messing with enjambewhatnow.

This poem has found a neologism.

In this poem I CAN RAISE MY VOICE
for my wanting, and then in the same poem
shut my voice into a music box
to leave on your nightstand.

This poem has managed a neat trick. Illusion?
Some rhetoric magic. Some see a rabbit appear from
nowhere. Others see a girl being sawed in half.
.
The best (- though, at what?) could see both
but know it's not really about that.
They know it's about appearing as something
that are you not and that's a craft in itself.

As I or this poem already told you,
I am  not a talented poet. I am just a girl
masquerading as someone she's not,
because she doesn't know what she is yet
or wants to be or could be, yet.

She and this poem may seem to have more
to them, to be even interesting,
but both are waiting for you to grow bored.
"

(3 hours. 3 years. A lifetime.)

1. 'and the Doctor said, "are you saying you feel guilty unless you are hungry?"
Discuss, with reference to the roles of female c haracters in the American moderns, particularly  to Plath's representation of Esther in The Bell Jar , the relevance of this quote to your adolescent development.

(10 marks)


2. Should a poet's work invariably utilise enjambment or read in sequence, allowing the poet freedom to let the poetry find it's own form?
(Candidates are encouraged to explore the source to which the question above alludes, and to formulate an original argument with an effective use of rhetorical devices to communicate it,)

(8 marks)


3. Elucidate your role as a daughter, then compare and contrast it with your role as a student. Use quotes directly taken from personal experiences and your own examples to clairfy your explanation.

(5 marks)


4. They are all looking at you and laughing at you. You are a joke. You are hallucinating and haven't slept in days. How does this make you/the reader feel and do you think this was a part of your plotline intended to elicit a particular response?

(5 marks)


5. Love is not unconditional. Discuss.

(10 marks.)


6. "To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering."
This famous quote by Nietzsche presents him as a nihilistic and misanthropic individual. Do you see him in this light or can you find hope in his hopeless stance? Use examples of your own suffering to corroborate your viewpoint.

(8 marks)


7. Is morality a prerequisite for appreciation of art? Are you? Are you appreciating/appreciated? Discuss.

(10 marks)


8. Calculate the 369th digit of pi as the fractal proxy to represent the infinite worlds contained witin each human being, and in doing so determine the contribution that you and the offspring you will most probably never have cannot contribute to the world shared between the infinite number of individuals posessing their own words, continuing on to deduct your own value from that of the mean value of the population considered in this infinite data set and draw up a graph to visually demonstrate the extent to which the world doesn't need you.

(15 marks)


9. Using the individual calculations formulated in question 8, derive the meaning of Y.

(5 marks)


10. Draw the shape of your sadness

(20 marks)


11. Don't you think you should have learnt by now?

(25 marks)


12. Explain what you are hoping for, and substantiate your hopes with empirical support.

*(5 marks)

We grew the earth, grew it around us and grew into it.
We grew into pairs of shoes after pairs of shoes
and we grew into our names.
We learnt to tie the laces of our shoes
and to tie our tongues around our names,
and the names of other things, other people,
and around other people's tongues.

We planted our cultures, cultivated them,
and they blossomed into traditions
and stereotypes and generalisations and rituals.

We broke in our shoes, broke the ice,
broke our voices, broke promises.
We broke glasses, hearts and bones.

We built hierarchies, looked up, looked down, bowed down.
We broke down into dictatorships and demonstration.
We found solutions like democracy
and diplomas and delegated.

We fixed fountains and freight trains
and falling trees in the forest and faucets that leaked.
We formed partnerships, made promises,
pledged to parties for both politics and both parents.
We made marriage and then we annulled, we divorced.
We fabricated the faiths that we fed on.

We invented stopwatches, reality television,
pedicures, lampshades, philosophy,
greenhouses, dictionaries, exclusivity,
feng shui, hand-holding, ****** medication,
street art, lawsuits, lingerie, car boot sales,
snow days, karaoke, comics, psychics,
boarding schools, toast, baseball, psychiatry,
bird-watching, plaid, research, stag nights,
slasher movies, salads, and interventions.

We wanted and we wished and we waited
and we wanted for more.
We were growing faster than we invented.

We were outgrowing ourselves
and our earth
and our shoes
and our names.

We forgot what we had found and fixed and formed.
We broke down and went broke.
We are waiting to invent a new way we can fix ourselves.

I.
Why do you always speak in twos
in twos?

II.
I speak to myself in the third person,
listen from the
first time I
heard
the first time.

III.
Spoke = I'm stupid = shut up = out of breath.

IV.
I've been holding my tongue for years
everything aches unspeakable aches
that I- and I- and
you-

V.
Mistakes.

VI.
"I wish you were somebody else."
Words can't be unsaid.
"It's all inside your head."
I wish it was, someone else instead,
her instead, her instead,
someone else, someone else said.

VIII.
Always skip the stanza seven.
Couplet in elegy of cousin, in heaven.

IX.
Speak now, or, forever hold your peace.
I chose to hold forever, not knowing
it was all I spoke for.

X.
"Keep quiet, until then."
Hold my breath until when?
Out of breath by stanza ten.

XI.
You must have me mistaken,

XII.
No words.

How did you wear it so easily,
make your head hang so naturally?
Perhaps it's one of those things
for only some people. For some,  
mourning suits. I'm not one of them.

Tell me, how did you cut your grief
so clean in half, just like a smile I saw
caught in the gleam of sun
on a swimming pool, shimmering
in a mirage or a lifetime ago,
when the summer heat knew us
and was simmering around us,
lifetimes ago.

It cut the world in half,
divided then from now,
divided moonlight,
split open decay to allow for more decay.
We've been doing that since May.

Now it's autumn,
meaning cold feet and a pile of laundry
losing heat, and inconsolable sky
and a train pulls into the platform,
empties itself, and on a sixth floor balcony,
evening dewdrops cling
to the railing, trembling, shy.

The thud of old telephone books,
thrashing in the wind. Our bones shook,
as we went on running on, ruining
one another for anybody else.
Everybody else.

Broken leaves, gold and russet.
Seasons leave us more than people do
so why is it we don't mourn the fallen
from trees as well as wars and cars and
wars and wars and  wars.

The 11th of the 11th month at 11
they called for peace. Rest in peace.
At 11:11 I wished that someone
somewhere will soon kiss away
my idiosyncrasies
and my memories
until they sigh,
bye, bye, and you're gone
as if never here. They always say
earth is a place you didn't belong.

Cold and birdsong, chuckling
at the window. You are always there- yes you,
at the edge of that photograph
in lecture halls. in guitar chords,
in nothing-at-alls, in hospital wards.

Your face, slow-burning,
an afterimage,
across fields of morning light,
under the lapels of mourning suits.

A pile of human teeth,
that which does not belong to itself but to the night and the moon
     and the lock and the hook, that which once did belong to itself,
     or to me,
a murmur and little more,
   something you shake in the hope that answers to the questions
     you want or some reasons you've yet to find
     will come falling out,
an inhabitant in a house that becomes a crime scene during their absence and they cannot be an eyewitness,
she who wanders along the beach by the sea,
    in search of shells,
   to listen in for the sound of old echoes,
         the unreal, suspended, irrelevant,
         the night-time fragments leftover after
            daylight gets its teeth in,
       a rule-****** in asymmetrical glasses,
       one of a family of confused clowns, juggling dreams
         that were once in trees, struggling
         and underestimating distance,
a cracked window in November that seems out of place,
    a Tuesday afternoon, and specifically not a Friday sunse
    or Sunday dawning,
a wishful **** belonging in the boneyard,
housing an ocean of unspeakables in
    attic mind,
    greenhouse heart,
    cavern mouth full of sea,
the container of many unspeakables,
    a cup, profoundly sad for being always a touch too empty,
        contained inside a small glass bottle,
         a paperweight.

Telephone wires are tangled in the trees tonight
and the stars are copper colour,
as if scattered from a fountain
and Romeo is calling from beneath the balcony
of the Capulet family in Verona,
trying to get reception-

but the receiver is busy
moving on, and growing up-

Juliet, the girl he is calling, has a new phone
that she doesn't trust with unfamiliar numbers,
and his is listed 'unknown'

Unsent messages: "goodnight
"goodnight- parting is such sweet sorrow,
that I shall say good night till it be morrow."

The story of the star-cross'd lovers was no tragedy at is end.
Nobody died, nobody had to pretend
to die. They rarely think of one another now,
only from time to time do they wonder 'what if'
or regret the absence of a real goodbye.

Romeo never got the chance to defy the stars
Juliet never got the chance to contemplate him cut out in them
and neither of them got the chance to commit,
and neither of them took a chance with suicide.

Telephone wires in trees, copper stars-
-ghosts, wished on, shooting, burning far, far away-

Unspoken words: "some consequence
yet hanging in the stars,
auspicious stars"

(the fairest of them, he'd once found in her eyes)-
no reception, nothing received.
In this love story, nobody dies.

It is remembered as any other night before.
It was not long until where Romeo had come and gone
he'd left behind just a flicker of a frisson
in memory, growing distant,
gradual decay, and then
he was nothing more than threads to weave
the patchwork of a dream,-
hard to recall, a close call,
a near miss, a could-have been-
but it was harder, with time, to believe it was ever
the real love she yet knew nothing of
at the keen age of only thirteen.

It was Paris she fell for. The two were to marry
and for her bouquet that day, the flower she chose
to carry- for their romance and sweetness-
was the rose, and in her vows, she spoke of her love
being boundless and deep as the sea,
and infinite. All the wishes he'd made on stars
and coins in fountains had come to be.

Spoken words: "Have I thought long to see this morning's face..."

So many saved lives and one love lost and
a glooming sort of peace settled over
the star-cross'd streets of Verona.

Words in my head grew into my throat,
violent and teeming as weeds
but the moment they disguised themselves with petals
you uprooted them,
pulled out each thought so it wouldn't deceive,
and then

a sigh, tender, as dandelions.
Blown away with a wish.
You left me blossom and
blooming with forget-me-not.

I was plucking at my eyelashes as though petals grew there
and snapping bone structures
into uneven halves-
      giddy on the tilt of things being skewed
       I cut myself where the crossed bones
       met my crossed fingers-
tossed over my shoulder,
salt rubbed into the wound,
I looked up and saw the sky emptied of stars.
All that wishful thinking
(more like superstition, now, than cognition)
grounded on
absolutely
nothing.

A list of images stuck in my mind:

- a well-made metaphor balancing precariously on the rooftop above a cortex
- asymmetry; namely, a piece of abstract art in a rectangular gilded frame, depicting three oranges in a disarray on a crumpled hectic tablecloth
- angry black stars twinkling ferociously in the periphery
- faces, sleeping or watching quietly from every direction, eyes following from the bookcase, the desk, even the blank walls
- the one clam that was not as happy as a clam is supposed to be
- a philosophy problem demanding to know if anyone saw you fall, with its broad chest, and nobody hears

I have stopped retracing my steps backwards
and given up on chasing the echoes
in search of sweet nothings, epiphanies or guitar chords.
I only found everything was back to front
and the wrong way round and found hollows
where I once was, in lecture halls and hospital wards.

When I wake up
my skin will be silver
the wolves won't be hungry
the wind will be sleeping
my back will lie flat across
the lace trim along the edge
of a fading dream and
my pockets will be filled
with pennies
and eyelashes
and wishbones.

Night is like shadows speaking nonsense, exchanging secrets
that rattle between hollowed-out bathtubs and empty beds,

like a wave of dead things and when it comes in
everything is rocking,

like paralysis, being a corpse for a few second at the most but it seems like forever in a dead body that isn't dead yet,

like waiting for what is forced on you,
like being forced to watch,

like lullabies and galaxies and stories spinning on cassettes,
memories and constellations of hypnotic trinkets,

like a room with no windows or doors or way to escape
and it's too dark to see clear or think,

like when the thought escape you, breaking away
with every blink

like a fade-out on a big screen when it i black but not yet the end,

like dreading what  you don't know
how to mend, like dreading what you don't know,
like dreading that you do,

like your night-time hours getting utterly tired of you.

Raindrops gave me the sound of a standing ovation
to congratulate my sleeping. Slight sadness at the windows
                                             pain, slow small ache in kind applause.
Promises don't even try to disguise themselves as secrets
here between all the edges and creased pages and
                                            frenzied spills across hardwood floors.

Did you know? Cashew nuts grow on flowers,
   and they grow one at a time.

Think of the distance between railway tracks:
    this traces back to ancient Rome.

To know the true energy of the sun: imagine it
   covered all over with postage stamps,
      each square inch a bomb,
       each exploding with power only comparable
        to explosions in Hiroshima. Energy like that.

Think of this: how time once was unknowable
   for being different to everyone, until trains began
    and the post began arriving on time.

Did you know? Facts are enough to make a poem.
Where do poems grow? Do they come one at a time?
When did poems first set down their tracks?
What is the power of a poem? Does it explode?
Are poems different to everyone? Will we ever know?

Hand
book
time
table
penalties
forms-
         submission
lecture
       mental construction
lecture
       speech
lecture
        tracing
            language
    c i r c u i t s

CORE            
      
     m o d u l e s  
understanding individuals and groups
affect, motivation & cognition
supervisor agreement
ethics application
examination
current issues in attitude (research)
social neuros(cienc)es
judgment & decision making


DEADLINES.

The giving of a gift

What's this?
- I couldn't let you leave without...
You shouldn't have.
- I couldn't...
You didn't have to.
- I can't.

A failed apology

Can we talk for a minute?
- I really don't have the time.
I want to say something.
- I know.
I'm sorry.
- I know. I'm not.

A love confession**

I'm in love with you.
- Don't say things like that.
I'm in love with you.
- In love with what?
I'm in love with you.
- There's nothing to love here.

I really really love it when you look at someone
and happen to have a smile on your face and suddenly
they smile back at you, not because they know why
or because they want to communicate anything more
but because you are happy and that is enough
to make them happy too.

but it's not worth stealing anymore
because all that glittered was never even gold
in the first place, and if there ever was a shine
it was made lacklustre with lust
and covered with rust over times that
even history books don't touch
(history repeats itself, keep eyes down,
avoid the looks, try to keep yourself from thinking
all of the men are just crooks)
and soon what you stole you see
you didn't really want that much
and soon it's getting old and your bones ache
under eyes so cold, but it's probably fake
what you thought was snow, so go
and don't make the same mistake,
don't make it twice. Did someone forget
to mention that the roads aren't going anywhere
only roundabouts back to tension,
not paved with gold? They are made of ice.

You aren’t the only one with secrets. Some secrets will be shared but I imagine most go unspoken, because the best kept secrets are the ones we keep from ourselves, those things we don’t know that we have hidden or forget we ever hid in one of those hiding places we don’t know we have.

She imagines the sound of a spine cracking when she crumples plastic bottles to recycle.
He hates his father and not because he’s an alcoholic with a vicious temper
           but because he gets more attention from the woman he’s married to,
           his mother, than she gives to him.
She doesn’t like his laugh.
He doesn’t like his laugh.
She won’t answer the telephone because she’s afraid of being mistaken for a child.
He won’t answer because he feels sick thinking about all the prints other people
         have left on the receiver.
She has recurring nightmares about her childhood teddy bear and
         she is reaching forty-five years old.
She resents her baby because she has to give up drinking for her pregnancy.
He resents her for being pregnant.
He has never had a dream he can remember so he makes them up.
She makes up anecdotes that bear little importance to make her life seem interesting.
He is planning on killing himself before he is at the age his hair begins to fall out.
He intentionally hold his jaw clenched to make it appear more chiselled.
        He read this in a magazine.
She refuses to take her socks off in bed. She said she read in a magazine
         that *** is better if the socks remain on. She actually hates her feet,  
         and his feet and all feet.
She makes herself ***** more than seven times every day. She has done this  
         for five consecutive years. She is clinically overweight.
His hair is not naturally the colour people think it is.
She has fantasies about her boyfriend’s sister.
He is afraid to go outside or near sharp objects or get in a car because
         of his conviction that he will **** somebody for a reason he can't explain.
He has no idea what he’s talking about.
She has no idea what he’s talking about.
He says he doesn’t believe in love. He believes it, and that he deserves it,
          but has never been shown it or felt it. He hasn’t given up
          but says that he has with a shrug.
She loves the way he shrugs her off. She loves to feel unimportant.
She says she doesn't believe in love and people assume she’s damaged
           after her divorce. She never loved him in the first place.
She spends her time alone splitting open tangerines and picking apart
           the slices one by one and then eats the rind.
He spends his time alone splitting open saturated teabags.
He has been stealing from his mother for five years.
She knows her son steals from her but doesn't want to confront him
          because she knows he has a drug problem and she hates him for it.
He thinks his daughter is weak.
She’s sad her daughter is ugly.
She’s comfortable being ugly because it means she’ll never be touched by a man again.
They tell people they were too busy to make that appointment.
They are alone all the time.

I.
Let me walk you home. Come on, the way you came
is not the only way back, and aren’t you just a little boring
if all you’re doing is going back and forth?
We could all drown tomorrow. We could all die.
Why don’t you just let your shoulders drop
lie down, lie, lie, and so will I. Wow,
you have no idea  just what you are worth.
Now smile. I am falling. In love? Falling for sure.
Lie here, you look vulnerable, I can’t leave
so I’ll stay with you, oh love love, for a while.

II.
Drink this. Look at my eyes and how the grow wide
at just the sight of your smile. To be honest, it’s not there-
what I care about. You know what that is?
I bet you don’t, don’t you think? Have a drink.
Stop talking, please. Your smile and your mind
are just so mesmerising, but I don’t want you to think.
I don’t want what’s on your face or in your head.
I’m hungry. I’d like to eat you. No?
Well, until you change that brain of yours
I’ll keep you all wrapped up and treat you
so well, you’ll be so safe and confined instead.

III.
Why the crying? What are you crying about?
Hurt? Do you really think people hurt other people?
That brain of yours. You’re just a sea made of tears
and a lot of little locked doors. Getting hurt,
that’s a choice. You’re weak, that’s why
you should listen to me sing louder than you speak
and you can follow my voice. Follow it
and I’ll follow you to your home. Silly, little,
silly, fiddle, little fears. I’ll kick all the doors down
and confiscate you. Odd vulnerable little thing
shouldn’t be alone. I’ll make sure you don’t drown.

IV.
I’m not saying it’s the end of the road
or the beginning of one. I was just a big smile, really.
A big curved way around from one eye to the other.
Did you see the rest of me? You saw what you wanted
to believe. I rescued you. You trapped me
and so now we’re both out stranded, very far.
I know you thought you knew the way back home
but odd, little, vulnerable thing- ready for confiscation
in exchange for what, confirmation?
Do you even know where you are?